Google senior advertisement executive Susan Wojcicki to run YouTube
06 Feb 2014
Google's senior advertising veteran Susan Wojcicki has been moved to run the search engine's video streaming site YouTube.
The former company chief of YouTube, Salar Kamangar, would continue at the search giant and work on 'early-stage projects', even as Wojcicki, who had been serving as the vice president overseeing advertising and commerce, takes reins at the video site.
Sridhar Ramaswamy, who had been co head of the ad and commerce business along with Wojcicki will now be its head.
According to Google CEO Larry Page, like Kamangar, Wojcicki had a healthy disregard for the impossible and was excited about improving YouTube in ways that people would love, The Verge reported.
Meanwhile, Wojcicki tweeted that she was excited to join YouTube and looked forward to a lot of video watching during work.
According to the report Wojcicki, Google's 16th employee, is also the sister of Google co-founder Sergey Brin's wife, Anne Wojcicki, co-founder and CEO of genomics firm 23andMe. In 1998, Susan Wojcicki housed Google in its startup stage at her garage, while the search engine was being developed.
The move came as a sign that Google was focused sharply on advertising at YouTube, The New York Times reported. Wojcicki has overseen Google's incredibly profitable advertising, which included successful new ad types for shopping and mobile, the report said.
Though according to projections of eMarketer, YouTube earned 21 per cent of all video ad revenue in the US and earned $5.6 billion in gross revenue worldwide last year, the site had run into problems during its efforts to collect a larger percentage of TV advertising.
YouTube had been providing money and other support for producers for creating more professional videos and had been experimenting with live programming like sports events, however, according to video creators, ad prices are dropping precipitously, even as it was getting more expensive for them to produce videos that broke through the noise.
Wojcicki had also pushed hard for Google's $1.65 billion acquisition of YouTube in 2006, which at the time, was a massive risk, and according to people at the company, she had always had affection for the service.