India-American Neal Mohan To Take Over As YouTube CEO, Susan Wojcicki Departs

After 25 years of working at Google, curtains have finally come down on Susan Wojcicki’s stint as the Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of streaming major YouTube. With her departure, the platform’s chief product officer (CPO) Neal Mohan, an Indian-American, will be at the helm of affairs at the company. 

“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 in a blog post.

While the 54-year-old Wojcicki will help the new team transition, she will also likely serve in an advisory capacity to Google and Alphabet ‘in the longer term.’

One of the earliest employees at Google (now Alphabet), she worked on many of the key verticals at the tech major, including AdSense, Google Image Search, marketing, among others. She was also part of the team that executed the acquisition of YouTube, and, subsequently,  rose to the position of the CEO of YouTube in 2014.

Speaking about Mohan’s elevation as the senior vice president and head of YouTube, Wojcicki said he had a ‘wonderful sense’ for the platform’s product, business, creators and user communities.

Neal Mohan joined Google after the tech giant acquired DoubleClick in 2007 and subsequently rose through the ranks to become the SVP of Display and Video Ads, and finally the YouTube’s CPO in 2015. Mohan also played a key role in the launch of some of the biggest products at YouTube, including YouTube Music, YouTube Premium and Shorts.

A Stanford graduate, Mohan has also previously also worked with Microsoft and sits on the board of genomics startup 23andMe and fashion brand Stitch Fix.

With this, Neal Mohan joins a growing list of Indian-Americans who are leading US-based tech giants including Alphabet’s Sundar Pichai, Microsoft’s Satya Nadella and Shantanu Narayen of Adobe.

The India Experiment

Mohan’s elevation to the top comes at a time when India continues to be a dominant force in the streaming market. As per a report, India was the biggest market, in terms of users, for YouTube across the globe, with 46.7 Cr users, followed by the US with 24.6 Cr users. 

Google claims that YouTube helped contribute more than INR 10,000 Cr to the Indian economy and directly supported 7.5 Lakh jobs in 2021. While the numbers have been staggering, the streaming platform has been marred by regulatory upheavals ranging from takedown orders to crackdown on illicit content. 

Despite the hiccups, YouTube has continued to scale heavily in the country owing to easier adoption and easy access to vernacular video content across multiple Indian languages. The platform also rakes up billions of views and dollars in a single year from content and ad revenues.

Last year saw Google pilot shoppable content for viewers in the country while the tech major also announced that videos, primarily on healthcare, will now be available in multiple languages on the streaming site. A few months back, the company also launched a learning management system (LMS) embedded into the YouTube app called ‘Courses’ for content creators.

Its newer offerings such as Shorts, launched in 2020, has also been getting good response and was generating 30 Bn views per day with 1.5 Bn logged-in users every month globally at the end of November 2022. 

While it has been facing stiff competition from players such as Meta-owned Instagram and other local players such as Chingari and Josh, the tenure of Neal Mohan will be the first change of guard at the streaming platform in close to a decade.