After serving as Chief Product Officer at YouTube for more than seven years, Neal Mohan was named last week to lead Google’s streaming platform after former CEO Susan Wojcicki said she would step down. His rise bodes well for fans and advocates of Web3 technologies.
Wojcicki announced his resignation on YouTube’s official blog. Praising Youtube’s “incredible leadership team,” she praised Mohan for playing a key role in launching products like YouTube TV and YouTube Music, stating that he will be an “excellent leader.”
She also praised Mohan for his solid understanding of YouTube as a business and one of the most popular places for communities to come together. “He has a wonderful sense for our product, our business, our creator and user communities, and our employees,” wrote Wojcicki.
youtube more immersive
As one of the most popular websites in the world, YouTube’s popularity and reach cannot be underestimated. From September to November 2022, the site was second only to Google in terms of usage, with 74.8 billion average visits per month, according to Statista.
During his long tenure shaping YouTube’s offerings, Mohan has kept an open mind about the evolution of the internet and its diverse platforms. Last year, he revealed in a blog post that YouTube was looking at ways to integrate Web3 technology, whether it’s “making YouTube more immersive,” leveraging the metaverse, or exploring technologies like NFTs, unique digital tokens that are often used to assert ownership. of online content.
“We believe that new technologies like blockchain and NFTs can allow creators to build deeper relationships with their fans,” wrote Mohan. “There is a lot to consider to ensure that we approach these new technologies responsibly, but we truly believe there is incredible potential in them.”
For example, Mohan wrote that NFTs could be a “verifiable and compelling way for fans to own exclusive videos, photos, art, and even experiences from their favorite creators,” adding that it would allow creators and audiences to collaborate in new ways.
Speaking of the metaverse, Mohan stated that the use of the technology is “still in its early days”, but said that YouTube “will work to bring more interactions to games and make them feel more alive.”
Even though the metaverse concept 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 like The Sandbox and Decentraland use blockchain technology to establish ownership of digital lands and other assets.
Google advances to Web3
Google itself also started to work harder on Web Services3 last year. In October, the company announced the launch of a cloud-based service for projects and developers on Ethereum called Blockchain Node Engine.
The service automatically hosts and manages individual nodes that contribute to a blockchain’s network, bringing the “reliability, performance and security that people have come to expect from the Computing Power of Google Cloud” to the digital asset industry.
The tech giant revealed the following month that it would be expanding its Blockchain node engine to the Solana blockchain as well, a feature set to launch in the first quarter of this year.
Google also gave Ethereum a nod in September 2022, when the network transitioned to a less energy-intensive way of verifying transitions, a long-awaited process known as Fusion. A “doodle” displayed on Google’s search engine told 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 head of Global Gaming, Ryan Wyatt, who left after seven years at YouTube to join Polygon Studios as CEO in February 2022 and has since switched to acting. as President of Polygon Labs.
Watt recently told Decrypt that he sees parallels between YouTube and Polygon, a sidechain that works alongside Ethereum and seeks to improve its counterpart by offering faster transactions and lower fees, serving as a platform for interoperable blockchains.
“There are a lot of similarities between YouTube and Polygon in the sense that it’s a platform, and you’re helping people get on it,” he said. “At the end of the day they are creators, uploading game videos, from that time until now, [onde estão] games and projects being built.”
*Translated by Gustavo Martins with permission from Decrypt.
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