"You can make money on YouTube with 100 real fans".

 

Sarah, tell us about a particularly impactful moment in your time before Google.

Sarah Clatterbuck: When I worked at Yahoo! our team did a big project to commemorate the tenth anniversary of 9.11. We held a moment of silence across the entire Yahoo website. One minute all at the same time. It was a very impressive project that also involved a lot of technical effort. But it was a beautiful opportunity for the whole nation to come together at Yahoo! And at LinkedIn, I have fond memories of building our Women in Tech program, launching our accessibility initiatives to make sure our products were useful and usable for people with different abilities. And then the launch of the new, social homepage and web app for LinkedIn.

And then you moved to Switzerland. What is your life like here?

I love living in Switzerland. When we have days like today and the sun is shining, it's the most beautiful place in the world. I love the mountains. I live here with my husband and we go to the mountains every weekend and do beautiful hikes or bike tours. In winter we like to go snowshoeing. I enjoy my time here very much.

You're not just wandering. You've also always been a strong advocate for the advancement of women in the tech industry. Why does the tech industry need more women power?

I think technology is used by everyone in society, and our users are at least half women. So we also need more women developing technology so that we also better understand what our users are looking for, or at least that half of society. So as long as the technology industry is mostly men, we may be creating great products for men, but at the same time missing out on the other half of society.

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Watch the full video with Sarah Clatterbuck as a video recording

What is your role at Women in Tech Switzerland?

Supporting this organization is a great concern for me. It is relatively new here in Switzerland, as part of a global movement: I serve on the Board of Advisors here, an advisory body. We work with the leadership team of this organization to help them develop the strategy on how they can reach more girls and women to get them excited about technology topics.

You are also one of four site managers at Google Switzerland. What is your job in this role? In your main function, you are Engineering Director at YouTube.

Yes, the site lead role is very interesting. It's in addition to my normal role as YouTube technical lead. The four of us essentially work to make sure that we foster a pleasant corporate culture here in the Zurich office, including holding lots of events where our employees can get together, that we have a good leadership team overall that can help run the Google site here in Switzerland, and then also make sure that the employees enjoy their work.

So how do you manage to balance all these different things? Hiking, 'Women in Tech' engagement, YouTube Director, Google Site Lead....

Well, I guess I've gotten good at time management, but yes, I make sure I have time for all the important things in my work. I set aside a lot of time in my agenda and block out time slots so that I can think about technology, about how I can attract more women to the industry, about all these issues that are significant to me.

In your main role, as I mentioned before, you are the technical director at YouTube. What is your biggest challenge at YouTube right now?

I think the really interesting thing about our work at YouTube, and also a challenge, is that we have a platform that reaches billions of users, and we also have millions of creators on our platform. So we have to make sure that users are happy with the time they spend on YouTube and that they can find the content that's interesting to them. So all of those things we measure. On the other hand, we want YouTube to be the best platform to be a content creator, the place where creators can be really authentic and have their voice heard around the world, but hopefully also build a strong business of their own.

It seems like YouTube's success story will go on forever because it was one of the first platforms to deliver videos. What is the secret of your success?

I think it boils down to Google's value of always putting our users first, and we consider our viewers to be the primary users, so we want to make sure that they're happy with the content they find, that they learn new things, and that they're entertained. We also want our creators to enjoy creating content and make a good living from it.

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Statistics on YouTube in Switzerland

• In Switzerland, the number of YouTube channels generating revenue of CHF 100,000 or more increased by over 15 % year-over-year (as of December 2022).
• In Switzerland, more than 20 channels have over 1 million subscribers, representing year-on-year growth of more than 10 % (as of December 2022)
• In Switzerland, more than 450 channels have over 100,000 subscribers, representing more than 20 % year-over-year growth (as of December 2022)
• In Switzerland, more than 3,000 channels have more than 10,000 subscribers, representing year-over-year growth of more than 15 % (as of December 2022)
• Over 90 % Share of playback time of video content produced by channels from Switzerland that is allocated to foreign countries (as of December 2022).
• Around 6.5 million people in Switzerland use YouTube every month; 2.5 million of them stream YouTube on their TV sets (Connected TV). (as of December 2021)

 

Let's take a look at the business part of YouTube. Which sources of revenue are currently bubbling up in particular?

Well, YouTube was, I think, the first platform to start sharing advertising revenue with content producers, creators. And we still do that today, of course. But in recent years, and this has really been the focus of my work, I've helped build new revenue streams thanks to which creators can diversify their revenues. I can tell you maybe five ways of monetization that we've developed over the last few years that Creators can use to diversify their revenue.

With pleasure...

First there is the subscription Channel Membership for a particular Creator's channel, which can offer its fans various perks or special content for which fans then pay a monthly fee. Recently, we expanded this program to include the ability to give away memberships (Membership Gifting). Here fans can give away these subscriptions to other fans. Because not everyone may be able to afford a subscription, but fans know that they have the option to buy some and give them away to other subscribers of the channel.

 

 

We also have a function called Video Thanks, that fans can use to thank you for a particular video. Certain creators may not have a recurring fan base for which they could sign up for a monthly subscription, but maybe they make video content that shows followers how to fix things around their house or something like that. And then fans can just say, "Thank you. This video helped me, and I'm going to give you, Creator, a donation for that."

 

The other parts of our fan support suite are Super chats and Super Stickers. These are features that allow fans in YouTube live streams to write special messages or add stickers to the chat history - again, as a subscriber, you can donate a small amount to the creator.

 

 

And lately, of course, we've also been working on our Shopping features developed. This means that creators can set up an online store on YouTube by connecting a 'Shopify' or 'Spring' store to their own YouTube channel to offer products.

 

Do I understand correctly that it will now be much easier to become a Creator and also earn money?

It is exactly the same. So you don't have to have so many ad views. You can also use these alternative types of revenue streams and be successful. We like to say that you can already make money on YouTube with "100 real fans".

Many of our readers are advertisers. So are there new opportunities for them as well, especially with regard to the Creator's Program?

Well, we'll see that advertisers can achieve various new reaches with our new formats. YouTube shorts have become very popular in the past two years. And we're offering special ad formats on shorts, which then also benefit our creators. And then there are a lot of new opportunities that are happening both in long-format video and on the big screen in the living room - keyword "Connected TV". So we're making sure that advertisers reach their audience exactly where their messages are best received.

How will artificial intelligence in its current new form change YouTube?

I think when we talk about artificial intelligence in the sense of machine learning, it's a technology that we've been using at YouTube for a very long time. We use machine learning, among other things, to make video recommendations to our users. Machine learning is also part of "Content ID", our system for ensuring copyright protection. So AI is now an integral part of many areas of the YouTube platform. But I think Generative AI and similar technologies will also play a role in the future; these will bring about new forms of expression and a new kind of creativity. And we're already seeing creators themselves starting to create exciting content by creating their backgrounds or videos using generative AI.

I'm looking forward to it, also for me as a video journalist. To wrap up this very interesting conversation Sarah, just one last question that I'd like you to answer for me. But you can choose the question.

Let's see... - what tool do you think has spurred your video creation as a journalist the most over the past year?

That's what you're asking me now. Well, I think CapCut.

Tell me about it.

It is a video app. You can upload a video, and then you have all the options to create your video professionally within no time.

Is there one last question you would like to ask me?

Maybe your most important project you are working on right now. If it's not too secret of course....

We have a lot of top secret things (laughs). We're working on expanding our shopping features right now and making them available to more Creators in more countries around the world soon. I think you could see at the end of June at the VidCon (in Anaheim, USA) to learn more about it already. VidCon is the largest creator event in the world.

Thank you very much for the interview. It was very interesting. I wish you a lot of fun and success. With hiking and with YouTube.

Thank you, I will.

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