Longtime YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki says she’s stepping down

Mr. Mohan inherits YouTube during a difficult time. The company faces a slowdown in digital advertising that has halted its growth, and it faces growing competition from TikTok, a Chinese-owned short-video service.

YouTube added its own short video feature, Shorts, to compete, and it tried to become a destination for more premium content by offering cable TV programs and the NFL Sunday Ticket, a set of weekly football games. Mr Pichai said this month that Shorts now averages 50 billion daily views. The service has also started running ads and sharing revenue with creators on the platform, an effort to lure influencers away from TikTok.

YouTube recently lost several prominent executives, including Robert Kyncl, who was chief commercial officer before leaving earlier this year to become chief executive of Warner Music Group, and Martin Kon, YouTube’s chief financial officer who left for the start-up of the AI. to Cohere.

“I’ve never met a CEO like Susan in my career,” Kon, who is now president and chief operating officer of Cohere, said in an interview. “She was able to go back and forth with engineers, data scientists, people in charge of partnerships, marketing people on the details of what they do.”

Most of YouTube’s revenue comes from ads that run before, during, and alongside videos. In the third quarter, the company’s advertising sales fell 1.9% from a year earlier. Last quarter, revenue fell 8% to $7.96 billion.

The platform has long wanted to diversify its business and has prioritized efforts to grow its content subscriptions. YouTube said in November it had 80 million paying subscribers for its premium music and services, a jump of 30 million from a year earlier.

The platform also offers YouTube TV, a package of streaming TV channels to replace cable packages. YouTube TV has more than five million subscribers, the company said. YouTube does not disclose subscription revenue.