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Susan Wojcicki perfectly predicted the media world we now live in—twice

Jim Edwards
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Jim Edwards
Jim Edwards
Executive Editor, Global News
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Jim Edwards
By
Jim Edwards
Jim Edwards
Executive Editor, Global News
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August 10, 2024, 12:09 PM ET
Susan Wojcicki
Susan Wojcicki, former CEO of YouTube. Michael Kovac/Getty Images for Vanity Fair

If you want to know why you now spend the majority of your media time scrolling through online video on your phone, it’s largely because of former YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki, who has died aged 56 from cancer.

Eight years ago, she sat down with Fortune’s Jennifer Reingold and described the current state of television: Viewership was 40% down from its peak. YouTube was already reaching more 18-34-year-olds than any U.S. TV network.

The future, Wojcicki said, would belong to individual content creators who had the power to amass audiences on YouTube far in excess of those who sat in their living rooms every evening to watch primetime.

And we would consume this future on our phones, not on the big flat-screen your parents bought, she said.  

She all-but called the death of TV:

“So TV is probably one of the biggest markets, from ads, from subscriptions, from time spent, and if you look at the next generation—they are completely changing the way they watch TV. They don’t watch the TV as we knew it. They watch … on their mobile phones, in their bedrooms, probably, and it’s completely different.”

Individual creators or influencers would replace studios and networks, she said:

“They are their own media companies. They are the CEO, they are the personality, and then behind them as they get bigger they have production and editors and writers and so we really have this next generation of media companies.”

Google was born in Wojcicki’s garage

It was not the first time Wojcicki demonstrated remarkable prescience. This was the woman who, in 1998, rented her garage (shown above) to two students for $1,700 a month because she needed the money.

“I was worried about covering the mortgage,” she told 60 Minutes “So I was willing to rent my garage to any student.”

“Then two students appeared. One was named Sergey Brin. The other was named Larry Page.”

Page and Brin were, of course, the founders of Google. The company was born in her garage. In 1999, she became its 16th employee, eventually becoming head of Google’s ad business, where she grew its annual revenues from zero to $15 billion by 2013, according to the Financial Times. 

Google later bought Wojcicki’s house and the garage to preserve it. And you can explore the way it looked when Larry and Sergey worked there on Google Maps.

Read More about Susan Wojcicki:

  • Former YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki has died at 56
  • Susan Wojcicki on how she built YouTube as the new TV
  • Susan Wojcicki was the most level-headed of her sisters while growing up, mother recalled in earlier talk about how to raise successful kids
  • Susan Wojcicki offered management lessons from the Titanic and ‘Frozen’ in a 2014 commencement speech
About the Author
Jim Edwards
By Jim EdwardsExecutive Editor, Global News
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Jim Edwards is the executive editor for global news at Fortune. He was previously the editor-in-chief of Business Insider's news division and the founding editor of Business Insider UK. His investigative journalism has changed the law in two U.S. federal districts and two states. The U.S. Supreme Court cited his work on the death penalty in the concurrence to Baze v. Rees, the ruling on whether lethal injection is cruel or unusual. He also won the Neal award for an investigation of bribes and kickbacks on Madison Avenue.

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