Google Is Trying To Destroy Creators But YouTube Is Great, Here’s Why They’re Different
You might think YouTube and Google are similar since they’re both owned by the same company. But they’re so totally different that not only do Google’s engineers have no contact with YouTube’s, they don’t even know how to use the product.
This was confirmed to me while attending Google’s 2024 Creator Conversation Event. While talking to Google’s engineers and using it as a comparison, they confessed they don’t know anything about YouTube, and I had to spend ten minutes explaining how their sister brand’s most basic mechanisms and user interfaces work.
As both a new YouTuber and one of the web’s earliest online publishers, it’s good information to have because it explains something I’ve been wondering about for the past year.
Why is Google such a tire fire, while YouTube only seems to be getting better with every iteration? They’re both owned by the same company, after all.
The Difference Between Google And YouTube
After spending a day at Google talking to their team and the past year building a YouTube channel from scratch, I think there’s a straightforward answer.
YouTube wants creators to succeed. Google does not.
YouTube has built its entire interface around helping the people who use it, to create better content. It’s a logical approach, since the better the videos are on YouTube, the more people will want to use YouTube.
Google’s approach is to treat all creators as enemies, in an effort to defend themselves against possible spammers. They actively lie to and sabotage creators, laying traps to send them in the wrong direction while intentionally obscuring useful data and performance metrics. They do this out of a paranoid fear that if anyone figures out how to do what Google wants them to do, it’ll somehow subvert their algorithm.
When I upload a video on YouTube, I get clear reports telling me every detail of what worked or didn’t. It’s not only a traffic report, but an in-depth and easy-to-understand summary of how people interacted and appreciated, or didn’t, every part of what you created and published on their platform. It doesn’t stop with explaining what your audience thought; it goes a step further and explains what the site’s own algorithm thought of what you did, too.
YouTube then gives real, specific, easy-to-implement recommendations that, if followed, will help you do even better next time. These are real recommendations that actually will work if you apply them.
Google gives you Search Console, which tells you when they’ve penalized or rewarded your site but not how or why.
If there’s a problem with your channel, YouTube gives you a strike as a warning, so you know what you did wrong and can avoid doing it again.
If you make a mistake on Google, even a tiny one, they permanently ban your site and refuse to tell you what’s wrong.
In my case, they once went a step further and banned me as a person by simultaneously issuing vague manual bans on every website I own. They were quickly removed, but I still have no idea why I got them.
YouTube Wants You To Be Better, Google Wants You To Go Away
YouTube is a product built around making itself better, by making the people who use it better.
Google is a product built around paranoia and an inborn belief that it doesn’t matter if their content is any good, people will still use it because of brand recognition.
When I explained YouTube’s philosophy to those Google engineers, they seemed baffled, as if I was speaking a foreign language. To them what I described YouTube doing was crazy, and they wanted no part of it.
Though Google and YouTube are both owned by Alphabet, only one of them has a future.
Login with Google