TechnologyI was one of the first creators of YouTube: Susan Wojcicki, ex-CEO, improved the platform, helped me earn money and even find a community...

I was one of the first creators of YouTube: Susan Wojcicki, ex-CEO, improved the platform, helped me earn money and even find a community of friends

YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki announced last week that she was stepping down after nearly a decade with the video platform. The unexpected decision follows a succession of women who have left management positions at big technology companies.

Wojcicki’s resignation comes at a time when YouTube is going through some turbulence.

YouTube Shorts, TikTok’s direct competitor, has recently surpassed 50 billion daily views and opened up monetization to creators. But revenue fell 2% in the fourth quarter amid macroeconomic concerns. The company has been dragged to the US Supreme Court over a question of whether it should be responsible for ISIS terrorist content, which could lead to a ruling with major implications.

Yet during Wojcicki’s tenure, the video platform was rarely mentioned in debates about the ills of social media, and the CEO didn’t regularly appear before the US Congress like other tech leaders.

Wojcicki was credited with creators for providing them with increasingly sophisticated monetization tools and options.

The early days were hard

I spent some of my formative years making YouTube videos, starting in 2007 when I was just a tween. YouTube had just launched in 2005 and being an internet influencer was not yet a very popular idea.

At first, people didn’t take youtube seriously, so it became synonymous with videos of dogs riding skateboards and other such content. Uploading videos was difficult: with no easy-to-use iPhone app, it took me days to figure out how to connect my DV tape camcorder to my Windows tower PC and then upload recorded video. And it was hard for the youtubers earn money with your videos.

In 2007, YouTube launched the “Partner Program”, which allowed a small number of creators (a few hundred at first) to earn 45% for the ads they placed next to their videos. The hope was to bring more high-quality content to the site. But in a recent book on the history of YouTube, Like, Comment, Subscribeauthor Mark Bergen says that only 30,000 creators had access to the program in 2012, partly due to YouTube’s copyright concerns.

When they accepted me in the first days, program criteria were opaque and most of the applicants were rejected.

One day I was miraculously accepted into the program, after applying more times than I can count, and I was ecstatic. At that time, between 2007 and 2010, it was virtually unheard of for a child to be able to broadcast videos to the world from his bedroom and earn money doing it.

It was something revolutionary.

Me in my early days as a 'youtuber'.

In this context, it’s especially surprising that companies like TikTok and Instagram have been slow to figure out how to compensate creators. YouTube has been offering a more advanced and reliable monetization system for several years. I learned about CPMs (cost per thousand impressions) when I was 13 years old by looking at my AdSense earnings.

My old YouTube channel makes me nostalgic. I made great friends on the site, some of whom I met at VidCon, a convention in Los Angeles where creators and their fans come together to celebrate their niche subcultures. I remember repeatedly hitting refresh as I watched “Fred” become the first channel to surpass one million subscribers (the most popular channels today have hundreds of millions).

The community was much smaller than it is today. Gone were features like “video responses” which, as the name suggests, allowed users to create video responses that appeared below someone else’s video.

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The algorithms weren’t as sophisticated or well understood, so it was a way for people to discover their videos. Flashy titles and thumbnails to trick the system were not yet widespread.

Those were good times when we all discovered this new medium together, but YouTube also had its problems. I was often harassed in the comments section. I took it in stride and even laughed at some of the meaner comments, but others didn’t take it so seriously. Back then there were very few moderation tools.

listen to the creators

YouTube has always had some tension with creators. It’s almost impossible to talk to a real person on YouTube. Women have been subjected to harassment. Its algorithms have been the subject of frustration, as changing priorities forces creators to adapt their videos to an algorithm in order to be discovered. And YouTube has been criticized for promoting big-name creators to the detriment of newcomers.

vidcon convention in los angeles.vidcon convention in los angeles.

Such a huge platform, with billions of users, is never going to please everyone. It’s hard to understand, but anyone who has searched YouTube enough has probably had that experience of finding a seemingly niche and obscure channel that just happens to have millions of subscribers. Those channels, and their followers, can be highly critical of changes to the platform that may have unintended consequences.

The constant criticism from the YouTube creator community is probably why other platforms are hesitant to give more power to users.

However, Wojcicki has been adamant about listening to creators, offering to give interviews and regularly hosting events to explain the changes taking place on YouTube. That didn’t happen in the old days, when YouTube was a mysterious black box.

The bubble of content creators is far from bursting: in 2023 the fight between TikTok and Instagram will continue, there will be more ‘influencers’ and YouTube still has a lot to say

Under Wojcicki’s tenure, YouTube expanded monetization and launched a bunch of new ways to make moneylike a store merchandising. Added a community tab where channels can share text-based updates with their subscribers.

Today creators have complete tools to protect themselves from harmful comments. YouTube doesn’t even allow kids’ videos to include comments anymore, and the comments on my older videos were retroactively removed years after the change. Moderation has improved, although it’s never perfect.

And, of course, the ubiquity of smartphones allows anyone to produce much better videos than I was able to do back in the day.

Wojcicki’s legacy is strong.

YouTube is a media outlet similar to TV or newspaper, and it feels like it’s in a stable place as it develops the Shorts and tries to become a home for all kinds of videos.

The Shorts They have great potential because they give creators the ability to trim parts of their videos to entice audiences to watch the whole thing. I can’t wait to see what happens next.

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