Neal Mohan first encountered YouTube almost two decades ago in a tiny office above a pizzeria in San Mateo when he worked for DoubleClick, an advertising platform trying to help the founders of the streaming service make money.
Within two years, both Californian start-ups had been bought by Google, for $1.65bn and $3.1bn respectively, bringing Mohan to the search giant to turbocharge its advertising business as it diversified into video.
YouTube now generates $50bn of annualised revenue for Alphabet, Google’s parent company. It has developed from hosting amateur clips to a hub for music streaming, cable TV subscriptions, live sports and a lucrative profit-sharing platform for so called “creators” — such as online influencers — and their hundreds of millions of Gen Z fans.