Eight years ago, she sat down with Fortune’s Jennifer Reingold and described the current state of television: Ratings are down 40 percent from their peak. YouTube already reaches more 18-34 year olds than any US television network.
The future, Wojcicki said, will belong to individual content creators who have the ability to amass an audience on YouTube that goes well beyond those sitting in their living rooms watching primetime every night.
She said that this future will be consumed on mobile phones, not on the big tablet screen your parents bought.
She almost called television dead:
“So TV is probably one of the biggest markets in terms of advertising, subscriptions, time spent, and if you look at the next generation — they’re completely changing the way they watch TV. They don’t watch TV as we know it. .They might be watching on their phones, in their bedrooms…it’s totally different.
She said individual creators or influencers will replace studios and networks:
“They are their own media company. They are the CEO, they are the personality, and then as they get bigger they have production, editors and writers behind them, so we really have the next generation of media companies.
Google was born in Wojcicki’s garage
This isn’t the first time Wojcicki has shown extraordinary prescience. This woman rented her garage (pictured above) to two students in 1998 for $1,700 a month because she needed the money.
“I was worried about paying the mortgage,” she told 60 Minutes, “so I would rent my garage to any student.”
“Then two students showed up. One was named Sergey Brin. The other was named Larry Page.
Page and Brin are, of course, the founders of Google. The company was born in her garage. According to the Financial Times, in 1999, she became Google’s 16th employee and eventually became the head of Google’s advertising business. By 2013, she grew Google’s annual revenue from zero to $15 billion.
Google later bought Wojcicki’s house and garage to preserve it. You can also explore what Larry and Sergey looked like when they worked there via Google Maps.
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