What you need to know in advertising today

"There isn't a playbook for how open platforms operate at our scale," YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki said at YouTube's annual Brandcast NewFronts presentation Thursday evening, referring to the platform's spate of brand safety snafus over the past year.

"But the way I think about it, is it's critical that we are on the right side of history."

Surprise, surprise: YouTube thinks that Google Preferred, a premium service that costs two to three times more than Google's self-serve tools, is the closest it can get to being on the right side of history.

The program, which lets advertisers buy ads against the platform's top-performing videos, was front and center at YouTube's presentation held at Radio City Music Hall Thursday evening.

Wojcicki took the stage and announced that the company was doubling down on Google Preferred, expanding it to let advertisers buy ads on not only its top-performing videos, but also cable TV shows, live events and music videos.

To read more about how YouTube is trying to flip its brand safety mess into an opportunity, click here.

In related news:

YouTube now has over 1.8 billion users every month, within spitting distance of Facebook's 2 billion. That makes YouTube Google's most popular service, with even more users than Gmail.

In other news:

Facebook is reportedly researching an ad-free version of its site where people would pay a monthly fee. During a hearing before congress in April, Mark Zuckerberg hinted that Facebook might someday offer a version of its site that's subscription-based, in addition to the current ad-support version.

Twitter is advising its 330 million users to change their password after a glitch left a number of password exposed.But the company says it has no evidence of a breach.

The executives behind Cambridge Analytica set up a mysterious new company called Emerdata last year, and sources told the New York Times that it's just a new iteration of the firm. The Times described it as a "Blackwater-style rebrand."

Amazon has made a formal offer to buy a majority stake in its biggest competitor in India. The firm wants to buy 60% of Flipkart, potentially complicating a separate bid from Walmart.

25 of the biggest failed products from the world's biggest companies. From Nintendo to Netflix, Microsoft to McDonald's - all these companies have had some big belly flops.

Snapchat is reportedly no longer paying licensing fees to Discover partners, Digiday reports. The change means that they will need to rely on their share of advertising revenue.