“There isn’t a playbook for how open platforms operate at our scale,” YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki said at YouTube’s annual Brandcast NewFronts presentation Thursday evening, referring to the platform’s spate of brand safety snafus over the past year.
“But the way I think about it is, it’s critical that we are on the right side of history.”
Surprise, surprise: YouTube thinks that Google Preferred, a premium service that costs two to three times more than Google’s self-serve tools, is the closest it can get to being on the right side of history.
The program, which lets advertisers buy ads against the platform’s top-performing videos, was front and center at YouTube’s presentation held at Radio City Music Hall Thursday evening.
Wojcicki took the stage and announced that the company was doubling down on Google Preferred, expanding it to let advertisers buy ads on not only its top-performing videos, but also cable TV shows, live events and music videos.
To read more about how YouTube is trying to flip its brand safety mess into an opportunity, click here.
In related news:
YouTube now has over 1.8 billion users every month, within spitting distance of Facebook's 2 billion. That makes YouTube Google's most popular service, with even more users than Gmail.
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