YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki steps down after nine years
The CEO of YouTube, Susan Wojcicki, will be stepping down after nine years at the helm of the world’s largest online video platform, she said in a blog post on Thursday.
YouTube’s chief product officer, Neal Mohan, will be the new head of YouTube, she said. Wojcicki, 54, was previously a senior vice-president for ad products at Google and became CEO of YouTube in 2014. Before Google, Wojcicki worked at Intel and Bain & Company.
“Today, after nearly 25 years here, I’ve decided to step back from my role as the head of YouTube and start a new chapter focused on my family, health and personal projects I’m passionate about,” said Wojcicki.
Although she became one of the most respected female executives in the male-dominated tech industry, Wojcicki will also be remembered as Google’s first landlord.
Shortly after Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin incorporated their search engine into a business in 1998, Wojcicki rented the garage of her Menlo Park, California, home to them for $1,700 a month.
Page and Brin – both 25 at the time – continued to refine their search engine in Wojcicki’s garage for five months before moving Google into a more formal office and later persuaded their former landlord to come work for their company.
“It would be one of the best decisions of my life,” Wojcicki wrote in the announcement of her departure.
She said she would stay with YouTube temporarily to aid in the transition of leadership, and in the longer term has agreed with CEO Sundar Pichai to take an advisory role across Google and Alphabet, offering “counsel and guidance”.
Wojcicki is the latest in a series of high-profile tech executives to bow out from their posts, with Jeff Bezos resigning as CEO of Amazon in 2021, Facebook’s Sheryl Sandberg stepping down in 2022 and Pinterest CEO Ben Silbermann leaving his position also in 2022. Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal was also ousted in 2022 as part of the company’s acquisition by billionaire Elon Musk.
Wojcicki’s departure comes at a time when YouTube is facing one of its most challenging periods since Google bought what was then a quirky video site facing widespread complaints about copyright infringement in 2006 for an announced price of $1.65bn. The all-stock deal was valued at $1.76bn by the time the transaction closed.
Although Google was initially derided for paying so much for a video service whose future appeared to be in doubt, it turned out to be a bargain. Besides becoming a cultural phenomenon that attracts billions of viewers, YouTube also has become a financial success with ad revenue totaling $29bn last year. That was up from annual ad revenue of $8bn in 2017, when Google’s corporate parent, Alphabet Inc, began to disclose YouTube’s financial revenue.
But YouTube’s ad revenue during the final six months of last year dropped 5% from the previous year – the first extended downturn that the video service has shown since Alphabet peeled back its financial curtain. Analysts are worried the slump will continue this year, one of the reasons Alphabet’s stock price has fallen 11% since it released its most recent quarterly report two weeks ago.
Under Wojcicki’s leadership for nearly a decade, YouTube has faced a number of concerns about misinformation and hate speech on the platform. In January 2021 YouTube joined a number of other tech platforms in banning Donald Trump for fomenting election unrest in the US. The former president remains suspended from the platform, and it is unclear if Wojcicki’s departure will affect the decision.
More recently, YouTube has grappled with the meteoric rise of the shortform video platform TikTok, which overtook the Google-owned platform in viewing time in late 2022.