The woman Behind YouTube is Susan Wojcicki. She suggested to Google to buy it and she made it what it is today. This is the story of a woman worth being known. Youtube has an impact on billions of lives on the planet in many ways. What a woman’s impact in technology?
Susan came from a strong two-decade background in tech. She was a founding member of Google and served as the company’s first marketing manager in 1999. She then became the head of Google’s online advertising division and was in charge of the company’s first video offering. Wojcicki recommended the acquisition of YouTube by Google in 2006 after seeing its growth and she was right, Youtube turned out to be huge! She has been the CEO of YouTube since 2014.
Early life and Education of Susan Wojcicki
Susan Diane Wojcicki was born in Stanford, California, on July 5, 1968. Her parents are Esther Wojcicki, a Jewish schoolteacher, and Stanley Wojcicki, a Polish-American physics professor.
She was a member of the school newspaper at Gunn High School in Palo Alto, California. When she was eleven years old, Wojcicki started selling “spice ropes” door-to-door. She was a humanities major in college, and as a senior, she took her first computer science class. Wojcicki got a bachelor’s in history and literature from Harvard University. She holds a master’s degree in economics from the University of California, Santa Cruz, and pursued a Ph.D. in economics. Her career started in academia and changed her path after discovering a passion for technology.
Susan Wojcicki and the Start of Google
Larry Page and Sergey Brin set the shop in Wojcicki’s garage in Menlo Park in September 1998. That same month, Google was incorporated. Wojcicki worked at Intel Corporation in Santa Clara, California, and as a management consultant at Bain & Company and R.B. Webber & Company before becoming Google’s first marketing manager in 1999. She worked on the first viral marketing campaigns and the first Google Doodles. With engineer Huican Zhu, she co-developed and launched Google Image Search.
Wojcicki was a key figure in the development of AdSense, one of Google’s most important advertising tools, in 2003. She was the first company’s product manager, and she received the Google Founders’ Award for her achievements. She moved through the ranks at Google to become the company’s senior vice president of advertising and commerce, overseeing AdWords, AdSense, DoubleClick, and Google Analytics, among other advertising and analytic products. At that time, a small start-up, called YouTube successfully competed with Wojcicki’s Google Video business. Her response was to suggest purchasing YouTube.
She oversaw two of Google’s most significant acquisitions: the $1.65 billion purchase of YouTube in 2006 and the $3.1 billion purchase of DoubleClick in 2007.
Susan Wojcicki as YouTube’s CEO
Wojcicki was CEO of YouTube in February 2014. The woman behind YouTube was “the most powerful woman on the Internet” and appeared on Time’s 100 most influential people list in 2015. She was also “the most important person in advertising” and “the most powerful woman in advertising” according to a subsequent issue of Time.
During Wojcicki’s tenure as CEO of YouTube, the firm claimed that it had hit 2 billion monthly logged-in users, with users watching one billion hours each day. She said in January 2021 that YouTube has paid out more than $30 billion to creators, artists, and media firms in the previous three years. YouTube has localized versions in over 80 languages in over 100 countries worldwide. Since becoming CEO, the percentage of female employees at YouTube has increased from 24% to roughly 30%.
Wojcicki was also in charge of creating and launching new YouTube applications and experiences aimed at consumers interested in family games and music. Under her leadership, YouTube producers earned money in various ways, including channel memberships, merchandising, BrandConnect, and paid digital items like Super Chat. She also oversaw the introduction of YouTube Premium (previously known as YouTube Red), YouTube’s ad-free subscription service, and YouTube TV, the company’s over-the-top (OTT) internet television service. The company’s short-form video experience, YouTube Shorts, was launched in 2020 and topped 15 billion daily views. YouTube announced in September 2021 that it had surpassed 50 million Music and Premium subscribers, including trailers. In addition, the corporation said that over 100 billion hours of worldwide gaming content were viewed in 2020.
YouTube’s Evolution
YouTube’s stance on videos it considers to be possibly breaking its hate speech and violent extremism policies throughout her tenure. The stricter measures were implemented after The Times reported that “ads funded by the British government and many private-sector corporations had displayed ahead of YouTube videos promoting terrorist organizations,” prompting several major advertisers to pull their advertising from YouTube. Some YouTubers say that the demonetization mechanism is far too stringent, resulting in the demonetization of any remotely “edgy” content and, in some cases, the removal of the creator’s channel. However, during the backlash over Logan Paul’s YouTube video about suicide, Wojcicki claimed that Paul had not broken YouTube’s three-strike policy and did not satisfy the threshold for being kicked off the platform.
Wojcicki has made educational material a priority for the firm, announcing the YouTube Learning initiative on July 20, 2018, which invests in grants and advertising to boost educational-focused creator content.
On October 22, 2018, Wojcicki stated that Article 13 of the European Union Copyright Directive would make YouTube directly accountable for copyrighted content, posing a danger to content creators’ freedom to disseminate their work.
The Freedom Forum Institute, a charity dedicated to furthering First Amendment freedoms, presented Wojcicki with the “Free Expression Award” on April 15, 2021. However, the users condemned her platform for sponsoring the award ceremony.
Susan Wojcicki ‘s Private Life
Wojcicki married Dennis Troper in Belmont, California, on August 23, 1998. They are the parents of five children who emphasized the need for paid maternity leave. She frequently emphasizes the significance of striking a balance between work and family life.
She is a dual citizen of the United States and Poland. Franciszek Wójcicki, her grandpa, was a Polish People’s Party politician. Janina Wójcicka Hoskins, her grandmother, was a Polish-American librarian at the Library of Congress who compiled the country’s greatest collection of Polish material.
Advocacy
The woman behind YouTube has advocated for many causes, including paid family leave expansion, the plight of Syrian refugees, gender discrimination in internet businesses, and encouraging girls to pursue computer science and promote coding in schools.
Awards
She was #1 on the Adweek Best 50 Execs list in 2013, which honors an organization’s top media executives. Susan Wojcicki also was #6 on Forbes’ list of the 100 Most Powerful Women in the World in 2017. She was #10 on Fortune’s list of the World’s Most Powerful Women in 2018. On Forbes’ list of America’s Self-Made Women, Wojcicki ranks #41.
Authored by Afifa Maryam Siddiqui
Edited by Yara Fakhoury
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