Ms. Wojcicki’s exit from YouTube’s top job further thins the ranks of women running large tech companies. While Safra Catz remains chief executive of Oracle, a maker of business software, Jayshree Ullal runs Arista Networks and Lisa Su leads the chip maker AMD, the industry has lost a raft of women leaders who broke barriers, without obvious successors in sight.
Despite tech companies emphasizing the need for more diverse leadership in recent years, the gender gap extends from large companies to small ones. More than half of American start-ups lacked women in leadership in 2020, according to a report from Silicon Valley Bank.
Mr. Mohan came to Google from DoubleClick, an advertising technology company acquired by Google in 2007, and eventually rose to be a senior vice president of video and display ads. He became YouTube’s chief product officer in 2015 and has overseen trust and safety efforts and the launches of major products including YouTube Music and Shorts, Ms. Wojcicki wrote in her note on Thursday.
Mr. Mohan inherits YouTube during a period of challenges. The company is contending with a slowdown in digital advertising that has halted its growth, and it faces increasing competition from TikTok, a Chinese-owned short video service.
YouTube added its own short-video feature, Shorts, to compete with TikTok, and it has tried to become a destination for more premium content by offering cable television programs and the N.F.L. Sunday Ticket, a package of weekly football games. Mr. Pichai said this month that Shorts was now averaging 50 billion daily views. The service has also begun running ads and sharing revenue with creators on the platform, an effort to lure influencers away from TikTok.
YouTube has recently lost several prominent executives, including Robert Kyncl, who was chief business officer before leaving at the start of the year to become the chief executive of Warner Music Group, and Martin Kon, YouTube’s business finance officer who departed for the A.I. start-up Cohere.
The bulk of YouTube’s revenue comes from ads that run before, during and alongside videos. In the third quarter, the company’s ad sales declined 1.9 percent from a year earlier. Last quarter, revenue dropped 8 percent, to $7.96 billion.
Nico Grant
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