Susan Wojcicki was appointed C.E.O. of YouTube in February 2014. In January 2016, YouTube expanded its headquarters in San Bruno by purchasing an office park for $215 million. The complex has 51,468 square metres (554,000 square feet) of space and can house up to 2,800 employees. YouTube officially launched the polymer redesign of its user interfaces based on Material Design language as its default, as well as a redesigned logo that is built around the service’s play button emblem in August 2017.
Through this period, YouTube tried several new ways to generate revenue beyond advertisements. In 2013, YouTube launched a pilot program for content providers to offer premium, subscription-based channels. This effort was discontinued in January 2018 and relaunched in June, with $4.99 channel subscriptions. These channel subscriptions complemented the existing Super Chat ability, launched in 2017, which allows viewers to donate between $1 and $500 to have their comment highlighted. In 2014, YouTube announced a subscription service known as Music Key, which bundled ad-free streaming of music content on YouTube with the existing Google Play Music service. The service continued to evolve in 2015 when YouTube announced YouTube Red, a new premium service that would offer ad-free access to all content on the platform (succeeding the Music Key service released the previous year), premium original series, and films produced by YouTube personalities, as well as background playback of content on mobile devices. YouTube also released YouTube Music, a third app oriented towards streaming and discovering the music content hosted on the YouTube platform.
The company also attempted to create products appealing to specific viewers. YouTube released a mobile app known as YouTube Kids in 2015, which was designed to provide an experience optimised for children. It features a simplified user interface, curated selections of channels featuring age-appropriate content, and parental control features. Also in 2015, YouTube launched YouTube Gaming. This is a video gaming-oriented vertical and app for videos and live-streaming, intended to compete with the Amazon.com owned Twitch. In April 2018, a shooting occurred at YouTube’s headquarters in San Bruno, California, which wounded four and resulted in the death of the shooter.
By February 2017, one billion hours of YouTube videos were being watched every day, and 400 hours worth of videos were uploaded every minute. Two years later, the uploads had risen to more than 500 hours per minute. During COVID, when most of the world was under stay-at-home orders, usage of services like YouTube significantly increased. Forbes estimated that YouTube accounted for 16% of all internet traffic, as of 2024, up from 11% in 2018, before COVID. In response to E.U. officials requesting that such services reduce bandwidth to make sure medical entities had sufficient bandwidth to share information, YouTube and Netflix said they would reduce streaming quality for at least thirty days as to cut bandwidth use of their services by 25% to comply with the E.U.’s request. YouTube later announced that they would continue with this move worldwide saying “We continue to work closely with governments and network operators around the globe to do our part to minimise stress on the system during this unprecedented situation.”
After a 2018 complaint alleging violations of the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (C.O.P.P.A.), the company was fined $170 million by the FTC for collecting personal information from minors under the age of 13. YouTube was also ordered to create systems to increase children’s privacy. Following criticisms of its implementation of those systems, YouTube started treating all videos designated as made for kids as liable under C.O.P.P.A. on January the 6th, 2020. Joining the YouTube Kids app, the company created a supervised mode, designed more for tweens, in 2021. Additionally, to compete with TikTok and Instagram Reels, YouTube released YouTube Shorts, a short-form video platform. During that period, YouTube entered disputes with other tech companies. For over a year, in 2018/ 19, no YouTube app was available for Amazon Fire products. In 2020, Roku removed the YouTube TV app from its streaming store after the two companies were unable to reach an agreement.
After testing earlier in 2021, YouTube removed public display of dislike counts on videos in November 2021, claiming the reason for the removal was, based on its internal research, that users often used the dislike feature as a form of cyberbullying and brigading. While some users praised the move as a way to discourage trolls, others felt that hiding dislikes would make it harder for viewers to recognise clickbait or unhelpful videos and that other features already existed for creators to limit bullying. YouTube co-founder Jawed Karim referred to the update as a stupid idea and said that the real reason behind the change was not a good one, and not one that will be publicly disclosed. He felt that users’ ability on a social platform to identify harmful content was essential, saying that the process works, and there’s a name for it – the wisdom of the crowds. He said the process breaks when the platform interferes with it and then, the platform invariably declines. Shortly after the announcement, software developer Dmitry Selivanov created Return YouTube Dislike, an open-source, third-party browser extension for Chrome and Firefox that allows users to see a video’s number of dislikes. In a letter published on January the 25th, 2022, by then YouTube C.E.O. Susan Wojcicki, acknowledged that removing public dislike counts was a controversial decision, but reiterated that she stands by this decision, claiming that it reduced dislike attacks.
In 2022, YouTube launched an experiment where the company would show users who watched longer videos on T,V,’s a long chain of short unskippable adverts, intending to consolidate all ads into the beginning of a video. Following public outrage over the unprecedented amount of unskippable ads, YouTube ended the experiment on September the 19th of the same year. In October, YouTube announced that they would be rolling out customisable user handles in addition to channel names, which would also become channel U.R.L’s.
