Game Theory - MatPat's UNCENSORED Interview with YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki

Episode Date: May 29, 2023

Join Game Theory host MatPat as he sit's down with YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki for an honest interview about the state of YouTube

Don't sound the alarms. Yes, I'm sitting down on the couch, but no, this is not a Matt Pat rance for the next 15 minute video. I just wanted to preface what you're about to watch. So earlier this year in October, YouTube threw their first ever YouTube gamer summit, where they brought 100, 150 of the top gaming channels from around the world to Palm Springs, California, to talk all about different YouTube issues, different products that are coming out, and what it means to be a gamer on the platform. And as a part of that event, I actually had the honor of being one of the first, if not the first, gaming creator, to sit down on the couch

and ask Susan Wojcicki, YouTube CEO, interview questions. Basically, they gave me carte blanche to ask whatever I wanted of her. And so I want to take advantage of that opportunity and really ask the hard-hitting questions that not many people talk about, especially when it comes to the creator community. So, I wanted to share that with you. I got permission from them to share that footage with you. And so here we are, friends.

Here's my interview with Susan Wojcicki and the Hotsie, YouTube CEO, me putting the screws to her. Let me know how I did. Let me know how she did. You know what? Let me know what I should ask if I'm ever given the opportunity again. Although I feel like after this interview, they probably won't be inviting me back.

Enjoy. Hey guys. First ever gaming creator summit. This is exciting. Super exciting. Susan, thank you for taking time. to sit down on the couch with me and all of us. Of course.

I know you're super busy. You just came from Arizona. Yes. But, you know, but I was very excited. I think this was an important event. And I'm glad that we have a Creator Summit just for gamers. And I was really glad to be here and to answer your questions. And so I'm, you know, looking forward to hearing what you're going to ask me.

So I know that we don't have too much time to ask questions today. So we'll get right to the point. But first, what's your history with gaming? I'm just curious. Do you play games at all? And your children play games? Well, all my children play games. Okay.

And so that is probably the main way at this point in my life that I'm interacting with gamers. I play with them sometimes. And they all play with each other. And they tell me about what they love about it. And sometimes I'll play with them. But that's, you know, I see, like, I think, you know, I wish I could say I have tons of time to always be playing games. But I think you want me also to be focused on all the issues and products that we're building at YouTube.

But I do when I spend time with my kids, sometimes I play games with them. And I see their love and passion and I see how fun it is and how engaging it is and how you can spend a lot of time playing games. So yeah, I get it. I get why it's meaningful. Well, I'm glad you segue to the big issues of YouTube, right? So I started off with a little softball, but it's going to get hard in a hurry since we only have half hour. Okay, sure. So first question I have for you is gaming as a second-class citizen here on YouTube, right?

So gaming, I did the research, 50 billion watch hours last year on the platform, 200 million people coming to this platform every single day, specifically to watch gaming content. You look at most subscribed channels on this platform, and they're mostly baby songs singing Baby Shark, but after that is gaming, right? Gaming is the second largest vertical on the platform only to music. And yet, if you were to ask a lot of people sitting in this room right now, I think they would probably say that they feel a second-class citizen on this platform. You know, YouTube is more than happy to prop up its beauty creators, its vloggers, its educational YouTubers. And yet gaming kind of feels off to the side, right?

They're not invited to the Metgala like the vloggers are. They're not... If you want to go to the Met Gala? Who wouldn't want to go to the Met Gala? I mean like that's such a huge opportunity, right? You know, Robert Kinsel and you, you've both been kind of touring around doing interviews with creators. This is really your first interview with a gaming creator, right? There's all sorts of stuff out there that feels like gaming is kind of a second thought.

We're relegated to our own platform with YouTube gaming, our own app, our own social media handle, our own trending tab. It feels like we're being segregated off from the rest of YouTube, even though we're delivering a huge value to this platform. So what are your thoughts on that? on that. Is this a true feeling? Is there a reason why gaming kind of feels like its own entity relative to the greater YouTube community? So I think as you can tell, I was clear just to ask whatever is on your mind and not edit it in any way. I was surprised your team let some of these questions.

Oh, of course. No, I want to hear what's on your mind. And I mean, my answer would be no. I mean, gaming is an incredibly important part of our ecosystem. It's why I'm here, why we're having a gaming summit. We think gaming is an incredibly important part for our users and all of you as gamers are and gaming creators is a segment that we really want to be investing in. And I mean, I'll tell you, when I first got to YouTube, which I've been there for five years, I immediately said this is an important area and we need to be investing. And I assembled the first team that was dedicated from an engineering perspective to supporting gaming on our platform. I talked to our team. I wanted to make sure everyone that was on

the team was a gamer and talked to them and said what are the most important areas for us to invest in at YouTube for the gaming community. And they identified a number of areas. One was live just to put in perspective. We didn't have live. We understood that that was an important category for us and took some investment on our side. We also realized that we needed to have the product more customized for gamers. So at the time, they wanted to have a separate app, which we now no longer have, because we realized that gaming really

was best served in the main app. But we wanted to make sure that we have gaming pages, that you actually are getting the right results, when you type in any query for a game. And we also wanted to see that there were a lot of other features that we thought would be relevant and useful for gamers. So it was actually our gaming team that developed a lot of core features,

like memberships, super chat, super stickers. So all of that functionality was actually developed first for the gaming community. So you could look at it the other set way, and you could have our other creators saying, like, how come gaming's getting all of the cool features first? Why did they get live? Why did they get all memberships?

And again, like we really want to make sure that we are, that we're doing what we can to support this important vertical for you. YouTube and that's again why we're here and you'll see us continue to invest and you know our teams always give coming back to us with different feedback and ways we can do more account linking is another area where we've invested I think you heard that in the last talk that we have five of the top ten games on YouTube have account linking so those are all different areas that we're investing to make sure that

YouTube is a really committed and great partner to gamers. Yeah. Okay, great. So that's good to know, but taking it even one step further back, is YouTube still a platform for creators? How do creators factor into kind of the larger scheme of YouTube? Because less than a month ago, YouTube kind of threatened to remove verified checkmarks from thousands

of channels, right? Like that was a huge blow, and a lot of these channels, some of which are probably sitting in this room right now, were grinding away on the platform for years, and yet a celebrity walks in and they immediately get the checkmark and it's allowed even though they're kind of like a passer-by on this platform, right? What does that, I mean, to the external eye that feels like creators are no longer a priority on this platform or a small piece of it. So where do we fit into the YouTube ecosystem in 2019? So verification was definitely, we apologize for that, that we made a mistake. But let me tell you, it was not to prioritize traditional celebrities over endemic, create.

or gamers in any way. The team identified that there were a number of ways we had, that they wanted to clean up how we had done verification. Verification has been around for a number of years, and as a result of that, we had verification many different ways people got verified. So in the past, you could have like two subscribers and just apply and get verified.

So we didn't have a consistent way of doing verification. And so the team did want to have more consistency with that going forward, without going forward, which is why they made the changes that they did. But we also realized how, like, you know, afterwards, like, A, I think there were some problems in execution. But then B, on top of that, we realized how important it was for creators. We heard everyone loud and clear. The response was pretty well, yeah.

Look, we said, you know, we're going to grandfather all existing people who are verified. And going forward, we will implement the new standards going forward for creators. So it didn't have anything to do with like one set of creators being preferred over another set of creators. It really just had to do with how we make changes and trying to make verification more fair for everyone. And to be clear, we go to extraordinary lengths to try to make sure that we are fair for everyone, not just one vertical versus another, not like gaming versus music or traditional

celebrities that come from TV versus creators that got started on YouTube. We're trying to think about how can we enable our overall platform and our users who come and enjoy all types of content. How can we make sure that everyone is having a better experience? How can we make sure that we have the right monetization for creators no matter what background they are? And we also see that creators change, that they may do a combination of different types of media and cover different types of events.

And so again, we want to support and be fair to everybody. Okay, fair enough. Speaking of other big picture things, gaming exists in this weird nexus, a exciting but also very scary gray area with a lot of the legislation that YouTube's having to deal with right now. I always get this wrong. The European Union's directive on copyright in the digital single markets. Yes.

We also call EUCD. Great. I mean, I guess that's the easy way to say it. Or Article 13, it then, you know, it passed. now Article 17, right? It's like a shell game, right? Yes. It's very confusing. It's almost like they're trying to hide it. Go figure. But basically this is the meme killer legislation which requires platforms to have stricter policies around content uploaded onto their platform that might contain copyrighted works, right?

You and I actually spoke briefly at Google zeitgeist a year ago about this policy, the impact it would have on YouTube, and you are very vocal against it, right? But now here we are, a year later, it's passed. And as of this June, there's now a two-year ticking clock for platforms to be compliant with this legislation. Countries. Oh, sorry, yes. Countries to be compliant.

Okay, I mean, that's a good distinction to make. So how are your feelings about what eventually did get passed as Article 17? What changes is YouTube making in response to it? And as gamers, who a lot of our content is built on the backs of copyrighted works in the the video game itself, even if it is fair use or whatever, where do we sit in that ecosystem? Yeah. Well, so YouTube has enjoyed tremendous success. And as we've grown and as we have more users and as we have more creators, there certainly

has been a lot more scrutiny. And that has come from regulators and policymakers and press and many other places. And we want to make sure, A, that we're transparent. So we're talking to them and explaining what we're doing and explaining all the benefits that come from that. And as there has been more interest in legislation and passing rules for not just YouTube, but all different types of digital platforms, we are often engaging with those policy makers and explaining why our business is set up the way it is and there's lots of back and forth.

And most of the times we're able to work through it on our own and come up with something. the background, we adjust things or we make our system compliant and it's something that you as creators don't really need to worry about. And we try to make it so that most of the time that's what's happening. What happened with Article 13, which had been in discussion and had been in the works for a while, is there are multiple factors of how the European law is created. And so when the Parliament passed their version of Article 13, we realized that there was that that specific legislation was really gonna be damaging to YouTube.

And it caught us by surprise because the previous versions and drafts that we had seen were not nearly that severe. And because it became very close to it being passed into law, that's when we asked for all of you to participate and explain because we wanted to make sure that you understood like how serious that was, that if that legislation got passed the way it was, that it would have really far-reaching implications for creators all over the world.

And so when we, like thanks to all of your work, thanks to everyone speaking up, I also flew, I went to Strasbourg, I met with a number of policy makers, I wrote a number of op-eds, we were very active in explaining, like we want to do the right thing, we wanna work with rights holders, that's why we develop content ID, we wanna pay content rights holders for their content.

But the way the law has been set up, is it's gonna, cause a significant number of problems. Actually, people are going to make less money because it'll just be less of a business overall. And because of that, we were able to secure liability protections when we made a best effort to be able to match the content with the rights holder.

And because we were able to secure that liability protection, it was, we were in a much better state. And so I really want to thank all the creators who spoke up for us. It was really the first time that we saw YouTube creators coming using their voice and using their platforms to be able to do something that was political and something that could change how our system and laws going forward are set up. And so it made a really big difference. I want to thank you for it. Right now we're in a situation where we have about two years for those for the countries to transpose that legislation. And we are working with all the different policymakers. We're bringing creators in to talk to policymakers who they understand these are small business.

They're in your country. You need to make, these are the considerations as you write your law and as you define it. So each country will have a slightly different interpretation. And so France is likely to be the first country. And so we're working closely with them. Netherlands is another country. So we continue to engage with all the different countries and try to explain the point of view for creators and for YouTube.

Because again, we want to pay the rights holders. We want to make sure that if we can identify the content, they're getting compensated, but we just want it to be fair. And we, we, that's why we built Content ID system. And we've paid out billions of dollars thanks to Content ID system to content owners. Okay. So we will or won't be seeing a big shift on the platform in response to this? Well, we're hopeful that we can work through enough of those changes that it will, that

it will work out for creators. We may need to do more, some more things on the back end on our side. We haven't yet determined what they are, because we're in the process of creating law. Right. But as of right now, we feel that we're in a much better situation. Is there anything else that we as creators can do to help spread the good word? Or is it at this point, is it more interpersonal conversations kind of led by you guys with each individual country? So right now, I think we're in a place where the pulsing

and are having productive conversations with our teams. I think, again, having everyone speak up made a difference. It made policymakers realize that this really mattered. Because if you look at all the different constituents for content, you can see that most of them are big companies, and they have different policy makers, just like Google does, and just like YouTube does, and they were going and explaining what their interests were,

and so we just wanted to make sure that they had an understanding like we're representing YouTube creators. We're here to represent all of these creators who are creating jobs in your country. They're creating content. They're exporting that content. A lot of them have businesses with merchandise or other areas. And if you create law and it shuts them down, like that's going to be a loss for your country. Speaking of things that directly affect our monetization and our businesses, I see you looking at the clock hoping that this ticks down faster.

No, no, no. You can ask me as many questions. ask me as many questions as you want. I got to take advantage of this time. I came here. I came here. I want your question. No, you're great. No, I appreciate it. I'm just giving you a hard time. But speaking of things that directly relate to our businesses and monetization

and kind of how things are built right now, demonetization, right? So those were all kind of like big picture questions, but this is kind of more in the day-to-day and a little bit more directed by YouTube. So obviously, demonetization is a worry that every creator has. But again, gaming exists in that weird nexus gray. I feel like a broken record saying this over and over again, but it exists in this weird gray area of what is and isn't allowed based on the system, right? So one thing we all know for sure, as an example, is like violence.

Violence is something that's going to get a video demonetized. That's fine. But where does virtual violence fit into that, right? Some of the biggest games on the platform and biggest releases of the year are things that, you know, that Ryan was just talking about on the stage before us. the Call of Duties of the world, the Dooms of the world. A Doom is one of the ten-pole IPs that's appearing on Stadia later this year, right? Mortal Kombat was a big release earlier this year.

Are we as gamers just expected to just play Minecraft and Fortnite? Fortnite, which has gun violence, by the way. Like, where does that line exist? Yeah. Yeah, so first of all, I want to say that I looked at the stats overall. for gaming and for gamers. And I say that in general, and I understand the concerns,

and I'm going to get into that and answer more, like looking at the stats, gamers are actually in a really good position. Okay. And so YouTube as a platform, we act on behalf of our advertisers. And advertisers come in all different types of preferences in terms of the type of content

they want to be advertising on. You have some advertisers, say we only want to be on the most safe type of content available and then we have other create advertisers say we'll be on like any type of content as long as the fans love it like we'll be there and so we have a broad range I don't want to say all advertisers are the same and so what we've done is we've tried to enable options for our advertisers to figure out depending upon who they are options for them to advertise with the right set of partners and

I think what we see is that most of our advertisers, just looking again at the stats, are advertising and interested in gaming. And so I looked at what are advertisers opting out of? They opt out of issues like sensitive subjects. That would be an example of something that's high up on the list. Gaming is not actually high up on the list. I looked at the top games and looked at their monitoring. monetization, and I would say it was very healthy with the lowest being mortal combat.

And I think that's not a surprise that the numbers are showing that. So gaming is a relatively newer area for advertisers. We've actually been trying to invest in advertisers understanding why this is an important vertical for them to be in. I just recently looked at some of the work that we're doing with advertisers and we've put out papers for them to understand it. We've tried to introduce them to advertisers, so we've done a lot of work there. The other thing that we have done that has been really successful is we've enabled creators

to self-certify themselves, which means that we give you the opportunity for you to tell us what's in your video. So how much profanity is in your video? Is there violence in your video? And what we have found is that way, you know, again, it's not like a free pass in any way, but we're not going to make any mistakes. We're not going to think you have violence when you don't really have violence, because you're going to tell us what's in that video and we're going to trust you, or at least

we're going to, you know, make sure that our systems say the same thing. And if they, you know, we have an opportunity for creators to, like, we check, right? If there's a difference, like we check and see, like, why is there a difference? Right. So in general, I think a lot of creators have been really pleased with that, and we're planning on rolling that out to a lot more creators. And I think that has actually resolved a lot of issues for creators. Okay.

Because, I mean, I will say personally, as someone who has the self-certification and goes through that, a lot of times there's a question around that, right? Where it says, this contains violence. Well, is shooting someone in Fortnite violence? Yeah. Is doing a kill in Call of Duty violence? Like, I think for us as YouTube creators, and this is a question that I have for later, but I think in general, we want to play by the rules.

We just need to know what those rules are. And I think that's been one of the areas that YouTube has been falling down on. How do you kind of, like, empower us with the knowledge that we need to best help you help us? Yeah. If that makes sense. Yeah. No, I understand. So this has actually been something we've been looking into because our policy around violence,

we realize that simulated violence and game violence is very different, of course, than real violence. Of course. And so, like, our policy right now put them together, and so we're actually going to be separating them. Interesting. Yes, so that is, I think that's good news for gamers, and that's something that is going to be coming out, and you should see in the next, I don't know, I don't want to say a couple weeks, maybe it'll take longer, but it's, like, close on the horizon coming up and separating those two. and that way we actually think we'll give a lot more clarity

in terms of like when we say violence, what do we mean? Okay, great, that's awesome. Is there a reason why, if there is kind of a list of watchouts or demonetization flags that YouTube isn't public about that stuff? Like, hey, this is the amount of cursing that you're allowed or like one sensor beep is ultimately going to get you removed from restricted mode, things like that.

Because, like I said, I think a lot of us in this room aren't looking to necessarily game the system, but play by the rules, we just don't know what they're. rules are and so it feels like we're operating in a black box where that's where the paranoia comes in, that's where the conspiracy theories comes in, that's when people are like, oh, this video underperformed, it must be because of X, Y, and Z. And I know that YouTube in the past has said, like, oh, we don't want the bad actors to take advantage of this system and find new loopholes that they can hop through.

But at the end of the day, those bad actors are operating at such a different scale than us as creators anyway. Can't we be empowered with tools to help us make better content and feel more comfortable and confident on the platform. So the question is why doesn't that list exist if it does? Well, we've definitely, we've definitely heard that and we have been and have been opening up really policy by policy a lot more information for creators overall in terms of publishing that.

So for example with profanity since you brought that up we actually have been doing a creator and we do creator insider videos regularly as a way of addressing challenges that creators are interested in. We talked about profanity there, and they identified a few areas, which is that whether or not there's profanity in the title, a thumbnail, and whether or not there's a lot of profanity, especially at the beginning of the video. So that was an example of giving a lot more clarity. We have, first of all, we have very detailed rules that our reviewers use, but we

You know, I think videos are complicated. I've learned that whenever someone has an issue about their video getting in one state or another. I'm like, you know, it's complicated. They're like, we need to see it and you need to see the context. And so that is, you know, part of why we try to give enough guidance that creators can figure out what's the right way to be able to handle their videos and create their content, but not so much that then it winds up being confusing either. Okay, that makes sense.

And again, like some advertisements will, like I have met with advertise who will say, we will never advertise on anything where there is any profanity. Okay? Like, so there's always going to be a broad range. Some advertisers come back and they say we'll only be on certain channels. Like that's, you know, that's their choice. They're an advertiser. They're paying money.

But what we try to do for the most part is we try to say, hey, like we have three, we basically have three settings for advertisers. We have sort of like the really edgy, like, oh, you know, more creators. We kind of have the standard one and then we have a more conservative version. Yeah. like in the super conservative one, we're not going to have profanity kind of in the middle one. That's usually when we talk about it that we're talking about. And that's where most of our advertisers are.

You know, and then of course, advertisers who are okay with anything, like, well, you know, they have self-selected into something and we've warned them, like, that there could be more edgy content in this category. Yeah. Interesting. Okay. Switching gears a little bit because we're running out of time here, but this is a completely different idea.

So YouTube obviously is a platform at this point built on hyper-concernation. trends, right? Like what is current and relevant as of right now? And as a result, that's really affected kind of the gaming landscape and the content that you see gaming creators making, right? So in the need to stay topical and relevant over the last year and a half, everyone's had to do Fortnite stuff and now it's Minecraft as of this year. But YouTube, you know, three, four, five years ago was a place where because it wasn't as hyper trendy or it didn't feel that way, you had a burgeoning kind of like retro game review scene. You had a really strong indie game community, but now it feels kind of shifted in the opposite

direction where everyone has to play the same game at the same time. Is that a concern for you? Like, do you have any thoughts on that? Is it something that YouTube is aware of that it feels almost like things are being pigeonholed and some communities that have been really strong on the platform have kind of suffered as a result of no longer playing the trendiness game? I mean, I think that we... are more on the receiving end than necessarily defining what are the top games.

Okay. Right? So what I see is that for whatever reason, culture is deciding these are the games that are interesting and hot right now. Our users want to see them. Our creators as a result want to use them and create videos with them. And so I feel that we are part of the general overall trends. We may indirectly drive some of them,

but I think they're pretty independent in terms of what games are released and what games are currently hot. Okay. That said, we do see creators playing a lot of different games, not just Minecraft and Fortnite. Yeah. I've heard you do lots of different games.

I do. But fortunately, I'm one of the few. And to be honest, I achieved scale early on when being a variety gamer, or someone who covered a lot of different topics was more acceptable, right? And we've curated a brand or a show around what we do that people tune in for the show, right?

And I think nowadays, if you wanna be a general gamer rather than a Fortnite player and then a Minecraft player, like it's harder. So that's the reason I bring that up. Yeah. Okay. Well, I mean, I think we see other people too. I mean, I was told you play a lot of different games.

I was told Jelly, for example, has posted videos from 12 different games in the last month. So I think we're seeing other people and we're seeing a variety of different games. I think if you look at entertainment overall, you always see there's like a few areas that lots of people are interested in and then there's a longer tale of games.

Sure. Or a longer tale of titles. I think it's like it's pretty standard. But there's nothing in our system. And you're gonna have an exec Q&A with people here who work on how our to recommendations and other areas, but in general, like, we want to recommend what we think our users want to see.

Like, if our users want to see 10 different games, like, we're going to recommend 10 different games. So it's based on, again, what users want to see, what we're seeing success with, we're presenting a broad range. We always want our users to be able to see a lot of different content, right? It's like, good for us. We don't want creators to come and only see one game. Like, we want to show them a lot of different things.

But if they keep clicking and they only will click on the Fortnite videos, well, then it's not good for us to keep recommending other types of things. And we may still do that because we're like, oh, well, maybe now they're actually interested in something different. So blame the viewer. Like, no, no. And I'm not saying you blame the viewer. I'm just saying like our frustrations about like, oh my gosh, I am so sick of Fortnite or this game is so dull at this point or whatever. Like it's not the platform necessarily that's propagating it.

It's just viewer interest perpetuating the strength of that game. Yes. Okay, fair enough. I know that technically it says zero zero zero. It's okay. You can keep going. Ask your question. No, I think we covered the fourth question that I technically had listed,

even though there's been like 10 at this point. I think a good one to end on, though, is why YouTube at this point, right? So obviously there's been a lot of press lately of platforms negotiating and competing over ownership. of different channels, throwing around tens of millions of dollars to get exclusive rights to ex-gamer, you know, ninja, shroud, what have you. And, you know, YouTube isn't appearing in any of those kind of press releases. So why. I don't know. Maybe you can, that's why I'm asking you the questions. Honestly, I know you lost Nick A-30. Like, that's the one time I've seen you show up. Sorry. I lost that one. But in all honesty, like, what is YouTube? What is YouTube? What is YouTube? YouTube rolling out.

In a room full of gamers, why is YouTube the place that we should be gaming? Yeah. Well, first of all, we have a platform and we work incredibly hard to have the best platform we can for all of you. And by best platform, we want to have the largest number of views to attract users to come and to watch your videos and also the largest. amount of revenue, whether that comes from ad dollars or subscription dollars or new features that we're rolling out, like memberships or super chat or super stickers.

And it's a combination of being able to have such an incredibly large audience, being able to have the opportunity to generate revenue, and to be able to build communities. And so, you know, we're also doing lots of things to be able to continue to improve all of of the different community features that we have, live opportunity with community and different posts and shorts. And so our goal is really to be the most compelling platform for you to engage with your fans to generate and build a business. And we also really care.

I mean, we care about creators. We always say creators are the heart of YouTube. YouTube is a company that is filled with people. The only thing that we're doing is trying to figure. out how can we build a better product for all of you like people come to work caring about doing the right thing for creators and we go to extraordinary lengths to measure every single change we make like I understand there was a you know we made a mistake on the how we rolled out verification or I want to

tell you that we roll out thousands of changes every single year we rolled out almost 3,000 changes to our platform I mean I'm rounding up but like we're We are making changes all the time. Every single thing is measured with science behind it to make sure that what we're doing is a right long-term thing. There's a reason that we have so many people coming to our platform to engage with gaming. I mean, I was just impressed that you actually knew all of our stats so well. So you want to tell them again?

What? The 200 million people every single day? Yes. And how many out? 50 billion watch hours? 50 billion. Is it now 70 billion? Oh, it's 70?

Yeah, it was 70 billion. Okay, so 70 billion. How many people have created channels or gaming content in the last nine months? What was it? 30 million channels uploaded up? Like, you don't get those numbers if you don't have a product that doesn't work. Right. So, I mean, our product works and we expect, you know, we expect you to be thoughtful about

who you partner with. But our goal is like to be the best place, to be the place where you're going to get the most views, you're going to get the most revenue, you're going to be able to engage with your fans in the most compelling way. And it's good, it's competitive. Like, it's good. Because that means that we're all working hard and thinking about how do we build a better business. And if we see someone else doing something, like, we're not like, we don't just sit back and say, oh, like, too bad.

Like they're doing something. We're like, oh, what can we learn from that? How can we build it into our platform and make it really great? So, you know, we're committed. We're in this for the long term to be a great place for creators, a great place for gamers. And that's why we have this gaming summit right now is because we want to. to hear from you and we want to tell you about what we're working on and we really care. So that's why you should come to YouTube.

That's great. Right? I mean, that was good one. Okay. Thank you. I mean, that's a really good place to end it. And I think just, again, to kind of wrap things up here, I think in a lot of cases, that's the stories that we're not hearing from YouTube side.

If I can just kind of like have a short editorial here is, you know, I said earlier, like, we feel like second class citizens, the verification button, it's just, you know, I can't and it doesn't exist for creators, but does exist for celebrities. You know, there's all these massive changes. It exists for everybody in the same way. Sure. Okay. Okay.

Great. Yes. I mean, there... Yeah, you say if, like, Billy Elish comes onto the platform without 100,000 subscribers, she's not going to get a checkmark until she gets 100,000 subscribers? Yeah. I mean...

Ha! ha! ha! Yeah? Is that true? We'll have to... Let me have to look into it. But I think, I think. Yeah, it's the same on Twitter. But if fairness is the thing, right?

If Billy Elish has a, again, I'm just using here as an example because it's one that comes in mind. Let me tell you, like there were a set of people that, let's like talk about a politician, right? Because we have politicians who are coming on our platform, okay? And election integrity is something that we're working in incredibly hard on. So you have a politician who comes on. You don't want to have, we have to be able to give them a checkmark because if they, we have someone else who comes on and does a parody of them and you actually think it could be them, like that actually could be a problem.

So I'm just saying there are real business reasons why we may need to do that. But our goal is to try to be as fair as possible with everybody who's coming on the platform. Okay, great. And we're wrapping things up here, but I think that's the thing that people just want to hear, right, is that you haven't forgotten about us, that we are still a priority for the platform and that there is a reason to still be on YouTube. I think with all the press that gets circulated around like Mixer, showing out all this money for all these creators over here and Twitch, stealing ex person from YouTube, it feels in

a lot of cases like, hey, where is YouTube playing in this ecosystem? Why, it feels like a lot of the press is always negative towards that. And I don't know if there's a way that you guys are improving those sorts of communications or helping to kind of uplift those messaging points about the creator community. But I think that's something that us as creators would love to hear every now and then. We'll keep working on it. Okay, great, thank you. And thank you for the time.

We'll keep working on it. Thank you everybody. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.