Time magazine has named YouTube’s Lucknow-born Indian American executive Neal Mohan as its 2025 CEO of the Year for cementing the dominance of what it calls the “attention economy.”
Since 2023, when Mohan, 52, took the helm of YouTube after his mentor Susan Wojcicki stepped down, the social platform has increased its dominance of the attention economy generating more than $36 billion in advertising revenue and $14 billion more from subscriptions last year.
This year both of those numbers have shot up: it’s taken in 15% more advertising dollars in the first three quarters, and in March announced it had 25% more subscribers (including trial ones) to YouTube Music and Premium than at the same time in 2024.
YouTube is both benefiting from and helping create a massive marketing shift to the so-called creator economy, Time said. A recent trade-group report cited by Time predicted that advertisers will spend $37 billion with creators this year, 25% more than in 2024.
Mohan, “the pilot of the world’s most powerful distraction machine,” as Time called him, is focused on one thing. He just runs YouTube.
“The entire dynamics of the entire media industry are changing before our eyes,” he told Time in an interview. “It’s incredibly disruptive, and if you don’t adapt, you can be left by the wayside.”
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“YouTube today is like a metropolis with lots of interconnected dependencies, and what you do on one street impacts what happens on another street,” says Mohan.
“In the early days, it was much more like a village, where lots of the creators knew each other. And I think that if you’re the leader of one vs. the other, you’re forced to think about decisions in maybe a different way.”
“As mayor of the global megalopolis, Mohan knows one of his chief duties is to communicate a genial unflappability rather than a slick charm,” as Time put it. “He’s superior at it: uncle level.”
“Creator success on the platform brings in all of these viewers and fans from all over the world, which in turn brings in brands and advertisers and marketing opportunities and that in turn attracts the next batch of creators,” says Mohan. “That’s sort of an encapsulation of my vision for YouTube.”
“I’m a technologist by passion and training,” he says. “I also happen to be somebody who loves media in the broadest sense of that term. And so building products, whether in the advertising world or at YouTube, is sort of my passion.”
Mohan, it’s fair to say, exhibited all the symptoms of chronic nerdiness early, according to Time. At age 6, he made his parents drive into Ann Arbor, Mich., to see “Star Wars.” It was sold out, so he made them return the next night.
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“That movie changed my life,” he says. He still has a Yoda figurine that his mother gave him on his desk. In the mid-’80s, when he was 12, his parents moved him and his two brothers to Lucknow, India.
It was a shock. “I was upset at losing my friends,” he says. He understood some Hindi, but in one summer had to learn to speak and read like a local. Plus, he had to study Sanskrit. “It’s incredibly phonetic and rules-oriented,” he says. “It was like learning computer programming, basically.”
He also grew up in a household that favored risky moves. “My dad came here to do his PhD at Purdue as a civil engineer back in the ’60s with, you know, 25 bucks in his pocket,” he told Time. “Over and over, he leaned into change.”
All three Mohan sons returned to the U.S. to study. Neal got his degree from Stanford, where he also went for business school. But while his path appears to be one of constant reward, it has also been marked by loss: his brother Anuj died after a swimming-pool accident at 30, and around that time Mohan wrote that it “destroyed the foundation on which I base my understanding of the world.”