Wojcicki rented her garage to founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin for Youtube’s first office in 1998. Now one of the group’s first female managers is leaving the company.
There is a change of boss at YouTube. After nine years, Susan Wojcicki is stepping down from leadership of Google’s video platform. She wants to focus on her family, health and personal projects, the 54-year-old wrote in a blog post on Thursday. The new boss will be Neal Mohan, who was already one of the top managers of the video platform.
Under Wojcicki, YouTube had become an important source of advertising revenue for the internet giant. In the past quarter, for example, the service brought in almost eight billion dollars (around 7.48 billion euros) in advertising revenue. It was down around eight percent year-on-year as a result of a slowdown in the online advertising market.
Wojcicki has had to lead YouTube through various turbulences in recent years. Among other things, advertisers had temporarily stopped their advertising because they feared that their brands could appear alongside extremist content. While YouTube is by far the largest video platform, the popularity of the short video app Tiktok has recently brought new competitive pressure. The service counters with a similar format called shorts.
Wojcicki played an important role in the genesis of Google at the time: in 1998 she rented her garage to founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin for the Internet company’s first office. Shortly thereafter, she was among the first managers of the group.
Blog entry by Wojcicki
