As reported by the Wall Street Journal, YouTube had a plan. They sent their executives to the VidCon gathering of Internet video personalities where they had a mission to better their relations with these popular content creators. YouTube apparently has a division which its focus is catering to the complaints made by these popular content creators. “I want to be running a platform that they can stay on, that they can grow up on and extend their work even further” YouTube’s CEO said from an interview with Wall Street Journal.
From an interview by CNBC, Susan Wojcicki also announced YouTube Originals which is an initiative to convince the content creators in the VidCon gathering. This was coupled by the announcement of poaching Susanne Daniels, who worked for MTV and she said Susanne is familiar with their demo and the YouTubers & will help the company develop content and grow it even further. Wojcicki wants to impress these creators so that they won’t consider jumping ship to Facebook, which has been constantly improving its video platform to woo these content creators.
Facebook on the other hand has been passive aggressive with its initiative to become the leading online video host. As reported by the Next Web, when you try to post a link from YouTube on a Facebook page, it gives a warning that says “Consider uploading your video directly to Facebook. People are more likely to view native videos and you’ll be able to track your success in Page Insights.”. Recently, Facebook released new tools that are aimed to give these content creators more control over their content in an aim to woo them to their video platform.
The war for user generated content between Facebook & YouTube is far from over. YouTube has been stepping up their game by trying to retain the popular content creators on their platform while Facebook is all up in arms to convince them to shift hosts. As advertisers continue to pump billions of dollars in the social media video landscape, the scramble to get the biggest share of the cut will continue to escalate.
