PLAYA VISTA, Calif. — Gathered in the company's historic Spruce Goose hangar Tuesday morning, a host of YouTube leaders laid out a roadmap for the platform's evolving relationship with both video creators and the music industry, announcing new monetization tools and industry partnerships in the cavernous event space where Howard Hughes once built a massive wooden airplane.
But while the tech executives seemed eager to outline their plans for the future of the creator economy, they were far more reticent to acknowledge the aggressively scaling industry upstart that, over the last few years, has taken a massive bite out of the online video ecosystem: TikTok.
Indeed, the Google subsidiary's "Made on YouTube" press event had been going on for about an hour before anyone explicitly cited TikTok — and even then, it was an audience member, during a question-and-answer period, who first named the elephant in the room.
