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A personal update from Susan
- robbiet480 4y ago25 years at Google, 9 as CEO of YouTube, created AdSense and was a driver of the DoubleClick acquisition. Just a hell of a career. Maybe the single person who did the most for Google in that time frame? Editing to add that her garage was Google's first office
- nixcraft 4y agoYouTube, AdSense, and DoubleClick? Wow. All those are Google's money-making products. Both YouTube and AdSense helped countless content creators across the globe. Not everyone goes to CS school or other graduate programmes for various reasons. These content creators make a good living too, I guess (at least top 5-10% content creators makes good living, but I don't any data to backup). So in a way, if you make money from YouTube or AdSense, then Susan played a big role for sure. Also, regardless of what HN think of Google Ads and Google's privacy policies, it fundamentally helped some those content creators, including support and development for other free Google products such as Gmail, Maps, Search and others stuff etc.
- pledess 4y agoIndeed! But I'm still pondering why she didn't put this announcement on her YouTube channel. It could be: A. the message was more effectively conveyed as text B. all the comment spam in her January 2022 video (people asking for a new CEO, etc.) C. possibility of inopportune ad placement as she is introducing Neal Mohan D. the people who produced her previous videos are gone after the layoffs
- jedberg 4y agoI'm not sure but the SEC has strange rules about where you can announce material information about the business. YouTube may not be one of those places.
- jjtheblunt 4y agoher parents' garage, which might be how her sister got to know then later married Sergey?
- rkachowski 4y ago.youtube is a tld??
- phneutral26 4y agoRight? Just shows you the powers of big monopolys.
- millzlane 4y agoThey're called Brand TLD's https://icannwiki.org/Brand_TLD https://icannwiki.org/Brand_TLD
- mtoner23 4y agolol, i guess youtube gets more clicks than most TLDs so makes sense.
- millzlane 4y agoIt's called a Brand TLD. https://icannwiki.org/Brand_TLD https://icannwiki.org/Brand_TLD
- notatoad 4y agobrand TLDs only cost ~$200k. maybe doesn't make sense for the average person, but if you've got google money there's no reason no to pick it up.
- steveklabnik 4y agoYouTube has been making many positive moves lately. Very interested to see if this continues after the transition.
- mhitza 4y agoPlease list these "many positives moves" made by YouTube, as just a content consumer of the platform I haven't heard anything positive about YouTube in a long time.
- steveklabnik 4y agoWhatever team improves livestreaming has been really responsive to creator requests. I believe that if YouTube executes, they'll kill Twitch entirely. Question is if they manage to execute, I'm not confident that it will continue to happen. They're starting to find the balance between their promotion of smaller creators vs things like disinfo. They're in my opinion more open about how The Algorithm(tm) works vs other social platforms. They've been de-emphasizing gameable metrics as opposed to "do people actually watch the video" metrics. Shorts is... fine, but they're far more fair to creators than TikTok is. TikTok Creator Fund has poor creator incentives, YouTube Shorts monetization is actually aligning the interests of YouTube as well as creators. (I do have some minor quibbles with some messaging there but what matters is the shape of the agreements.) They've also recently resolved the whole "should I make a new channel for shorts or post them to my current channel" problem, which is nice. I dunno that's off the top of my head.
- binarymax 4y agoIf by “positive moves” you mean infestation of short shallow content to drive addiction, then I disagree.
- anvuong 4y agoI hope they stop trying to push shorts into me feed, I'm that guy who hate shorts/tiktok videos with everything I have, at least give me an option to not see any shorts.
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- newyankee 4y agoIs Neal Mohan the person who was paid like 100 m $ a decade back to prevent him from leaving Youtube ?
- 0xfffafaCrash 4y agoAccording to TechCrunch, yes https://techcrunch.com/2011/04/06/google-said-to-have-high-level-mole-at-twitter-makes-massive-counteroffers-to-retain-employees/?guccounter=1 https://techcrunch.com/2011/04/06/google-said-to-have-high-l...
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- qbasic_forever 4y agoYouTube has gotten consistently worse under her leadership in my experience. Creators have been squeezed dry with less and less revenue, ads are obnoxious and terrible, and experiments like shorts are badly implemented, make little money for creators and should be aborted. YouTube 10 years ago was a place for people to do what they loved and build a following, now it's just a click bait farm where everyone is gaming the algorithm with the same thumbnails, the same content, and even hawk their own ads/partnerships because YouTube revenue can't support them anymore. Good riddance IMHO. I hope whoever comes next actually focuses on creators and their needs.
- RationPhantoms 4y agoShe's being replaced by a person from the Doubleclick acquisition. What does that signal to you will happen to the already embattled creator space?
- qbasic_forever 4y agoIt sucks. Every single creator I've followed has had some variation of, "well shit, YouTube isn't making me enough to sustain this anymore" video in the last few months. Things are going to really dry up and go down hill fast as more creators are forced to give up.
- 0xDEF 4y agoYouTube rewards creators more than any other platform. However they're ruthless about the subscriber demographics. A few thousand subscribers is enough to become Ramen profitable [1] if they are high income people from high income countries. [1]: http://www.paulgraham.com/ramenprofitable.html http://www.paulgraham.com/ramenprofitable.html
- qbasic_forever 4y agoUhhh no, you need well over 100k subscribers and videos getting consistently thousands of views to make 'Ramen profitable' money. And even that is tenuous as inflation just keeps jacking up the cost of ramen for everyone.
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- mig39 4y agoI hope whoever takes over implements one simple change to the YouTube algorithm: If a user subscribes to a channel, show the user videos from that channel on their front page.
- TremendousJudge 4y agono way, some guy probably did an A/B and showing random crap instead "increases engagement" I don't think they measured it on a period of more than a couple of hours
- vpeters25 4y agoI suggested them to put: - A random video from the ones uploaded in the last minute. - Another random video, uploaded anytime In both cases, these videos should be shown regardless of language, view count, etc. In most cases these random videos will be junk, but I bet there will be gems which would die unwatched otherwise.
- johnnyanmac 4y agoIsn't that what the "subscriptions" is? It depends on the algorithm, Besides I generally do get new videos from subscriptions on my front page. And in my "suggestions" for unrelated videos, and in my search for unrelated content, and sometimes even in category tabs for content it is not a category for. I get it, I'll watch it later, I know where to watch it.
- rhyminggpt 4y ago"I always dreamed of working for a company with a mission that could change the world for the better." May her dream come true one day!
- none_to_remain 4y agoThe "Update": because for some reason corporate comms cannot let on that it's a layoff/resignation/shutdown in the post title
- steponlego 4y agoSirs…
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- Gargoyle_Bonaza 4y agoGood riddance.