Neal Mohan, YouTube Chief Executive Who Took the Platform to the TV Screen

Neal Mohan is the chief executive officer of YouTube, the video platform owned by Alphabet. He took the top job in February 2023 after almost eight years as the service’s chief product officer, and he has spent most of his working life in online advertising and video.

His tenure has coincided with YouTube’s move onto the living-room television and a sharp rise in its revenue. Alphabet said YouTube’s combined advertising and subscription revenue exceeded $60 billion in 2025, and TIME magazine named Mohan its CEO of the Year for 2025.

Education

Mohan studied at Stanford University, where he earned a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering. He later returned to the same campus for an MBA at the Stanford Graduate School of Business.

He has kept a link with the business school since then. Starbucks lists him as a member of the Stanford Graduate School of Business Advisory Council.

Career

Mohan started out in consulting. He then moved to NetGravity, a young company that sold software for placing advertisements on websites. NetGravity was later bought by DoubleClick, the online advertising firm, and Mohan stayed on through the merger.

At DoubleClick he rose to senior vice president of strategy and product development, a post he held from 2005 to 2008. In that role he worked on the company’s plan and led its product teams during a period of fast growth in internet advertising.

In 2007 Google agreed to buy DoubleClick for $3.1 billion. TIME reported that Mohan handled the deal from DoubleClick’s side, and he then helped bring the two businesses together after the purchase closed.

From 2008 to 2015 he was senior vice president of display and video ads at Google. The job covered the display and video advertising products that Google offers to publishers and advertisers, an area Google had expanded through the DoubleClick purchase.

In 2015 he moved to YouTube as chief product officer. Over the next eight years he oversaw the product side of the service, from the main app to new formats. TIME reported that in 2017 he began rebuilding the YouTube app for television screens, a project that later became central to the company’s strategy.

On 16 February 2023, Susan Wojcicki announced that she was stepping back as YouTube’s chief executive. Mohan, who had worked with her since the DoubleClick acquisition, was named as her successor and took charge that month.

As chief executive he has pushed YouTube further into living-room viewing, sports, podcasts and tools built on artificial intelligence. The platform began carrying NFL Sunday Ticket games in 2023, and in 2025 it hosted its first global livestream of an NFL game, played in Brazil.

YouTube’s audience reaches far beyond its home base in California. In Saudi Arabia, YouTube was the most used social platform in 2025 with 27.2 million users, according to our report on social media use in the Kingdom.

Creator-led sports coverage is one of the newer formats. In October 2026, selected Roshn Saudi League matches began streaming through a creator-led YouTube brand, as covered in our guide for fans.

Current Roles

• Chief Executive Officer, YouTube (since February 2023)
• Member of the Board of Directors, Starbucks (since January 2024), serving on its compensation committee
• Member, Council on Foreign Relations
• Trustee, The Paley Center for Media
• Advisory Council Member, Stanford Graduate School of Business

Before his current boards, he served as a director of Stitch Fix from 2020 to 2023 and of 23andMe from 2021 to 2024, according to the Starbucks proxy statement.

Key Achievements

Building Google’s display advertising business

Mohan’s longest stretch at Google was in display and video ads. He joined through the DoubleClick deal and spent seven years, from 2008 to 2015, as the senior vice president in charge of display and video ads, the part of Google that took over DoubleClick’s business.

Moving YouTube to the television screen

As product chief he started the work of rebuilding YouTube for televisions in 2017. By 2025, TIME reported, half of all YouTube viewing happened on a TV screen. In his annual letter of 21 January 2026, Mohan wrote that YouTube had been first in US streaming watch time for nearly three years, according to Nielsen.

• Share of YouTube viewing on TV screens: about half (TIME, 2025)
• Share of all US television viewing time: 12.7% in February 2026 (Nielsen, cited by TIME)

Growing revenue past $60 billion

Under Mohan, YouTube’s revenue has kept rising. TIME reported more than $36 billion in advertising revenue and about $14 billion from subscriptions in 2024. Alphabet then said YouTube’s advertising and subscription revenue together passed $60 billion in 2025.

• YouTube advertising revenue, fourth quarter of 2024: $10.47 billion (Alphabet)
• YouTube advertising revenue, fourth quarter of 2025: $11.38 billion (Alphabet)
• YouTube ads and subscriptions, full year 2025: more than $60 billion (Alphabet)

Paying creators and partners

YouTube says it has paid more than $100 billion to creators, artists and media companies around the world since 2021. TIME reported that the number of creator partners rose from 2 million in 2021 to 3 million in 2023.

Short videos, podcasts and AI tools

Shorts, the platform’s short-video format, reports about 2 billion logged-in users a month, and Mohan’s January 2026 letter put its average at 200 billion daily views. YouTube also says about a billion people watch podcasts on the service each month.

In September 2025 the company unveiled more than 30 tools built on artificial intelligence for making, editing, translating, dubbing and earning from videos. TIME reported that this was three times the number launched the year before.

The Company in Numbers

• Revenue from ads and subscriptions: more than $60 billion (2025, Alphabet)
• Advertising revenue: more than $36 billion (2024, TIME)
• Subscription revenue: about $14 billion (2024, TIME)
• Daily visitors: more than 2 billion people (2025, TIME)
• New footage uploaded: about 500 hours every minute (2025, TIME)
• Videos uploaded since launch: more than 20 billion (April 2025, AFP)
• Paid to creators, artists and media companies since 2021: more than $100 billion (2025, YouTube via TIME)

Awards and Honours

• TIME CEO of the Year, 2025

In Their Own Words

Speaking to TIME for its CEO of the Year profile in December 2025, Mohan described the change facing traditional media: “The entire dynamics of the entire media industry are changing before our eyes.”

In the same interview he spoke about the use of artificial intelligence to police the platform: “AI will make our ability to detect and enforce on violative content better, more precise, able to cope with scale.”

Read also: Saudi Internet and Social Media Statistics 2026: 40+ Key Numbers