YouTube CEO Steps Down in 2023, Severing Longtime Ties To Google

Susan Wojcicki is stepping down as CEO of YouTube after nine years in charge of the video site that has changed entertainment, culture, and politics. Wojcicki has worked for Google for a long time and was a big part of how the company started.

Wojcicki, 54, stated in an email to YouTube employees that were made public on Thursday that she is leaving to “start a new chapter focused on my family, health, and personal projects I’m passionate about.” She didn’t go into detail about her plans.

Neal Mohan, who has worked closely with Wojcicki for years, will take over as CEO of YouTube.

Wojcicki will be remembered as Google’s first landlord, despite becoming one of the most respected female executives in the male-dominated tech industry.

Youtube And Google Have Had A close Partnership For Years.

Soon after Larry Page and Sergey Brin turned their search engine into a business in 1998, Wojcicki rented the garage of her Menlo Park, California, home to them for $1,700 per month.

Page and Brin, 25 at the time, spent five months refining their search engine in Wojcicki’s garage before moving Google into a more formal office and later convincing their former landlord to work for them.

“It would be one of the best decisions of my life,” Wojcicki wrote in her departure announcement.

Google purchased Wojcicki’s house in 2006 to memorialize the origins of a company now valued at $1.2 trillion. Brin married Wojcicki’s sister, Anne, in 2007 and became her brother-in-law at Google. Brin and his wife, Anne Wojcicki, divorced in 2015.

Wojcicki’s departure comes at a hard time for YouTube, which Google bought for $1.65 billion in 2006 from a strange video site that was getting a lot of complaints about copyright violations. The all-stock transaction was valued at $1.76 billion when it closed.

Although Google was chastised initially for paying so much for a video service with an uncertain future, it was a steal. In addition to becoming a cultural phenomenon with billions of viewers, YouTube has become a financial success, with ad revenue totaling $29 billion last year. That was up from $8 billion in annual ad revenue in 2017, when Google’s corporate parent, Alphabet Inc., began disclosing YouTube’s financial revenue.

Youtube Ad Revenue Has Been Falling For Months

However, YouTube’s ad revenue fell 5% year on year in the final six months of last year, marking the video service’s first sustained decline since Alphabet revealed its financial details. Analysts are concerned that the slump will continue this year, which is one of the reasons Alphabet’s stock price has dropped 11% since its most recent quarterly report two weeks ago.

Wojcicki is leaving just days before the United States Supreme Court hears oral arguments in a case that threatens YouTube’s freewheeling style, which has long been one of its biggest advantages.

The lawsuit stems from the 2015 death of an American woman in Paris during an Islamic State attack, which prompted the victim’s family to file a lawsuit alleging that YouTube’s algorithms aided the terror group’s recruitment. Experts say that if the court rules that tech companies can be held liable for content posted on their websites, the consequences could destroy YouTube and shake up the entire internet.

This is because, under US law, internet service providers are generally immune from liability for the content that users post on their networks. Section 230 of the 1996 Communications Decency Act, part of a larger telecom law, provides a legal “safe harbor” for internet companies, which YouTube co-founders Chad Hurley and Steve Chen saw as an opportunity to launch a video site to “broadcast yourself.”

SOURCE – (AP)