• by Laurie Sullivan  @lauriesullivan, February 5, 2014

Google has reportedly appointed longtime senior vice president of ads and commerce Susan Wojcicki to head YouTube in an effort to boost ad revenue. The move replaces Salar Kamangar, who many expected to move into a new role.

The news, first reported by The Information, follows reports that Kamangar had discussed moving to a new role last year. He stepped into the role in 2010.

"Salar and the whole YouTube team have built something amazing. YouTube is a billion-person global community curating videos for every possibility. Anyone uploading their creative content can reach the whole world and even make money. Like Salar, Susan has a healthy disregard for the impossible and is excited about improving YouTube in ways that people will love," said Larry Page, Google CEO.

YouTube generated $5.6 billion in gross ad revenue last year, per eMarketer. After divvying the revenue split to advertising partners and video content creators, the company's net revenue rose 65.5% to $1.96 billion from ads worldwide in 2013.

Google's video site continues to expand on its TrueView advertising unit, but some believe the company could do much more for YouTube. eMarketer expects video ad revenue to in the U.S. to reach $1.22 billion this year, as more consumers view content on mobile devices.

Google also said it would start to audit the authenticity of videos uploaded to YouTube. "While in the past we would scan views for spam immediately after they occurred, starting today we will periodically validate the video's view count, removing fraudulent views as new evidence comes to light," explains Philipp Pfeiffenberger, Google software engineer. "We don't expect this approach to affect more than a minuscule fraction of videos on YouTube, but we believe it's crucial to improving the accuracy of view counts and maintaining the trust of our fans and creators."

The video site will crack down on services that attempt to get YouTube views through automation, as well as force or trick viewers into watching videos that "are not OK," such as purchasing views from third-party Web sites, paying $10 for 10,000 views, and tricking viewers into playing a video when they click unrelated elements on the page by creating a deceptive layout, among others.

View counts serve as a way to recognize great content. Google defines a "view" as a user-initiated watch of a video where the primary purpose is to watch the video by a real human being.