YouTube's CEO On Why The Video Platform Isn't A Standalone Company

Susan Wojcicki is the CEO of Alphabet Inc's GOOG GOOGL YouTube unit. On Friday, she was a guest on "Bloomberg Studio 1.0" to discuss what role the streaming video unit plays within the greater Alphabet family.

Wojcicki was asked why YouTube isn't a standalone company and still part of Google.

The executive said YouTube remains an important part of Google and runs on its infrastructure. She added that YouTube also tasks Google's ad sales team to sell its ad inventory but still considers YouTube to be a "company within Google" yet maintain its own standalone brand.

Investment Mode

Moving on to growing YouTube, Wojcicki said the top priority at YouTube is to "continue growing the business in a big growth area." She expanded that by all measures, television is a bigger market than online streaming, videos but millennials are watching less TV these days which creates a tremendous opportunity for YouTube to capitalize on.

"I do think if you look at the millennial audience you do see their behavior really shifting from traditional TV to online," she said.

Faced with this opportunity, Wojcicki said YouTube is "definitely in investment mode" so that users will be able to watch "whatever show they want."