Our responsibility goes beyond removing policy violative content: YouTube India

YouTube was created by Steve Chen, Chad Hurley, and Jawed Karim on February 14, 2005. In the following year, it was acquired by Google and since then, it has grown steadily and is become a huge search platform, second only to Google.

However, YouTube is not just a repository of information and entertainment videos, but also a crucial platform for creators to earn and live a respectable life.

In India, during the Covid-19-induced pandemic, several women and men were able to earn and support their families by creating cooking recipes, educational tutorials, and other infotainment videos. It helped people to try creative ways to cook food at home, learn new skills to improve their job profile, and binge on entertainment videos to distract themselves from depressive news around the world.

As YouTube marks 22 years anniversary, DH had the opportunity to interact with Satya Raghavan, Director, YouTube Partnerships, India.

Satya Raghavan, Director, YouTube Content Partnerships, India

We discussed a wide range of topics from the change of trends between now and the pre-covid era, to training up-and-coming creators to sustain their work on the platform and importantly, YouTube's measure to control the spread of misinformation. Here are the edited excerpts.

DH: Can you share with us a quick comparison of the trends before Covid-era and now. How has content consumption changed on YouTube? What are some trends you’ve seen during the pandemic? What kind of content saw growth?

Satya Raghavan: During the pandemic, YouTube creators answered questions on all our minds - from haircuts and workouts to crisis cooking ideas to cultivating hobbies to financial prudence and investments for individuals and small businesses. Our viewers turned to YouTube to find a sense of belonging and connect with their favourite creators and like-minded people, by celebrating festivals from Onam, Ramzan, and Diwali on YouTube, while also bonding over squads in FreeFire and imposters in Among Us. On the other hand, our creators showed up to support the community. For instance: Samay Raina came up with the inventive ‘Chess for Charity’. Karthik Aryan spotlit frontline workers and first responders, while creators like Sandeep Maheshwari and Prajakta Koli broached often-overlooked issues of mental health, urging their communities towards self-care.

Our viewers turned to YouTube to learn new skills, hone newfound passions, discover content to watch with friends and family, and foster a shared sense of community.

In 2021, we saw the rise of new genres and voices in the YouTube content ecosystem including Science & Experiments, Facts, Motivation. Even as YouTube caters to one of the largest learner communities, creators like A2 Motivation {Arvind Arora} and Mr. Gyani Facts are leveraging YouTube Shorts to share facts and knowledge in byte-sized videos. We also saw the rise of Science and Experiment videos thanks to the ingenuity of creators like Crazy XYZ and Mr. India Hacker who created innovative and engaging content, uniting the goodness of science, technology and entertainment.

On the other hand, gaming firmly established itself in Gen Z popular culture in India. Across this year’s top trending videos, top creators, and breakout creators lists, gamers from around the country have a notable presence. While gaming creators covered the spectrum from Minecraft to Grand Theft Auto 5, the popularity of Garena FreeFire was evident. In fact, a five-hour-long gaming live stream of the FreeFire World Series Final in 2021, became one of the most popular videos in India this year. Gaming content evolved, expanding from “let’s play” gameplay style videos to comedy, pranks, challenges, and even festival-themed music videos celebrating Holi with Hrithik Roshan and Diwali with Bhuvan Bam and Sharadda Kapoor.

With people spending more time at home, more than 20 million Indians streamed their favorite YouTube content on their connected TVs, over 40 percent growth since May last year. Moreover, high growth in watch times of cricket, comedy, beauty, and educational content through Connected TV underscores the increasing preference of users to tune into YouTube from their living rooms.

DH: How has regional content grown on YouTube? What are trends seen during the pandemic? What kind of content saw growth?

Satya Raghavan: 2021 showed us that creativity is no longer the bastion of urban creators and artists, with regional content, and music appealing to wide audiences, across the country. In India, we are seeing the rise of creators from across regions and languages, whose inventiveness and creativity are fuelling new storytelling formats and genres.

Even as sub-genres like stand-up comedy acts and sketch comedy became mainstream, comedy creators trained the spotlight on new voices across languages including Haryanvi and Tamil as well as new forms of storytelling, including short films, horror-comedy, using animation and sketch comedy techniques in roast videos and even comedy in the short-form video.

The success of the Village Cooking channel, which surpassed the 10 million subscriber milestone in 2021, is indicative of a wider trend where food has emerged as a powerful conduit to celebrate their heritage with global audiences and connect meaningfully with a widespread diaspora. We saw this trend across languages and regions from Mamatha natural food, a Telugu homemaker with natural recipes to Tamil food channels like Irfan’s view and Venkatesh Bhat's Idhayam Thotta Samayal as well as Village Food Channel in Malayalam.

We have begun to see the emergence of Indian VTubers i.e. avatar-based YouTubers, who use the Apple Memoji to construct rich characters and tell relatable stories. On the forefront of India’s animated Memoji trend are channels Filmymoji and Funmoji. At the very core, this content is popular because it is relatable and captures themes of everyday life, but told in an innovative format, using the local dialect.

We saw the continued rise of Bhojpuri music with artists Ankush Raja and Shilpi Raj at the helm of the sub-culture as it continues to thrum and thrive across geographies. And, in another testament to how great content can travel beyond geographical boundaries, appealing to wide swathes of viewers, the break-out success of Tamil sensation Enjoy Enjaami, inspired reaction videos and cover songs including some in Hindi and Malayalam.

DH: What measures YouTube is taking to drive creators' ecosystems. What aspects does the workshop for creators, the company focus on, please elaborate

Satya Raghavan: We are invested in growing quality creators on YouTube and work closely with them in many ways.

We run creator camps across all major cities, where emerging creators get to hear directly from YouTube product experts about new & upcoming features and also learn from their most loved YouTube idols.

Also, Google hosts workshops such as Content Labs for audience development best practices, and also launched new formats such as Diversify Your Revenue and Brand Jam to help creators discover alternate revenue streams to build a sustainable career off of YouTube.

Our NextUp programs consist of week-long camps where we help participating creators ramp up their camera, lighting, and sound techniques, as well as their channel development strategies. As part of this, participating creators also have the opportunity to network and build community with each other.

As a part of our investment in the development and growth of content creators, YouTube Pop-ups offer training on strategies used by the most successful YouTube creators, hands-on workshops to improve their presence across Google and YouTube, and opportunities to meet and collaborate with other members of the YouTube community.

And, FanFest gives creators a stage to interact with their fans directly

DH: YouTube Shorts videos are getting more view count compared to regular videos. Is the algorithm changed to give prominence to short videos or just the audience are looking for them more now?

Satya Raghavan: YouTube has always been a place to be entertained, and over the years we’ve enabled an entire generation of creators and artists who have shared their voice and found an audience on the platform. As technology advances, creators and users now have more options to quickly create and consume content. YouTube Shorts is a natural progression for YouTube. That’s why we’re excited to build Shorts as we look to enable the next generation of mobile creators and artists on YouTube.

One year since the launch of YouTube Shorts, the quick, informal aspect of short-form videos created relatable content experiences that resonated with viewers. Since introducing our initial Shorts beta in India, we’ve already started to see creators using our tools creatively. Our creators are leveraging YouTube Shorts as a new format of personalised video content to unlock imaginative ways to tell their stories. And, in fact, the number of Indian channels using Shorts creation tools has more than tripled since the beginning of December 2020.
The types of content we see are largely driven by the imagination of our creators and the taste of our viewers. Both new and existing creators reached viewers across a broad range of topics with short-form content that tapped into the humor and familiarity of everyday life. Some of the most popular Shorts creators in 2021 went beyond the well-understood techniques of editing videos to music and transitions, and have given rise to new and innovative formats of short-form storytelling across themes including family and friendships, language skills, motivation and men's grooming content, social messages.

DH: The recent decision to remove the dislike button count has not gone down well with large section creators. They feel the audience needs to know to make an informed decision to watch a video. What's your take on this issue?

Satya Raghavan: At YouTube, we strive to be a place where creators of all sizes and backgrounds can find and share their voice. We have a responsibility to protect the community and create an inclusive environment where creators have the opportunity to succeed and feel safe to express themselves.

We've seen that public dislike counts can motivate dislike attacks (where people work to drive up the number of dislikes on a creator’s videos), trolling, and harassment of creators. We believe that disincentivizing this behavior is the right thing to do. When we initially announced that we were experimenting with making the dislike count private, we found that because the count was not visible to viewers, they were less likely to target a video’s dislike button to drive up the count.

We heard during the experiment that some viewers have used the public dislike count to help decide whether or not to watch a video. Over the past few months, we conducted an in-depth analysis on this specific concern. And, while some viewers might use the dislike count to give them a sense of a video’s worth when we looked at the data from millions of viewers and videos in the experiment, we did not see a noticeable difference in viewership, regardless of whether or not there was a public dislike count.

DH: Does YouTube has any in-built mechanism in the algorithm to identify fake or misinformation-based video with a clickbait headline. Does the company have a team of editors to review the video and block or penalize them?

Satya Raghavan: With many people, today, coming on YouTube not only for entertainment but also for News and Information, YouTube’s recommendations are built keeping all kinds of audiences in mind. Through the years, YouTube has used recommendations to reduce low-quality content from being widely viewed, built out classifiers to identify and prevent racy/ violent videos from being recommended, started to demote sensationalist content, removed any video that showed minors in risky situations, and further expanded the way the recommendation system is used to reduce problematic misinformation and borderline content.

Bad content represents only a tiny percentage of the billions of videos on YouTube (about .16-.18% of total views turn out to be content that violates our policies). And our policies center on the removal of any videos that can directly lead to egregious real-world harm. For example, since February of 2020, we’ve removed over 1M videos related to dangerous coronavirus information, like false cures or claims of a hoax.

We've taken a number of steps to address misinformation on our platform, including surfacing more authoritative content across our site for people searching for news-related topics and beginning to reduce recommendations of borderline content and harmful misinformation.

Our responsibility goes beyond removing policy violative content. Many of the changes we’ve made around news and our recommendations help limit the spread of content that comes close to but doesn’t quite violate our policies. To do this we are focusing on three areas: making authoritative sources readily available, providing people with context to make their own decisions, and reducing borderline content and misinformation.

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