There are countless data that leave your mouth open when talking about YouTube. Every minute 500 hours of video are uploaded to the platform. Its monthly active users are 2,000 million people; that is, one in four people on the planet visits it once a month. That without discounting the 40% of the world that continues without daily access to the Internet. YouTube is, for better or worse, synonymous with our time, and that hegemony has been led by Susan Wojcicki, until this week CEO of the platform and who has announced his withdrawal.
Wojcicki, CEO since 2014 of YouTube, has communicated in an open letter that he is leaving his position to focus on his personal life and new projects. The stories of Silicon Valley tells that it was she who lent her garage to Larry Page and Sergey Brin and that it was there that they generated the germ of what would be Google. Later, she had a very important weight after becoming the 16th employee of today’s Alphabet and persuade their superiors to buy DoubleClick and YouTube itself.
It was the year 2006, YouTube barely had a year of life and Google invested 1,650 million in its purchase. It was not an easy move, especially if we take into account that in 2005 Google had launched its own competitor: Google Video. Wojcicki, from her position as Alphabet’s directoralso caused the focus to focus on YouTube and Google Videos ended up closing.
Her withdrawal means the departure, as we saw with Sheryl Sandberg recently in Meta, the departure of another decisive woman in the technology sector but who is not usually in the spotlight.
Wojcicki, when he was in the news, was often because of the recurring controversies of the YouTube algorithm, and not so much because of his success as a business and cultural change.
Success as a business is clear. In 2020 Alphabet first shared YouTube billing data independently. It was 15,000 million dollars a quarter. That is, one of every 10 euros that generates All the company. In addition, YouTube is the second most used search engine in the world after (precisely) Google. But Wojcicki’s legacy goes much further, because he has actually changed the way in which the creation of content and information circulates.
This is his story.
Susan Wojcicki, the one in charge of changing the norms of content creation on the internet
As we mentioned, Wojcicki is officially the 16th employee of Google and, a year before being hired, she rented her parents’ famous garage to Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, where they set up their first office. Wojcicki joined Google when he had no income and has been with the company for 25 years, that is, his entire history.
Her first role was Google’s Marketing Director in 1999, and in 2003 she became the first Google AdSense Product Manager before coming to YouTube.
However, in 2007, he made one of the biggest changes that have marked the success of YouTube and the internet. YouTube was until then a site where funny videos were uploaded and Wojcicki decided to start, after joining Google’s ad technology with YouTube, to distribute the profits of the ads with the people who upload videos.
That over the years was a standard on other platforms where the user wanted to be the one who uploaded the content, breaking the unidirectionality that had existed until then from traditional media, and creating the phenomenon of youtubers and the many times named creator economy.
Wojcicki took control of YouTube when it was already a household name, the third largest site in the world after Google and Facebook, and the web’s de facto video site. He oversaw a spectacular expansion of service through the turn of YouTube towards multiple vertical content applications as of 2015with the launch of ad-free YouTube Premium, internal content “YouTube Originals”, YouTube Music, YouTube Gaming and YouTube Kids.
YouTube TV cable television service launched in 2017, the clone of Snapchat YouTube Stories launched in 2018 and the TikTok clone YouTube Shorts launched in 2021. Today the brand is basically the content wing of Google, and we all expect the next YouTube app to be YouTube Podcasts, given its latest moves.
In the huge flurry of product launches from Wojcicki have not all come out winners: YouTube Originals, YouTube Gaming and YouTube Stores have died.
It has also been controversial. The site’s content moderation policies are also frequently misapplied and confusing, and creators have often spoken out about having few resources to deal with the issues.
The arrival of Twitch also produced a migration of some of the platform’s star YouTubers, something that seems to be reversing in recent years. Yes indeed, Wojcicki leaves YouTube as he prepares for one of his biggest battles. For the first time in a long time, YouTube’s dominance over video is threatened by someone: the Chinese app TikTok.
Wojcicki will stay “short term” to help with the transition, and while he won’t ultimately have a day-to-day role at Google, Wojcicki says he “has agreed with Sundar to take on an advisory role at Google and Alphabet.” His departure marks the farewell to one of the most important intermediate directives and one that has shaped the world in which we live.