After more than seven years as YouTube's chief product officer, Neil Mohan was named to lead the Google-owned streaming platform last week after former CEO Susan Wojcicki announced she was stepping down.
Its rise bodes well for fans and supporters of Web3 technology.
Wojcicki announced her resignation in a blog post. Praising Youtube's "incredible leadership team," she praised Mohan for his crucial role in launching products like YouTube TV and YouTube Music, saying he would be a "great leader."
Wojcicki also praised Mohan for his clear understanding of YouTube as a business and one of the most popular places for communities. "He has a great feel for our product, our business, our creators and user communities, and our employees," Wojcicki wrote.
As one of the most popular websites in the world, YouTube's popularity and reach cannot be underestimated. From September to November last year, the website was second only to Google in traffic, with 74.8 billion visits per month, according to the data. Statista.
Throughout his long tenure shaping YouTube's offerings, Mohan has kept an open mind about the evolution of the Internet and its various platforms. Last year, he revealed in a blog post that YouTube was looking for ways to integrate Web3 technology, whether through "making YouTube more immersive" using a metaverse or technologies like NFTs, unique digital tokens often used to prove ownership of online assets. contents.
"We believe that new technologies like blockchain and NFTs can enable creators to build deeper relationships with their fans," Mohan wrote. "There's a lot to consider to make sure we approach these new technologies responsibly, but we also think there's incredible potential here."
For example, Mohan wrote that NFTs could be a compelling, "proven way for fans to own unique videos, photos, art, and even experiences from their favorite creators," adding that it would allow creators and audiences to collaborate in new ways.
As for the metaverse, Mohan said the technology is "still being used," but said YouTube will "work to bring more interaction to games and make them more alive."
Although the concept of a metauniverse is not explicitly based on blockchain technology (the term was coined in 1992 by writer Neal Stevenson in his sci-fi novel Snow Crash), popular projects such as The Sandbox and Decentraland use blockchain technology to establish property digital land and other assets.
Google itself has also leaned more toward Web3 services over the past year. In October, the company announced the launch of a cloud service for Ethereum projects and developers called Blockchain Node Engine.
The service hosts and automatically manages individual nodes that contribute to the blockchain network, ensuring "reliability, performance, and security." [people] expect from Google Cloud computeā for the digital asset industry.
Next month, the tech giant announced that it will be extending its Blockchain Node Engine to Solana Blockchain as well, a feature that will launch in the first quarter of this year.
Google also gave a nod to Ethereum last September when the network switched to a less energy-intensive form of handover verification, a long-awaited process known as merging. The "doodle" featured on Goolge's search engine calculated how long it would take to complete the process and other statistics related to the change in Ethereum's power consumption.
YouTube has seen some high-profile employees fully embrace Web3, such as former global head of games Ryan Wyatt, who left after seven years at YouTube to join Polygon Studios as CEO in February 2022, before becoming president of rebranding Polygon Labs.
Watt recently told Decipher that he sees parallels between YouTube and Polygon, a sidechain that works in tandem with Ethereum and aims to improve upon its counterpart by offering faster transactions and lower fees while serving as a platform for interoperable blockchains.
"There's a lot in common between YouTube and Polygon in a sense [that] it's a platform and you help people get into it," he said. "It's creators of all types uploading gaming videos, all the way up to now, [where it's] games and projects being created."