Few folks have had higher unseen affect on at the moment’s youthful generations than Susan Wojcicki, who has died aged 56 after affected by lung most cancers. From 2015 to 2023, Wojcicki was chief govt of the video sharing platform YouTube, a subsidiary of the Google division of the US know-how conglomerate Alphabet, growing its revenues to upwards of $30bn and its consumer base to almost 3 billion, and watching it reshape leisure and politics.
Her roots at Google went again to the corporate’s earliest days in 1998 when, as a cash-strapped pupil in California with mortgage debt and pupil loans, she sought to lease out a few rooms. The takers, at $1,700 a month, had been Larry Web page and Sergey Brin, whom she had met via a mutual pal and who had been searching for low cost workplaces for his or her newly integrated firm. The next 12 months, Wojcicki grew to become Google’s first advertising and marketing supervisor and its sixteenth worker.
As chief govt of YouTube, Wojcicki discovered herself on the centre of quite a few controversies as the location grew to become an more and more vital means for people to propagate – and monetise – excessive content material, misinformation, disinformation, harmful don’t-try-this-at-home exploits, conspiracy theories, and paedophilia to hundreds of thousands of viewers by way of the location’s algorithmic suggestion system.
In response, she made adjustments to enhance content material moderation and hold advertisers from leaving the location by including hundreds of human moderators, altering the location’s suggestion algorithms to cease spreading harmful content material, and constructing techniques to automate eradicating inappropriate feedback, or movies corresponding to that of the mass shootings at a mosque in Christchurch, New Zealand in 2019.
Nonetheless, many commentators felt she didn’t strive arduous sufficient to curb the unfold of problematic materials, and blamed the corporate for prioritising earnings over the general public curiosity.
But eradicating content material introduced its personal risks. In 2018, Wojcicki spent 40 minutes hiding from a lady with a gun, a YouTube consumer apparently livid over new advert requirements, who had pushed to YouTube’s headquarters in San Bruno, California, and who shot three folks after which herself.
The anger the incident represents remains to be seen at the moment; since Wojcicki’s dying, whereas some have praised her philanthropy and kindness, others have lashed out at her “censorship”.
A selected supply of ire appears to have been her choice through the Covid-19 emergency to take away medical misinformation such because the film Plandemic and to take her lead from the Facilities for Illness Management, the US authorities’s well being company, in deciding what counted as medical misinformation.
In 2019, she admitted regretfully to the New York Instances that her adjustments had not come quickly sufficient and known as aiming to set requirements of accountability “a number of the most vital work that I’ll do in my profession”.
Born in Santa Clara, California, Wojcicki was the eldest of three daughters of Esther, a trainer and journalist, and Stanley, a professor of particle physics at Stanford College who had arrived within the US as a Polish refugee on the age of 12. She usually paid tribute to the worth of rising up on the Stanford campus surrounded by individuals who had passions they studied significantly.
After Henry M Gunn highschool, Palo Alto, she went to Harvard College the place, though finding out literature and historical past, she found an surprising curiosity in know-how when she took a random vacation temp job in a startup. The revelation of the affect new know-how may have on the world led her to take a pc science course in her closing 12 months earlier than graduating with honours in 1990.
She then accomplished an MS in economics on the College of California at Santa Cruz in 1993, and an MBA on the UCLA Anderson Faculty of Administration in 1998. That 12 months she additionally married Dennis Troper, a monetary advisor at Deloitte in San Francisco.
In 1999, Brin invited Wojcicki to affix his fledgling firm, which nonetheless had no income, and she or he deserted a protected job in advertising and marketing at Intel regardless of being strapped for cash, 5 months pregnant along with her first little one, and warned off by mates saying “it’s simply one other search engine”. She knew it wasn’t, she has mentioned, as a result of in the future when Google was down, she realised how dependent she had turn out to be on utilizing it to look issues up.
Missing a hard and fast function at first, she seemed across the firm for alternatives. Within the early years she helped develop the Doodles emblem, and picture search, and served as product supervisor for Google’s first promoting product, AdSense, after which others corresponding to AdWords.
She led Google’s fast-growing promoting enterprise, together with overseeing the acquisition of the web promoting pioneer DoubleClick in 2007. As well as, she campaigned to make paid parental go away a normal at Google and different corporations. The previous Fb chief working officer Sheryl Sandberg has credited Wojcicki with serving to her and lots of others study the enterprise.
As senior vice-president of promoting and commerce, and overseer of Google’s unique video service, in 2006 Wojcicki advisable buying the year-old startup YouTube. On the time, many thought the $1.65bn Google paid was extravagant for an organization with no enterprise mannequin. In 2023, YouTube generated $31.5bn in income; greater than 2.7 billion folks entry it at the least as soon as a month, and 100 million subscribe to its premium service.
“I care concerning the legacy we go away,” Wojcicki instructed the Guardian in 2019, when requested why she continued in attempting to resolve the issue of coping with extremist content material. When she stepped down in 2023, she mentioned it was to concentrate on “household, well being, and private initiatives I’m obsessed with”.
She is survived by her husband, 4 of their 5 kids, her sisters, Anne and Janet, and her mom.
