Neal Mohan, a YouTube insider, is the new CEO of the social media platform. The 49-year-old top executive, who was until recently YouTube’s chief product officer, succeeds Susan Wojcicki. Ms Wojcicki – in whose garage Google (YouTube’s parent company) had begun in 1998 – stepped down last month.

Mr Mohan seems to be the right man to fill up the void left by his veteran predecessor. The new YouTube chief knows the social media company like the back of his hand, having been associated with it for over a decade and a half. In fact, the highly-popular YouTube Shorts were a brainchild of Mr Mohan. He was also a part of a team that came up with a new-look YouTube.

Mr Mohan joins a very long list of Indian-origin chiefs of global corporations, such as Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen and Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai, among others. An alumnus of Lucknow’s St Francis’ College, young Mohan flew to the US and completed his four-year bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering from Stanford University. He also passed out of the university’s Graduate School of Business with an MBA.

Accenture (then known as Andersen Consulting) opened its doors for the young man in 1996. Later, Mr Mohan joined startup NetGravity, which was subsequently acquired by online advertising firm DoubleClick. As senior vice-president (SVP) of strategy and product development, he built DoubleClick’s strategic plan, led the product management team and helped grow its business. He played a critical role in the sale of DoubleClick to Google and led the integration of the two businesses. As the SVP of Google, he led quite a number of initiatives related to display and video advertisements for the company.

Soon, he moved on to sister concern YouTube and gradually went on to become its chief product officer. Rapid rise and popularity of TikTok, a Chinese video-hosting services company, began denting YouTube’s subscriber base as well as its revenue a few years ago. It was then that
Mr Mohan and his team launched YouTube Shorts in September 2020 in a single market in India to test and refine its short-form content. The new format soon became a rage in India, and it was replicated globally.

Rather than building a clone of TikTok, Mr Mohan thought out of the box and came up with a refreshing format – YouTube Shorts. The new format has gone many steps ahead by offering to monetise the content developed by YouTube creators. YouTube monetises its creators by sharing advertisement revenue generated by their content.

Meanwhile, there is concern over artificial intelligence (AI)-driven chatbots like OpenAI’s ChatGPT, which has also been integrated with Microsoft’s Bing Search. These chatbots will change the way the world searches for information online and impact Google, which after all is primarily the world’s leading search engine. Google too is developing its own AI-powered chatbot Bard.
There is also stiff competition to YouTube from TikTok and Instagram Reels.

However, Mr Mohan’s leadership in these testing times is quite reassuring. According to industry insiders, he is a rare combination of an insatiable technologist and a shrewd businessman rolled into one.