Former YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki announced on February 16 that she would be stepping down from the role of CEO saying that she wanted to focus on “family health, and personal projects”. This comes after her serving as CEO for nearly a decade.

She will be replaced by Neal Mohan, who has worked at YouTube since 2008. This change in management is important because of how long Wojcicki has acted as CEO and the number of changes YouTube has implemented under her management.

Wojcicki became CEO of YouTube in 2014. Throughout her time as CEO, she has implemented a lot of changes. The changes she implemented were sometimes received well and at other times were greatly disliked. Some of the bigger changes that saw both positive and negative reception were related to monetization. Monetization is how YouTube and content creators can make money off of the videos and content they make. This is usually done with advertisements.

YouTube also does monetization through ads, but YouTube upped the number of ads it showed. Before a video, two ads would play instead of one. They also implemented stricter guidelines for creators if they wanted to monetize their videos. These changes were received poorly and were criticized when they were announced. Some of their positive changes were the creation of a membership that got rid of ads named YouTube Premium. They also added a way to tip content creators that you wanted to show support. 

The changes to YouTube under Wojcicki’s management were very hit-or-miss for the YouTube community, but she did a good job at communication. She frequently had meetings with large content creators where she listened to their issues with YouTube and the changes that were made.

While she made many statements that felt empty due to the slow time it took to actually address the issues, the communication helped the community feel as if their issues were known and that they will eventually be addressed. However, with Mohan taking her place, many are worried that this little bit of communication could be lessened even more. Many people hadn’t even heard of him until this past week. We don’t know if he will also be dedicated to communicating with the community and addressing the issues they have.

Another issue some have is that Mohan was someone who advocated for the implementation of NFTs and their technology into YouTube. NFTs have been very controversial due to the energy cost needed to create them and the fact that they have been frequently used to scam people out of their money.

Not much is known about Mohan or what he has planned for the future of YouTube. Content creators hope that he keeps up the communication of his predecessor with maybe more transparency on where he wants to take the company.