By Joshua Tyler | update
You might think that YouTube and Google are the same because both are owned by the same company. But they’re so different that not only do Google’s engineers have no connection to YouTube, they don’t even know how to use the product.
This was confirmed to me while attending Google’s 2024 Creators Talk event. Speaking to Google’s engineers and using this as a comparison, they admitted that they knew nothing about YouTube, and spent ten minutes explaining to me that the most basic mechanisms of their sister brand and how user interfaces work.
As a new YouTuber and one of the web’s earliest online publishers, this is good information because it explains something I’ve been thinking about for the past year.
Why is Google such a tire fire, while YouTube only seems to get better with each iteration? After all they are both owned by the same company.
The difference between Google and YouTube
After spending a day at Google talking to their team and building a YouTube channel from scratch last year, I think there’s a simple answer.
YouTube wants creators to succeed. Google doesn’t.
YouTube has built its entire interface to help people who use it create better content. This is a logical approach, since the better the videos on YouTube, the more people will want to use YouTube.
Google’s approach is to treat all creators as enemies, in order to defend itself against potential spammers. They actively lie to and sabotage creators, setting traps to mislead them while deliberately hiding useful data and performance metrics. They do this out of fear that if someone knows what Google wants them to do, it will somehow screw up their algorithm.
When I upload a video to YouTube, I get clear reports telling me in every detail what worked and what didn’t. It’s not just a traffic report, but an in-depth and easy-to-understand summary of how people have interacted with and appreciated each part of what you’ve created and published on their platform. , or not. It doesn’t stop at explaining your audience’s thoughts. It goes a step further and tells you what the site’s own algorithm also thought of what you did.
YouTube then gives real, specific, easy-to-implement tips that, if followed, will help you do even better next time. These are real recommendations that actually will If you implement them, work.
Google gives you Search Console, which tells you when they have 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 small 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 to every website I owned. They were promptly removed, but I still don’t know why I got them.
YouTube wants to improve you, Google wants to take you away.
YouTube is a product designed to improve itself, by improving the people who use it.
Google is a product built around paranoia and an innate belief that no matter how good their content is, people will still use it because of brand recognition.
When I explained YouTube’s philosophy to these Google engineers, they were astounded, as if I were speaking a foreign language. To them what I described to YouTube was crazy, and they wanted no part of it.
Although both Google and YouTube are owned by Alphabet, only one of them has a future.
