Susan Wojcicki, the CEO of YouTube, would be leaving her position after nine years in charge of the biggest online video network in the world. Neal Mohan, YouTube’s chief product officer, will take over as the channel’s new CEO, she said. Wojcicki was formerly a senior vice president for ad services at Google and was appointed CEO of YouTube in 2014. Wojcicki held positions at Intel and Bain & Company before joining Google.
CEO of YouTube resigns, but why?
Wojcicki will be recognized as Google’s first landlord even though she rose to become one of the most esteemed female executives in the largely male-dominated tech sector. Soon after turning their search engine into a business in 1998, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, co-founders of Google, rented the garage of Wojcicki’s Menlo Park, California, residence for $1,700 monthly.
For five months, Page and Brin worked on improving their search engine in Wojcicki’s garage before transferring Google into a more official workplace and convincing their old landlord to join their business. In order to help with the leadership transition, she indicated she would continue with YouTube for a while. In the long run, she and CEO Sundar Pichai have decided that she will serve as an advisor to Google and Alphabet, providing advice and guidance.
Wojcicki is the most recent in a line of prominent digital CEOs to stand down from their positions, following the departures of Sheryl Sandberg from Facebook in 2022, Jeff Bezos from Amazon in 2021, and Ben Silbermann from Pinterest in 2022. Parag Agrawal, the CEO of Twitter, was likewise fired in 2022 as part of Elon Musk’s takeover of the business. The departure of Wojcicki comes at a time when YouTube is experiencing some of its most challenging periods since Google purchased it in 2006 for approximately $1.65 billion.
At the time, YouTube was a quirky video site that was frequently accused of copyright infringement. By the time the agreement was finalized, the all-stock deal had a value of $1.76 billion. Although it received criticism at first for spending so much money on a video service whose viability was in question, it ended up being a good deal for Google. YouTube has not only become a global phenomenon with billions of users but also a financial success, with $29 billion in ad income in the previous year.
In 2017, when Alphabet Inc, started disclosing YouTube’s financial earnings, the company’s yearly ad revenue was $8 billion. But during the final 6 months of 2017, YouTube’s ad revenue fell 5% from the prior year, marking the video service’s first significant decline since Alphabet unveiled its financial details.
Alphabet’s stock price has dropped 11% since its most recent quarterly report was released two weeks ago, in part due to analysts’ concerns that the downturn will persist this year. YouTube has seen a lot of issues with false information and hate speech on the platform during Wojcicki’s nearly ten years as CEO.
Donald Trump was banned by YouTube along with a number of other tech companies in January 2021 for inciting instability ahead of the US elections. It’s unclear if Wojcicki’s resignation will have an impact on the decision to keep the former president off the stage. In more recent times, YouTube has had to contend with the rapid ascent of the short-form video network TikTok, which in late 2022 surpassed the site owned by Google in terms of viewership.
