YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki made the comments when asked about what she thought of Facebook’s video ambitions, reports CNBC. Speaking at the Recode’s Code Media conference, Wojcicki was asked if she was worried about Facebook’s increasing moves into video. At first Wojcicki replied diplomatically:
I mean you always have to take your competitors seriously, but you don’t win by looking backwards and looking around. You win by looking forward, and looking at your customers and figuring out what do they want, how can I be better at what we do? And I look at YouTube and I look at the opportunity and we have a really wonderful ecosystem, and so the priorities that we have this year are building trust among our advertisers and our creators, tightening our policies, building more engagement, increasing the creator ecosystem that we have with educational content . . . We have this amazing platform and we want to invest it that. And so, I don’t know what Facebook is going to do . . .
But when pressed, Wojcicki ditched the PR prep and threw some shade:
I mean, I think they should focus on what they’re focused on. I think they should get back to baby pictures and sharing.
The Facebook quip aside, the social media giant is positioning itself as an alternative to YouTube in many respects, with the company looking to roll out its “Watch” content platform to more individual content creators and launching an ad revenue system where content creators take a share of the revenues generated from their original content–just like YouTube.
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