YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki has announced her resignation

Thursday, YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki announced her resignation. As YouTube’s new senior vice president, Neal Mohan, the chief product officer, will lead.

In a blog post, she stated, “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.”

In 2014, Wojcicki, 54, became CEO of YouTube.

She added that she would continue to meet with creators, coach team members, and work with YouTube teams.

Wojcicki stated that she and Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai agreed to take on a longer-term advisory role for both Google and Alphabet. She wrote, “This will allow me to call on my different experiences over the years to offer counsel and guidance across Google and the portfolio of Alphabet companies.”

She made the observation, “The time is right for me, and I feel able to do this because we have an incredible leadership team in place at YouTube.” “When I joined YouTube nine years ago, one of my first priorities was bringing in an incredible leadership team.”

Wojcicki has been connected to Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin for a long time. When Wojcicki founded Google, she allowed them to work from her home in Menlo Park, California. Page and Brin paid her $1,700 per month to rent the garage space. At the time, Wojcicki was employed by Intel in the marketing department.

She advocated for YouTube’s acquisition for $1.65 billion in 2006.

Wojcicki joined Google in 1999 and was in charge of advertising and analytics product design and development for 14 years. YouTube has increased its physical presence over the past few years in places like New York and close to its headquarters in San Bruno, California.

She was in charge of the company’s rapid growth to become the world’s largest video platform during her tenure. According to the company, YouTube now has more than 2.5 billion monthly active users and uploads more than 500 hours of content every minute.

The company had a hard time controlling the rapid expansion. In 2019, a case alleging that the video platform had violated children’s privacy laws necessitated a settlement of $170 million between Google and YouTube. During the Covid-19 pandemic and the 2020 elections, Wojcicki was also criticized for the platform’s inability to control misinformation and disinformation campaigns.

According to Wojcicki’s blog post, she spent “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” during the nearly 15 years of her career working with Mohan, the new head of YouTube.

In recent years, YouTube has been under pressure due to the rise in popularity of social media, particularly TikTok, which it has been attempting to compete with through its Shorts platform for short-form videos. In the fourth quarter, YouTube generated $7.96 billion in advertising revenue, which was lower than analyst expectations and was down 8% from the previous year.