New YouTube CEO is Bullish on Web3 tech like NFTs and Metaverse

After serving as YouTube’s Chief Product Officer for over seven years, Neal Mohan was named last week to lead the Google-owned streaming platform after former CEO Susan Wojcicki said she would step down.

His ascension bodes well for fans and advocates of Web3 technologies.

Wojcicki announced his resignation in a blog post. Praising YouTube’s “incredible leadership team”, she praised Mohan for playing a pivotal role in launching products such as YouTube TV and YouTube Music, and said he would make a “fantastic leader”.

Wojcicki also praised Mohan for his robust understanding of YouTube as both a business and one of the most popular places for communities to gather. “He has an amazing sense of our product, our business, our creator and user communities, and our employees,” Wojcicki wrote.

As one of the most popular websites in the world, the popularity and reach of YouTube cannot be underestimated. From September to November last year, the site ranked behind only Google in terms of usage, with 74.8 billion visits on average per month, according to Statistics.

During his long tenure shaping YouTube’s offerings, Mohan has kept an open mind about the evolution of the internet and its assorted platforms. Last year, he revealed in a blog post that YouTube was looking at ways it could possibly integrate Web3 technology, either by “make YouTube more immersive” by leveraging the metaverse or tapping technology such as NFTs, unique digital tokens often used to claim ownership of online content.

“We believe new technologies like blockchain and NFTs can allow 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 think there’s incredible potential as well.”

For example, Mohan wrote that NFTs could be a compelling, “verifiable 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.

Regarding the metaverse, Mohan stated that the technology’s use is “still in its early days” but said YouTube will “work to bring more interactions to games and make them feel more alive.”

Although the concept of a metaverse is not explicitly built around blockchain technology – the term was coined in 1992 by author Neal Stephenson in his science fiction novel “Snow Crash” – popular projects such as The Sandbox and Decentraland use blockchain technology to establish the ownership of digital land and other assets.

Google itself has also leaned more heavily into Web3 services over the past year. In October, the company became announced the launch of a cloud-based service for Ethereum projects and developers called Blockchain Node Engine.

The service both hosts and automatically manages individual nodes contributing to a blockchain’s network, providing “reliability, performance and security [people] expect from Google Cloud compute” to the digital assets industry.

The tech giant revealed the following month that it would expand its Blockchain Node Engine to Solana Blockchain as well, a feature to be launched in the first quarter of this year.

Google too gave a nod to Ethereum last September when the network switched to a less energy-intensive form of verifying transfers, a long-awaited process referred to as the merger. A “doodle” featured in Google’s search engine counted down how long it would take for the process to complete and other statistics related to Ethereum’s change in power consumption.

YouTube has seen some prominent employees fully embrace Web3, such as its former Global Head of Gaming Ryan Wyatt, who quit after seven years at YouTube to join Polygon Studios as CEO in February 2022, and has since transitioned to serve as president at the renamed Polygon Labs.

Watt recently told Decrypt that he sees parallels between YouTube and Polygon, a sidechain that runs in tandem with Ethereum and seeks to improve on its counterpart by offering faster transactions and lower fees while serving as a platform for interoperable blockchains.

“There are a lot of similarities between YouTube and Polygon in that sense [that] it’s a platform and you help people on board it,” he said. “There are creators of all types, uploading gaming videos, right up until now, [where it’s] games and projects being built.”