Susan Wojcicki Passed Away!

YouTube and Google leader Susan Wojcicki passed away from lung cancer.

One of the early pioneers of Google and YouTube has passed away from lung cancer. Her impact has grew the video platform from a mere 5,000 videos to over 4 billion.

Susan Wojcicki has passed away on Friday. She leaves behind husband Dennis Troper and her five children. Her son Marco died in 2019.

Wojcicki worked in the technology industry for over twenty years. She became involved in the creation of Google in 1998 when she rented out her garage as an office to the company's founders. She worked as Google's first marketing manager in 1999, and later led the company's online advertising business and original video service. After observing the success of YouTube, she suggested that Google should buy it; the deal was approved for $1.65 billion in 2006. She was appointed CEO of YouTube in 2014, serving until resigning in February 2023.

Susan Diane Wojcicki was born in Santa Clara, California, on July 5, 1968, the daughter of Esther Wojcicki, an American journalist, and Stanley Wojcicki, a Polish physics professor at Stanford University. Her maternal grandparents were Russian Jewish immigrants. Her paternal grandfather, Franciszek Wójcicki, was a Polish politician who was elected MP during the 1947 Polish legislative election. Her paternal grandmother, Janina Wójcicka Hoskins, was a Polish-American librarian at the Library of Congress and was responsible for building the largest collection of Polish material in the U.S. She had two sisters: Janet, a doctor of anthropology and epidemiology, and Anne, an entrepreneur who is the co-founder and CEO of 23andMe.

Wojcicki grew up on the Stanford campus, where mathematical scientist George Dantzig was her neighbor. She attended Gunn High School in Palo Alto, California, and wrote for the school newspaper. Her first business was selling "spice ropes" door-to-door at the age of eleven. A humanities major in college, she took her first computer science class as a senior. She studied history and literature at Harvard University and graduated with honors in 1990. She originally planned on getting a PhD in economics and pursuing a career in academia, but changed her plans when she discovered an interest in technology. She also received her MS in economics in 1993 from the University of California, Santa Cruz, and an MBA in 1998 from the UCLA Anderson School of Management.

After Wojcicki became the CEO of YouTube, the company reached 2 billion logged-in users a month and that users were watching one billion hours a day. By 2021, YouTube had paid more than $30 billion to creators, artists, and media companies. There are localized versions of YouTube in 100 countries around the world across 80 languages. Since she became CEO, YouTube's percentage of female employees has risen from 24 to nearly 30 percent. Wojcicki also emphasized new YouTube applications and experiences designed to cater to users interested in family gaming, and music content. While CEO, the company developed 10 forms of monetization for YouTube creators, including channel memberships, merchandise, BrandConnect, and paid digital goods like Super Chat. She also launched YouTube's advertisement-free subscription service, YouTube Premium (formerly known as YouTube Red), and its over-the-top (OTT) internet television service YouTube TV. In 2020, the company launched YouTube Shorts, its short-form video experience, which surpassed 50 billion daily views in February 2023. In November 2022, YouTube publicized that the company had surpassed 80 million Music and Premium subscribers, including trailers. The company also reported over 100 billion hours of global gaming content watched on the platform in 2020.

Wojcicki tightened YouTube's policy on videos it regards as potentially violating its policies on hate speech and violent extremism. 

Let me guess Israel. 

Israel has confirmed it has impact on Facebook, X, YouTube, Tinder, Instagram, Myspace, POF and is trying to force TikTok to abandon the pro Palestinian content. The U.S. is forcing ByteDance to sell TikTok to American investors like Zionist Steven Mnuchin so they can police content. The ADL and AIPAC are notorious for pushing for content creators to be deplatformed.

The more stringent policies came after The Times showed that "ads sponsored by the British government and several private sector companies had appeared ahead of YouTube videos supporting terrorist groups" and several large advertisers withdrew their ads from YouTube in response. The enforcement policies have been criticized as censorship. YouTube has also faced criticism that the company applies its enforcement policies inconsistently, with larger content creators treated more favorably. During the controversy surrounding Logan Paul's YouTube video about a person that committed suicide, Wojcicki said that Paul did not violate YouTube's three-strike policy and did not meet the criteria for being banned from the platform.

Wojcicki has emphasized educational content as a priority for the company, and on July 20, 2018, announced the initiative YouTube Learning, which invests in grants and promotion to support education focused creator content.

On October 22, 2018, Wojcicki wrote that Article 13, as written in the European Union Copyright Directive, would make YouTube directly liable for copyrighted content, and poses a threat to content creators' ability to share their work.

On February 16, 2023, Wojcicki announced her resignation from YouTube via a company blog post. She said she wanted to focus on "family, health, and personal projects" but would be taking on an advisory role across Google and its parent company Alphabet.