YouTube’s new CEO to introduce NFTs

It looks like YouTube could be expanding into NFTs…

YouTube’s CEO Susan Wojcicki has resigned in a blog post as of last week after nine years in her position with the company and 25 years total. To take her place, CEO Neal Mohan has just been appointed after serving as YouTube’s Chief Product Officer for over seven years.

Why Mohan?

It appears that Wojcicki has every bit of confidence in Mohan’s leadership, as she shares that, “He has a wonderful sense for our product, our business, our creator and user communities, and our employees.”

However, alongside this, Mohan is also particularly popular amongst the Web3 community.

In February 2022, Mohan outlined plans to introduce a variety of new features to the platform, including metaverse-based content and experiences, and content tokenization via nonfungible tokens (NFTs).

The CEO thinks that these introductions could create further opportunities for creators to engage with their audiences and add revenue as he mentioned in a previous blog post from February 2022:

Web3 also opens up new opportunities for creators. We believe new technologies like blockchain and NFTs can allow creators to build deeper relationships with their fans. Together, they’ll be able to collaborate on new projects and make money in ways not previously possible.”

He continues that this will be a “verifiable way for fans to own unique videos, photos, art, and even experiences from their favourite creators could be a compelling prospect for creators and their audience.”

Although these plans are yet to materialise, we expect to see them in the not-so-distant future now that Mohan is leading the force.

NFT’s controversy

However, Mohan remains a controversial individual due to being an advocate for the removal of the video dislike button, a no-swearing policy, and the introduction of YouTube Shorts to compete with TikTok, and YouTube Music.

The controversy stems from the fact that NFTs are considered damaging for the environment because of the high amount of energy required to mint an item on the blockchain. Supposedly NFT’s also put creators at cyber security and fraud risk.

By appointing Mohan as CEO, could this rock the boat for a portion of global users?

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