OAN Staff Cory Hawkins
11:55 AM – Tuesday, December 9, 2025
YouTube CEO Neal Mohan has been named TIME Magazine’s 2025 CEO of the Year, with the outlet celebrating his leadership in transforming YouTube into a dominant force in global entertainment and culture.
Over the past two decades, YouTube, owned by Google, has reigned as the undisputed leader in video streaming. The platform has served as the launchpad for countless self-made influencers, podcasters, political commentators, and entrepreneurs, many of whom have built lasting, influential careers and personal brands from the ground up.
TIME described him as a “farmer” cultivating the world’s cultural diet, while noting that YouTube — under his guidance — has become both a “brand and a universe,” expanding from mobile origins to dominate living room screens via YouTube TV and its free app.
Overtime, the application went from web streaming to the “big leagues” of television through rights deals with NFL, Disney, Warner Bros, and NBCUniversal.
“The entire dynamics of the entire media industry are changing before our eyes,” Mohan said in an interview “It’s incredibly disruptive, and if you don’t adapt, you can be left by the wayside.”
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Since Neal Mohan took over as CEO in February 2023 — succeeding the late Susan Wojcicki, who had first hired him when she became CEO in 2014 — YouTube has further solidified its dominant position in the market against competitors.
Under his leadership, revenue from advertisements have increased substantially. In 2024, Youtube generated more than $36 billion in advertising revenue and an additional $13 billion from subscriptions, according to the company’s executives.
The application also saw a 15% increase in advertising revenue during the first three quarters of 2025. Furthermore, in March, it recorded 25% more subscribers to YouTube Music and Youtube Premium compared to the previous year.
“YouTube today is like a metropolis with lots of interconnected dependencies, and what you do on one street impacts what happens on another street.” said Mohan in an interview.
“In the early days, it was much more like a village, where lots of the creators knew each other,” Mohan told Time. And I think that if you’re the leader of one vs. the other, you’re forced to think about decisions in maybe a different way.”
In the 2023-24 season, Youtube shifted into becoming the exclusive U.S retailer for the NFL’s Sunday Ticket out-of-home package, replacing DirecTV — and snuffing out other highly interested parties, including Apple and Amazon, for the rights.
“I would say Neal is very well prepared,” NFL commissioner Roger Goodell told Time. “He understands what he’s trying to build. He’s got a deep understanding of the media landscape and where YouTube fits and where content can help him advance his strategies.”
Mohan has been described as soft spoken but difficult to ruffle, and outside of work, he reportedly enjoys watching sports and attending his daughters’ dance recitals.
Mohan’s Background
Mohan began his career in 1996 as a Senior Analyst at Accenture (then Andersen Consulting), shortly after graduating from Stanford University with a Bachelor of Science in electrical engineering. In 1997, he joined the internet advertising startup NetGravity, which DoubleClick acquired later that year, bringing Mohan into the DoubleClick organization. He rose through several roles there — including Director of Global Client Services, positions in sales and business operations, and eventually Vice President of Business Operations. In 2003, Mohan returned to Stanford Graduate School of Business to pursue his MBA, which he completed in 2005 as an Arjay Miller Scholar. During this period, he briefly interned at Microsoft in corporate strategy. Upon graduation, he rejoined DoubleClick as head of products and strategy, helping lead its turnaround under CEO David Rosenblatt by focusing on ad exchanges, core ad technology, and an expansive ad network. When Google acquired DoubleClick for $3.1 billion in 2007, Mohan transitioned to Google, playing a key role in integrating DoubleClick’s technology into Google’s ecosystem. At Google, Mohan initially focused on product management and strategy for display advertising, before being promoted in 2008 to Senior Vice President of Display and Video Ads. In this role, which he held until 2015, he oversaw the growth of Google’s display advertising business, including the Google Display Network, AdSense, AdMob, and the DoubleClick suite, while driving programmatic advancements, video ad innovations, and acquisitions.
Mohan didn’t just advance his own career — he worked closely with Wojcicki to transform YouTube from a video-sharing platform into the global entertainment powerhouse it is today.
“I’m a technologist by passion and training,” Neal tells TIME. “I also happen to be somebody who loves media in the broadcast sense of that term. And so building products, whether in the advertising world or at YouTube, is sort of my passion.”
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