Like, Comment, Subscribe by Mark Bergen

Author:Mark Bergen [Bergen, Mark]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2022-09-06T00:00:00+00:00

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The company knew something was askew with its creator economy. But it had another corporate hubbub to deal with.

That August in 2015, Larry Page had shocked the world (and most Googlers) by announcing the creation of Alphabet, a new holding company that would split his empire into several stand-alone businesses: one for Google, one for self-driving cars, one for smart thermostats, and so on. YouTube seemed like a natural splinter; it already operated with a different name and office. Leaders there considered plans to become a separate Alphabet unit, detached from Google. Wojcicki wanted to keep reporting to Page, who had appointed himself Alphabet CEO, rather than his successor at Google, Sundar Pichai. But ultimately it was decided YouTube was too intertwined with Google’s business and machinery to leave. So it stayed at Google.

That year Wojcicki had also brought on two new executives to shape YouTube’s future. Neither had a background in media production, but they were both Google veterans. Neal Mohan had cut YouTube’s first big ad deal, in its office above the pizza shop, as a director at DoubleClick, and he had stayed with Google’s ad division after the DoubleClick acquisition. He had two Stanford degrees, an NBA obsession, and the careful elocution of an accountant. Within Google he was known as a political master, someone who could “manage up.” One YouTube director recalled having a tense standoff with Wojcicki during a Tuesday meeting. By Thursday, Wojcicki had changed her mind. Mohan “had done some Jedi mind trick behind the scenes,” the director recalled. This paid off. A publication reported in 2011 that Google had given Mohan a $100 million bonus to counter an offer from Twitter. Some Google colleagues then ribbed Mohan as the “hundred-million-dollar man,” much to his chagrin.

Wojcicki put Mohan in charge of YouTube’s product, and he quickly became her top deputy. As his deputy, Mohan recruited Ariel Bardin, the executive fond of Vice—a fast-talking, blunt Israeli who had been at Google since 2004, most recently running its payments service. When he and Mohan arrived, they looked at figures in the creator economy and saw serious inequities. Most ad money flowed to the top one hundred creators. What if a few of them went elsewhere or quit producing? Was the compensation system really a level playing field? The new executives developed a plan to redraw YouTube’s entire payment system based on mathematical measures of success. They called this Project Beane after Billy Beane, the unorthodox baseball general manager featured in Moneyball.

They had another nickname for the project: “boil the ocean,” a nod to the Herculean engineering task required. YouTube had used this phrase before to describe big, successful efforts to remake its service for apps and TVs. So as 2016 began, the company prepared to solve the financial problems of its creator class with engineering, like usual. It didn’t seem like there were other major problems on the horizon.

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