as YouTube CEO

Catherine Stone, Online Features Editor, looks at Wojcicki’s legacy

SUSAN Wojcicki is not an immediately recognisable name to many — she is one of the more understated tech giants, who has nevertheless been a huge influence in shaping YouTube as its CEO. Wojcicki is stepping down after nine years in the role, to be succeeded by Chief Product Officer Neal Mohan. The user base of the platform has skyrocketed from 1 billion in 2014 to 2.5 billion today and her tenure has seen the increasing professionalisation of video content creation as a career and expanding diversity of content available.

THE USER BASE OF THE PLATFORM HAS SKYROCKETED TO 2.5 BILLION TODAY

She will go on to take on an advisory role across Google and Alphabet to impart diverse experience from her time as head of YouTube and involvement with Google from the very beginning. Wojcicki was the 16th ever Google employee, and founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page operated out of her garage in Silicon Valley in 1998, making her a tech veteran, one of the cadre that captured the ‘moment’ of the technology boom in the late 1990s.

YouTube made a profit of $29 billion from ad revenue last year, but it has recently slumped, and the stock value of Alphabet, the corporate parent company of Google, has fallen by 11 per cent. YouTube dominated the video market for a decade but recently has been challenged by the short form video site TikTok, which overtook YouTube in viewing time in late 2022. In response, initiatives such as YouTube Shorts have gained trac- tion to widen the platform’s appeal, with the feature now averaging 50 billion daily views.

Shorts, as well as YouTube TV, Premium and Music were largely developed by Chief Product Officer Neal Mohan, with Wojcicki crediting his influence in her blog after it was announced he would be succeeding her as CEO.

Controversies

YouTube has faced over the years include the spread of misinformation, with the company’s policies of fact-checking and content moderation considered inadequate by many. Fears of hate speech, incitement of violence, and radicalisation have led leadership to ban some users, including former US President Donald Trump. She is one of the many long-standing tech bosses to step down from leadership roles in recent years, alongside Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, Facebook’s Sheryl Sandberg and Twitter’s Parag Agrawal. It has raised concerns about the decreasing number of women in tech’s top jobs, with the pioneering businesswomen Sheryl Sandberg, Meg Whitman, Ginni Rometty, Marissa Mayer all departing high-ranking and prominent roles at tech juggernauts in the last few years.

There has also been a minority of women in seedling business, with a Silicon Valley Bank report finding that more than half of American start-ups in 2020 contained no women in leadership.

Wojcicki’s legacy will resonate in her ability to move through different spaces of engineering, data science and business in order to smoothly operate a multifaceted company like YouTube, overseeing the biggest period of the platform’s growth and success.