Susan Wojcicki is no longer the CEO of YouTube

Susan Wojcicki is stepping down as CEO of YouTube effective immediately after nine years. She has appointed Neal Mohan, who has served as Chief Product Officer for the company for the past seven years, to succeed her.

“I have decided to step down from my role as the leader of YouTube and to start a new chapter focused on my family, health and personal projects that are close to my heart,” she wrote in a company blog post.(Opens in a new tab) Wojcicki will now take on an advisory role at Google and Alphabet.

In her post, Wojcicki praised Mohan’s work in launching the highly successful YouTube TV, as well as leading YouTube Music, Premium and Shorts. She also notes that Mohan has led the company’s trust and security team, which will become even more important as “the promises of AI,” as she puts it, become a potential area of ​​growth.

It’s the end of an era for YouTube, which withstood public scrutiny over how it dealt with hate speech, content moderation and misinformation during Wojcicki’s tenure. When she joined the platform in 2014, she had just hit one billion users and “YouTubers” were still considered oddities. Now YouTube is home to 2.5 billion users worldwide, and YouTube creators have made full-fledged careers out of their channels.

A friend of founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, Wojcicki was one of Google’s early employees and, in her own words, was “Marketing executive, co-founder of Google image search, ran Google’s first video and book search, and early parts of Google.” The creation of AdSense, which worked on the YouTube and DoubleClick acquisitions, served as “SVP of Ads” before heading up YouTube.