Content is queen: CEO Susan Wojcicki is calling time on her tenure at YouTube

2/19/23 7:00PM

Broadcast Yourself

‍CEO of YouTube, Susan Wojcicki, announced last Thursday that she would be stepping down after 25 years at Google, with 9 at the helm of the world’s largest video sharing platform.

Wojcicki is Google royalty. She was initially the search engine’s first landlord, when she rented her garage out to co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin in 1998. She went on to become the company’s first marketing manager and helped to drive the development of AdSense, which transformed the web by enabling websites to make money through displaying Google ads. Then, in 2006, she convinced the board to spend $1.65bn acquiring a startup called YouTube after noticing the company was outcompeting her unit — Google Video.

‍Content is queen‍

‍Wojcicki officially became CEO of YouTube in 2014. She maintained the early focus on creators, keeping YouTube’s near 50:50 split of advertising revenue, helping to ensure the platform always had the content that people wanted to watch, even if it sacrificed some earnings in the short term.

That focus brought the usual problems associated with user-generated content, such as moderation and how to handle bad actors, but it's ultimately propelled YouTube to second place on the list of most visited websites. Its popularity has seen YouTube become the birthplace of enormous media empires like that of Mr. Beast. One of the site’s most popular creators, he's racked up a total of 22.7 billion views on his main channel, earning some $50m+ last year, per Forbes.

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