YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki said Thursday that she’s stepping down. Neal Mohan, chief product officer, will take the lead because the senior vp and recent head of YouTube.
“Today, after nearly 25 years here, I’ve decided to step back from my role as the pinnacle of YouTube and begin a recent chapter focused on my family, health, and private projects I’m enthusiastic about,” she said in a blog post.
Wojcicki, 54, joined YouTube as CEO in 2014.
She is going to proceed working with YouTube teams, coaching members and meeting with creators, she added.
Wojcicki said she agreed with Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai to, in the long run, tackle an advisory role across Google and Alphabet. “This may allow me to call on my different experiences over time to supply counsel and guidance across Google and the portfolio of Alphabet firms,” she wrote.
YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki speaks through the opening keynote address on the Google I/O 2017 Conference at Shoreline Amphitheater on May 17, 2017 in Mountain View, California.
Justin Sullivan | Getty Images
“The time is true for me, and I feel capable of do that because we’ve an incredible leadership team in place at YouTube,” she noted. “After I joined YouTube nine years ago, certainly one of my first priorities was bringing in an incredible leadership team.”
Wojcicki has long-held ties to Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, who she let work out of her Menlo Park, California, home upon founding Google. Page and Brin rented the garage space for $1,700 a month from her. Wojcicki was working within the marketing department at Intel on the time.
In 2006, she advocated for the $1.65 billion acquisition of YouTube.
Wojcicki joined Google in 1999 and oversaw the design and construct of Google’s promoting and analytics products for 14 years. Lately, YouTube has expanded its physical footprint in areas like Recent York and near its headquarters in San Bruno, California.
During her tenure, she oversaw the corporate’s rapid expansion to grow to be the biggest video platform on the earth. YouTube now has greater than 2.5 billion monthly energetic users and greater than 500 hours of content are uploaded to the platform every minute, the corporate has said.
The rapid growth became a challenge for the corporate to contain. Google and YouTube needed to pay $170 million in 2019 to settle a case where the video platform allegedly violated kid’s privacy laws. Wojcicki also got here under fire through the 2020 elections and the Covid-19 pandemic because the platform struggled to contain misinformation and disinformation campaigns.
Wojcicki’s blog post said she spent nearly 15 years of her profession working with Mohan, the brand new head of YouTube, “first when he got here over to Google with the DoubleClick acquisition in 2007 and as his role grew to grow to be SVP of Display and Video Ads.”
YouTube has faced pressure in recent times amid an increase in popularity of social media, namely TikTok, which it has been attempting to compete with through its short-form video platform Shorts. YouTube booked $7.96 billion in promoting revenue through the fourth quarter, which fell in need of analyst expectations and was down 8% from the yr prior.
