YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki is stepping down

After nine years of being the head of YouTube, Susan Wojcicki is stepping down from her role as CEO of the company. Her second-in-command, Neal Mohan, will be replacing her. According to an internal letter, she decided to leave to focus on her family, health, and other personal projects.

She was one of the few women in IT that held such a position in a major company, and her departure marks the end of an era.

Even though she’s been the YouTube CEO for almost a decade, her story with YouTube’s parent company, Google, goes much further. She joined Larry Page and Sergej Brin in 1998 and was the first to direct Google’s marketing sector. A fun fact not many know is that she was the owner of the garage that Page and Brin originally rented, joining the company later on as its sixteenth employee.

YouTube arguably owes its success to Wojcicki. This is because she convinced the board in 2006 to buy the online video platform for a whopping 1.650 billion dollars. During her tenure, YouTube grew exponentially, generating 29.2 billion dollars in ad sales in 2022 only. This is more than 10 percent of all of Alphabet's revenue.

Wojcicki had to deal with a difficult balance during YouTube’s early years. She was an open advocate of making YouTube more enticing to advertisers, but that meant developing many policies that were met with criticism from the video creators' side, and even users. For instance, the way comments were moderated, and less tolerance for certain contents. The YouTube partner program also got more restricted.

One wonders what a difficult role she had, trying to increase YouTube’s income while not destroying its life force at the same time, that is, content creators. However, according to the impressive revenue numbers, she succeeded in making the platform grow to new heights.

The company also had to deal with changes in trends and was at the forefront when it came to potential competitors. It sometimes integrated with them to gain some foothold. This approach allowed Wojcicki and her team to develop new ideas and products, such as YouTube TV and YouTube Music. The platform also introduced paid memberships.

In her letter, she stressed the importance of the current times for the Alphabet companies, of which YouTube is part. She claimed that we’re in a very innovative era, much like the early days of Google, with massive opportunities for new products and services.

Her successor Neal Mohan was at her side during her time as YouTube’s CEO, and even further back. He started at Google after the company acquired DoubleClick in 2007, becoming YouTube’s Chief Product Officer in 2015.

Intriguingly, she hinted that the next decade for YouTube will involve AI somehow and that because of that Mohan was the perfect person to lead the company in this new, innovative era. The future is yet to be told, but for YouTube, Wojcicki ensured she left the position in good hands.

The End of an Era: Susan Wojcicki Steps Down from YouTube