Susan Wojcicki Resigns As Youtube CEO

Susan Wojcicki, YouTube's CEO, announced her resignation on Thursday. As the new head of YouTube, Neal Mohan will become senior vice president and chief product officer.

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“After nearly 25 years here, I have decided to step down from my role as YouTube's head and focus on my family, health, and projects I'm passionate about,” she wrote.

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YouTube CEO Wojcicki, 54, joined the company in 2014.

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Aside from coaching members and meeting with creators, she will continue to work with YouTube teams.

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The Google and Alphabet CEOs agreed that Wojcicki would take on an advisory role in the longer term. "This will allow me to offer guidance and counsel across Google and Alphabet's portfolio of companies based on my diverse experience."

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“Because of YouTube's incredible leadership team, the time is right for me to make this move," she said. “Bringing an incredible leadership team to YouTube was one of my first priorities when I joined nine years ago.”

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As a founding member of Google, Wojcicki has maintained close connections with the company's co-founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, whom she let work out of her Menlo Park, California, home when they founded Google in 1998. In exchange for the garage space, Page and Brin rented it from her for $1,700 a month. At the time, Wojcicki was employed by Intel in the marketing department as part of the company's marketing department.

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She was heavily involved in advocating for YouTube's acquisition of $1.65 billion in 2006.

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Over the course of 14 years, Wojcicki oversaw the design and development of Google's advertising and analytics products. YouTube has expanded its physical footprint in locations like New York and near its headquarters in San Bruno, California, in recent years.

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She oversaw the rapid growth of the company during her tenure, which led to the company becoming the largest video platform in the world by the end of her tenure. According to YouTube, now has over 2.5 billion monthly active users and more than 500 hours of content are being uploaded to the platform every minute, according to the company.

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As the company grew rapidly, it became difficult to contain it. YouTube and Google paid $170 million in 2019 to settle a case alleging violations of children's privacy laws. As the platform struggled to contain misinformation and disinformation campaigns during the 2020 elections and the Covid-19 pandemic, Wojcicki also faced criticism.

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As Wojcicki describes in her blog post, she has spent nearly 15 years of her career working with Mohan, the new head of YouTube, “first when he came over to Google with the DoubleClick acquisition in 2007 and as his role grew to become SVP of Display and Video Ads.”

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With the rise of social media, particularly TikTok, YouTube has been fighting to compete with it through its short-form video platform Shorts in recent years. YouTube's fourth-quarter advertising revenue was $7.96 billion, down 8% from last year and short of analyst expectations.

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