Susan Wojcicki, a longtime Google executive who played a key role in the company\u2019s creation, is stepping down as YouTube\u2019s CEO after spending the past nine years running the video site that has reshaped entertainment, culture and politics.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In an email to YouTube employees that was shared publicly<\/strong> Thursday, the 54-year-old Wojcicki said she is leaving to \u201cstart a new chapter focused on my family, health, and personal projects I\u2019m passionate about.\u201d She didn\u2019t elaborate on her plans.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Neil Mohan, who has worked closely with Wojcicki for years, will replace her as YouTube\u2019s CEO.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Although she became one of the most respected female executives in the male-dominated tech industry, Wojcicki will also be remembered as Google\u2019s first landlord.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Shortly after Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin incorporated their search engine into a business in 1998, Wojcicki rented the garage of her Menlo Park, California, home to them for $1,700 a month.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Page and Brin \u2014 both 25 at the time \u2014 continued to refine their search engine in Wojcicki\u2019s garage for five months before moving Google into a more formal office and later persuaded their former landlord to come work for their company.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cIt would be one of the best decisions of my life,\u201dWojcicki wrote in the announcement of her departure.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In 2006, Google bought Wojcicki\u2019s home to serve as a monument to the roots of a company now valued at $1.2 trillion. During Wojcicki\u2019s career at Google, Brin became her brother-in-law when he married her sister, Anne, in 2007. Brin and Anne Wojcicki divorced in 2015.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Wojcicki\u2019s departure comes at a time when YouTube is facing one of its most challenging periods since Google bought what was then a quirky video site facing widespread complaints about copyright infringement in 2006 for an announced price of $1.65 billion. The all-stock deal was valued at $1.76 billion by the time the transaction closed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Although Google was initially derided for paying so much for a video service whose future appeared to be in doubt, it turned out to be a bargain. Besides becoming a cultural phenomenon that attracts billions of viewers, YouTube also has become a financial success with ad revenue totaling $29 billion last year. That was up from annual ad revenue of $8 billion in 2017 when Google\u2019s corporate parent, Alphabet Inc., began to disclose YouTube\u2019s financial revenue.<\/p>\n\n\n\n But YouTube\u2019s ad revenue during the final six months of last year dropped 5% from the previous year \u2014 the first extended downturn that the video service has shown since Alphabet peeled back its financial curtain. Analysts are worried the slump will continue this year, one of the reasons Alphabet\u2019s stock price has fallen by about 10% since it released its most recent quarterly report<\/strong> two weeks ago.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Wojcicki is also leaving just days before the U.S. Supreme Court is scheduled to hear oral arguments in a case threatening the freewheeling style that has long been one of YouTube\u2019s biggest advantages.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The case stems from the 2015 death of an American woman killed in Paris during an attack by Islamic State in an incident that spurred the victim\u2019s family to file a lawsuit alleging YouTube\u2019s algorithms aided the terror group\u2019s recruitment. If the court decides that tech companies can be held liable for material posted on their sites, experts say the effects could not only destroy YouTube but shake up the entire internet.<\/p>\n\n\n\n That\u2019s because under the U.S. law, internet companies are generally exempt from liability for the material users post on their networks. Section 230 of the 1996 Communications Decency Act \u2014 itself part of a broader telecom law \u2014 provides a legal \u201csafe harbor\u201d for internet companies \u2014 a protection that YouTube co-founders Chad Hurley and Steve Chen seized upon as an opportunity to launch as video site to \u201cbroadcast yourself.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Susan Wojcicki, a longtime Google executive who played a key role in the company\u2019s creation, is stepping down as YouTube\u2019s CEO after spending the past nine years running the video site that has reshaped entertainment, culture and politics. In an email to YouTube employees that was shared publicly Thursday, the 54-year-old Wojcicki said she is leaving to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8,"featured_media":29667,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_post_source_name":"","_post_source_url":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[50],"tags":[12535,5304,2848,7960,8289,1350,10507,3513,7234,13055,9478,5455,12210,3577,6070,12634,11062,13157,9515,8475,10342,9349,1993,7968,11973,12238,1253,5424,12103,7650,8383,12778,759,6327,9030,1825,9549,10236,11089,8033,3954,5273,10415,594,9550],"class_list":["post-29666","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-technology","tag-alphabet","tag-attack","tag-california","tag-case","tag-chad","tag-ceo","tag-court","tag-culture","tag-death","tag-divorced","tag-dropped","tag-family","tag-female","tag-future","tag-google","tag-health","tag-internet","tag-islamic","tag-killed","tag-landlord","tag-law","tag-married","tag-my-life","tag-nine","tag-one","tag-oral","tag-paris","tag-politics","tag-price","tag-recruitment","tag-revenue","tag-seized","tag-sergey-brin","tag-stock","tag-success","tag-supreme-court","tag-susan-wojcicki","tag-tech","tag-terror","tag-video","tag-will","tag-woman","tag-work","tag-who","tag-youtube"],"blocksy_meta":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nsemgh.com\/api-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29666","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nsemgh.com\/api-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nsemgh.com\/api-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nsemgh.com\/api-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/8"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nsemgh.com\/api-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=29666"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.nsemgh.com\/api-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29666\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":50487,"href":"https:\/\/www.nsemgh.com\/api-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29666\/revisions\/50487"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nsemgh.com\/api-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/29667"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nsemgh.com\/api-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=29666"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nsemgh.com\/api-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=29666"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nsemgh.com\/api-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=29666"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}