Debbie Weinstein, Managing Director, YouTube/Video Global Solutions – Google says that the big goal for the organization is to utilize the fast-expanding user base of YouTube to find targeted solutions for marketers.
Q] How big is India as a market for YouTube?
India is amongst our top 10 markets globally, so it is definitely a focus market for me. In fact, I was amazed to find out that today, over 225 million Indians come to YouTube every month on mobile. Interestingly, in March when I was supposed to visit India, Youtube had reached out to 180 million Indians on mobile phones alone. So that tells me Indians love video and they love entertainment.
Q] Do you feel marketers here are using YouTube to its fullest potential just yet?
Shopclues and Marico are both excellent examples of businesses who know exactly how to make those connections with the audience via YouTube. To me it goes back to the business problems that a marketer is trying to solve. For example, Marico was trying to drive relevance amongst women for their hair care products and for Shopclues, their business challenge was more about getting people to take action, so cost per action became their focus. In fact,there are a lot of really strong cases that show business outcomes. Marketers have figured out how to use YouTube to attain tangible business results.
Q] What are the big areas of focus for YouTube?
The biggest area we are focused on is direct response. Our new product called True-view for action that comes with an optimization and bidding mechanism enables YouTube to be as effective for direct response marketers as it has been historically for brand marketers.
Q] What kind of trends do you see in the online video space in India?
While music is big everywhere, it is particularly big here, as it speaks of a known passion amongst Indians. That is a core part of the entertainment lifestyle that people enjoy. We actually see growth amongst all users—be it moms, professionals or millennials.
Q] You are in the midst of a controversy following a stream of negative press earlier over hate speech and now over the child exploitation videos the platform has been hosting?
How are you tackling that? The safety and user experience on the platform is critical to us and we have been taking a number of actions since the beginning of the year to tackle violent extremism. We focus on three different areas--policies, controls and enforcement of the policies and controls. We are always looking to upgrade policies to reflect community guidelines to govern what can happen on the platform. Then we have separate ad policies with a higher standard on where ads can run. So constantly we are trying to understand what is happening on the platform and make sure our policies reflect potential threats. Earlier in the year, we made some pretty substantial upgrades to our policies -like whoever was covered by the hate speech policies was made to come off the platform completely. We are constantly refreshing those policies. Then we have controls, which is the ability of an advertiser to manage where their ads appear. And finally the enforcement, it comes in two forms, human and machine. Humans help understand how to interpret the policies and then they train machines to understand them better, especially considering that with 400 hours of content being uploaded on the platform every minute, it is a very large scale problem for us to get our hands around.
Q] What kind of innovations can we expect from YouTube in the near future?
I was thinking about how we can take that 225 million reach on YouTube to help advertisers find their best consumer using signals from search and maps. For example, a mobile phone manufacturer can find 52 million technophiles amongst 225 million Indians on YouTube using a combination based on their search for mobile phones, if they have watched unboxing videos on YouTube and whether they have visited tech retailers. Through all these different signals, a mobile phone manufacturer can find their best customer. That’s a huge opportunity and we shall be constantly innovating in this kind of audience space.
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