YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki announces she is stepping down

• YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki said Thursday she is stepping down.
• Neil Mohan, chief product officer, will become senior vice president and new head of YouTube.
• Wojcicki said she has reached an agreement with Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai to take on an advisory role at Google and Alphabet.

YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki said Thursday she is stepping down. Neil Mohan, chief product officer, will become senior vice president and new head of YouTube.

“Today, after nearly 25 years here, I’ve decided to step away from my role as head of YouTube and start a new chapter dedicated to my family, health, and the personal projects I’m passionate about,” she said in an interview. Blog post.

Wojcicki, 54, joined YouTube as CEO in 2014.

She will continue to work with YouTube teams, train members and meet creators, she added.

Wojcicki said she agreed with Alphabet’s CEO. Sundar Pichai to take on an advisory role at Google and Alphabet in the long term. “This will allow me to use my years of experience to provide advice and guidance on Google and the Alphabet portfolio of companies,” she wrote.

“The time has come for me and I feel like I can do it because we have an incredible leadership team on YouTube,” she said. “When I joined YouTube nine years ago, one of my top priorities was building an incredible leadership team.”

Wojcicki has long-standing ties to Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, whom she allowed to work from her home in Menlo Park, California, after founding Google. Page and Brin rented a garage from her for $1,700 a month. Wojcicki was working in Intel’s marketing department at the time.

In 2006, she advocated for the $1.65 billion acquisition of YouTube.

Wojcicki joined Google in 1999 and spent 14 years leading the design and development of Google’s advertising and analytics products. In recent years, YouTube has expanded its physical footprint to areas like New York and close to its headquarters in San Bruno, California.

During her tenure, she led the company’s rapid expansion to become the largest video platform in the world. According to the company, YouTube now has over 2.5 billion monthly active users, with more than 500 hours of content uploaded to the platform every minute.

Rapid growth has become a problem for the company. In 2019, Google and YouTube had to pay $170 million to settle a case in which the video platform allegedly violated children’s privacy laws. Wojcicki also came under fire during the 2020 elections and the Covid-19 pandemic as the platform struggled to contain misinformation and disinformation campaigns.

Wojcicki’s blog post says she spent almost 15 years of her career working with Mohan, the new head of YouTube, “first when he joined Google after the acquisition of DoubleClick in 2007, and then he became senior vice president of media and video advertising. “

In recent years, YouTube has faced pressure from the rise in popularity of social media platforms, namely TikTok, which it has tried to compete with through its Shorts video platform. YouTube recorded ad revenue of $7.96 billion in the fourth quarter, which fell short of analysts’ expectations and was down 8% year-over-year.