YouTube's Susan Wojcicki On Star Creators: 'YouTube Is Their Home'

YouTube's position as the king of online video is being threatened by rivals, none more serious than Facebook. But YouTube's CEO says she's not concerned about losing its top creators, who command millions-strong audiences and who have been experimenting with other video platforms.

"Sure, exclusivity would be nice, but I don't think it's necessary," Wojcicki said Monday at the Fortune Brainstorm Tech conference in Aspen, Colo. "YouTube is their home -- it's where their fans were, where they were born. They know that medium. It's where they're connecting with their audiences."

Those top creators, the likes of Smosh, PewDiePie, Michelle Phan and a slew of others, are a big deal -- to viewers and to YouTube's competitors. A study last year in Variety showed that the five most influential celebrities for U.S. teens are all from YouTube, not from Hollywood or the music industry. And other video-hungry sites like Facebook are circling like sharks around top creators, hoping to lure them onto another platform.

YouTube's draw is largely from a creator's most ardent fans, who may be used to seeing content on the site, Wojcicki said. "We have a creator who stopped uploading as much as she used to," she added. "Her fans were like, 'Where are you? Why aren't we hearing from you?' These are the people who make them a star. It's important for them to keep it up."

She also highlighted differences between YouTube and Facebook, which has been on an aggressive push to increase video recently. Facebook's News Feed heavily prioritizes native video posts and auto-plays videos when they show in a user's feed. A three-second auto-play counts as a view, which allows Facebook to tout statistics like having 4 billion views per day in April.

Instead of counting quick views, YouTube prefers to track "watchtime," which is at hundreds of millions of hours a day, she said. And views on Google's YouTube are different, she said. Facebook's are in a feed, while YouTube's viewers are "more engaged."

Wojcicki also spoke more about YouTube Music Key, the subscription music service it launched in beta last year. The service lets users listen to the vast music catalog on YouTube ad-free, offline, or in the background while using the phone to do other things like email. She emphasized that the service is different from Apple Music, Spotify or other streaming services because it offers music video and because it has a more varied catalog of music -- covers, live shows, and more.

"YouTube has a really impressive collection of music," she said. "Our corpus is different. We're thinking about how to lean into that more."

That's not the only area where the YouTube wants to lean harder. Its top three priorities for the near future are "mobile, mobile, mobile," Wojcicki also said. More than 50% of YouTube's views are on mobile, she said. It's something that Google at large is struggling to figure out, as more traffic moves to mobile but mobile ad prices continue to drop.