YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki said the company did a poor job with its annual wrap-up video last year, writing today that her kids described it as “cringey.”
YouTube’s 2018 Rewind video became the most disliked video on the platform in just over a week after it was posted in December, with more than 15 million dislikes to date. Fans and creators criticized it for not accurately depicting YouTube’s current culture.
“We hear you that it didn’t accurately show the year’s key moments, nor did it reflect the YouTube you know,” Wojcicki writes in a blog post today. “We’ll do better to tell our story in 2019.”
“We’ll do better to tell our story in 2019.”
The video showed popular creators hanging out with one another, and participating in extremely corny sketches. But it skipped many of YouTube’s biggest — and often, less advertiser-friendly — moments, like the fight between KSI and Logan Paul or PewDiePie’s heavily discussed battle with T-Series.
YouTube acknowledged in December that it had messed up with Rewind. But at the time, its statement was more playful, writing that dethroning a Justin Bieber video for most dislikes “wasn’t exactly our goal.” Now, Wojcicki is more directly acknowledging it as a screw-up and promising something better for the end of this year.