Facebook “should get back to baby pictures.”
That’s the advice of Susan Wojcicki, the CEO of YouTube, which is Facebook’s main rival in the race to dominate online video. Her comment came during her on-stage interview with Kara Swisher at the Recode Code Media conference in Huntington Beach, Calif..
But she also said she wasn’t that focused on what Facebook (FB) is doing, saying, “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?”
Facebook is producing a batch of shows under the umbrella of Facebook Watch. The series, which will comprise both short-form and TV-length shows, has seen Facebook shell out $10,000 to $40,000 for short episodes and up to $1 million for full-length episodes, according to Business Insider.
Wojcicki also addressed the recent controversy over YouTube celebrity Logan Paul, who last month posted a video that showed the body of a suicide victim in Japan and more recently posted a video in which he used a taser gun on dead rats and attempted to perform CPR on a fish he had removed from the water. Wojcicki defended YouTube’s decision not to suspend his account, saying the platform is trying to walk the tightrope between censorship and “too much freedom of speech,” and that their decision to stop running ads on his channel and sharing ad revenues with him sent a strong message in and of itself.
Her comments came on the same day that Keith Weed, CMO of Unilever (UL), said the global consumer-goods company would pull advertising from companies that “do not protect our children or which create division in society, and promote anger or hate.”