Susan Wojcicki, longtime CEO of YouTube, announced she is stepping down today, marking an end to one of the great tech leadership tenures in history.
Many people will argue she never got the attention she deserved as a major Silicon Valley executive because she's a woman, and there is probably some truth to that. But I would more likely argue she never got the attention she deserved because YouTube never got the attention it deserved. While we've all been squabbling about how Instagram is showing too many vertical videos and how TikTok is a Chinese spy balloon disguised as an app and how Twitter exists solely for Elon Musk to stroke his own starving ego, YouTube has just been sitting on the sidelines killing it. It has grown its quarterly users figure every single quarter from Q2 2010 through Q4 2022. It has remained arguably the top platform for creators who want to get paid in cash rather than likes and comments. And despite facing a greater existential threat now than ever before in TikTok, YouTube has proven to be possibly the most resilient platform of its peers. Whereas Instagram and Facebook have had to consistently update their product design year after year to fit whatever social media trend is shiny at the time, YouTube has maintained its spot as the second most popular social media app in the world despite making as few user experience changes over its lifespan as the Western toilet.
This isn't to say YouTube doesn't have any blemishes, but if I were to choose between my teenage daughter diving headfirst into clinical depression on Instagram or my great aunt diving headfirst into QAnon on YouTube, I would probably choose the latter. In reality I've always found YouTube to be a tremendous place to absorb new knowledge and hear new stories. Watch an interview. Throw on a mini documentary. Find some creators doing really incredible things. Most social media sites I can look at and definitively state it's a net negative on society. That's not the case at all with YouTube.
Thank you, Susan Wojcicki, for being the heartbeat of YouTube all these years and for giving me a way to watch Howard Stern while I poop. You rule.
Comments