1.8 billion registered users watch videos on YouTube each month, according to Susan Wojcicki, the platform’s CEO.
The CEO who announced the milestone at YouTube’s Brandcast presentation to advertisers, alongside some of the year’s most noteworthy successes — like Beyoncé’s record-setting 41 million livestream views at Coachella and the “Despacito” music video passing 5 billion views last month, said the number does not include the number of viewers who watch without an account.
The company previously announced that it had 1.5 billion logged-in monthly users in mid-2017.
Wojcicki used the Brandcast event to obliquely address some of the problems YouTube has faced, including questions over inappropriate kids’ videos and conspiracy theories on the platform.
“This is the impact of an open platform: it brings the world together in ways that were just not possible before. But we’ve also seen that with openness comes challenges, as some have tried to take advantage of our services,” Wojcicki said. “It is incredibly important to me and to everyone at YouTube that we grow responsibly.”
Wojcicki mentioned changes like a YouTube Kids option for human-curated videos and a promise to hire 10,000 moderators — something that appears to still be in progress. “There is not a playbook for how open platforms operate at our scale,” said Wojcicki. “But the way I think about it is that it’s critical that we’re on the right side of history.”
