In an on-stage conversation with New Yorker writer Ken Auletta, Google CEO Eric Schmidt conceded that the search-engine giant doesn’t know how to produce money off of YouTube, the popular video-sharing site for which it paid $1.65 billion in 2006.

In an event at Syracuse University’s Newhouse School, Schmidt said it “seemed obvious” that owning YouTube should generate “significant amounts of money” for Google, but that has proven harder than expected. In any case, monetization is not Google’s primary concern with YouTube at that point, as YouTube could lead to “the creation of a whole new industry.”

And there are two facts on Google’s side: “We know society are watching it” and “We have the luxury of moment to invest.”

Google’s Goal: ‘Change the World’

Google’s goals are loftier than monetizing its products. “The goal of the company isn’t to monetize everything. The goal is to change the world. We start from the perspective of what problems

we do have,” Schmidt said.

For instance, Google.org, the company’s philanthropic arm, is devoted to causes such as renewable energy and preventing disease.

Google’s infamous motto — “don’t be evil” — is taken seriously within the company. “We don’t have an evil meter we can apply,” Schmidt said, but internal discussions do address the issue.

“I thought when I joined the company that was crap — companies don’t have these things. I thought it was a joke. It must be a Larry and Sergey thing. So I was sitting in a room six months in, and an engineer said, ‘That’s evil.’ It’s like a bomb goes off in the room. Everybody has a moral and ethical discussion that, by the way, stopped the product.”

A Plan for Monetizing YouTube

As part of that corporate culture, Wall Street’s criticism — in the scheme of share price — is “not the…

Orginal post by Top Tech News