Susan Wojcicki, the pioneering Chief Executive of YouTube, the video-sharing subsidiary of internet giant Google’s Alphabet division, passed away on August 9th, 2024 after a battle with lung cancer at the age of 56. Born on July 5, 1968, Wojcicki was instrumental in transforming YouTube into a primary mode of entertainment and politic discourse during her tenure from 2015-2023. She managed to amplify the revenue to over $30 billion and swell the user base to almost three billion.
Back in 1998, Google’s genesis linked Wojcicki to it, where she lent some rooms to Larry Page and Sergey Brin, the soon-to-be founders of Google, whom she acquainted through a mutual friend. Years later, she became the first-ever marketing manager and the 16th employee of this nascent tech company.
YouTube’s journey under Wojcicki’s leadership was tumultuous and plagued by several controversies as the platform transformed into a vortex that sucked in an array of extreme and illicit content. Despite the obstacles, she worked tirelessly to enhance content moderation and retain advertisers. To this end, Wojcicki revised YouTube’s algorithm recommendations and appointed numerous human moderators to prevent toxic content ingestion. She also ushered in technologies to automate the removal of inappropriate comments or disturbing videos.
Even though she made strides in improving YouTube’s content system, her efforts were criticised by many who accused the company of prioritising profit above public welfare. Wojcicki’s decision to remove select content led to a traumatic 2018 event, where she found herself hiding from an armed YouTube user infuriated at the new advertising guidelines. This user, who later shot three individuals and herself, had stormed into YouTube’s headquarters in San Bruno, California.
Despite her passing, Wojcicki continues to draw both praise for her philanthropic endeavours and kindness, as well as criticism for imposing ‘censorship’.
Susan Wojcicki, known as an internet pioneer at Google and YouTube, was born in Santa Clara, California and held the position of the eldest among Esther and Stanley’s three daughters. Her parents were a teacher-journalist and a particle physics professor at Stanford University, who was originally a Polish refugee. Growing up on the Stanford campus, she appreciated the seriousness with which people pursued their interests.
After completing her high school education at Henry M Gunn high school in Palo Alto, she pursued higher education at Harvard University. Though her primary focus was on literature and history, she stumbled upon an unanticipated fascination with technology during a temporary job at a start-up over vacation. This piqued her interest in technology’s transformative power and led her to take a computer science course before graduating with honours in 1990.
After Harvard, she earned an MS in Economics from the University of California, Santa Cruz in 1993, followed by an MBA from the UCLA Anderson School of Management in 1998. That same year, she wed Dennis Troper, a financial consultant at Deloitte in San Francisco.
Despite being tight on money and expecting her first child, Wojcicki left a stable position at Intel to join Brin’s budding company, Google. She has said that her dependency on Google, realised during a temporary malfunction, confirmed this path despite friends’ warning against joining just another search engine. Initially without a specified role, she consequently explored options within Google. Her contributions in the formative years included the development of the Doodles logo and image search, and she also played a significant role in managing Google’s first advertising product, AdSense, and others such as AdWords.
During the Covid-19 pandemic, she faced backlash for her decision to eliminate medical misinformation, following guidelines from the Centers for Disease Control, the US government’s health agency. She later expressed regret to the New York Times in 2019 for not implementing these changes earlier, highlighting her commitment to upholding standards of responsibility as crucial to her career.
Wojcicki spearheaded Google’s rapidly expanding advertising division, which included the procurement of web ad pioneer DoubleClick in 2007. She also advocated for the implementation of statutory paid parental leave at Google and other firms. Sheryl Sandberg, who once helmed Facebook, credited her for providing guidance to many in the industry, including herself.
In her capacity as Senior Vice-President of advertising and commerce, and the person in charge of Google’s original video service, Wojcicki proposed the purchase of the fledgling company YouTube in 2006. The price tag of $1.65 billion was considered steep at the time, given the company’s lack of a business model. However, in 2023, YouTube raked in revenues of $31.5 billion, boasts more than 2.7 billion users accessing the site monthly, and has 100 million premium service subscribers.
Her determination to tackle the issue of managing extremist content was driven by her concern for the legacy that they would leave behind, as she expressed to the Guardian in 2019. Her decision to retire in 2023 was fueled by her desire to spend more time with family, look after her health, and devote herself to personal projects that she cared deeply about.
Her husband, four out of their five children, her sisters Anne and Janet, and her mother survive her.