The CEO of YouTube, Susan Wojcicki, will be stepping down after nine years at the helm of the world’s largest online video platform, she said in a blog post on Thursday.
YouTube’s chief product officer, Neal Mohan, will be the new head of YouTube, she said. Wojcicki, 54, was previously a senior vice president for ad products at Google and became CEO of YouTube in 2014. Before Google, Wojcicki worked at Intel and Bain & Company.
She counted herself as one of Google’s earliest employees, famously letting founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin rent out the garage in her Menlo Park, California, home when they founded Google.
“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,” said Wojcicki.
She said she would stay with YouTube temporarily to aid in the transition of leadership, and in the longer term has agreed with CEO Sundar Pichai to take an advisory role across Google and Alphabet, offering “counsel and guidance”.
Wojcicki is the latest in a series of high-profile tech executives to bow out from their posts, with Jeff Bezos resigning as CEO of Amazon in 2021, Facebook’s Sheryl Sandberg stepping down in 2022 and Pinterest CEO Ben Silbermann leaving his position also in 2022. Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal was also ousted in 2022 as part of the company’s acquisition by billionaire Elon Musk.
Under Wojcicki’s leadership for nearly a decade, YouTube has faced a number of challenges, including concerns about misinformation and hate speech on the platform. In January 2021 YouTube joined a number of other tech platforms in banning Donald Trump for fomenting election unrest in the US. The former president remains suspended from the platform, and it is unclear if Wojcicki’s departure will affect the decision.
More recently, YouTube has grappled with the meteoric rise of the short-form video platform TikTok, which overtook the Google-owned platform in viewing time in late 2022.
