Late last year, YouTube signed Ludwig Ahgren to an exclusive deal. Once the ink was dry, the streaming star immediately invited YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki to sit down with him for a chat.
Wojcicki wasted little time before deciding to take Ahgren up on his offer. In a recent episode of The Yard, YouTube’s top exec and its big-name signee enjoyed a wide-ranging conversation that spanned multiple hot topics in the digital video industry.
There was plenty of fluff in the interview. Wojcicki brought Ahgren a chair with his face on it, and the streamer quizzed his guest on some emotes associated with her competitor Twitch. At the same time, Wojcicki provided open and honest insights about the “serious” topics Ahgren broached, and her candor earned her props from the comments section.
Obviously, Ahgren had to ask Wojcicki about the controversial decision to make dislikes invisible to YouTube viewers. The 23-year Google vet explained that her team is always calculating how creators will react to major updates, and in that case, the resulting backlash was expected. So then why did YouTube go through with the change? Wojcicki explained that the small creators who are positively impacted by hidden dislikes don’t have amplified voices, so they aren’t heard as loudly as the naysayers.
“We have to do what is the right thing for the ecosystem as a whole,” Wojcicki told Ahgren. She explained that the people running the platform “have access to data that individual creators may not have.”
Despite all that data, community reactions sometimes catch YouTube by surprise. For example, Wojcicki admitted that she did not expect the most-disliked video in YouTube history to receive such a negative response. “We had no idea that the Rewind video in 2018 was going to go badly,” she said.
