YouTube co-founder Hurley steps down as CEO

LOS ANGELES: Chad Hurley is relinquishing his post as CEO of YouTube, the company he co-founded five years ago that revolutionized video on the Internet.

Hurley said he'll remain an adviser and that Salar Kamangar, vice president of product management, will become CEO. Hurley, along with Steve Chen and Jawed Karim, launched YouTube in December 2005, and sold it a year later to Google for $1.65 billion. Chen left the company two years ago; Karim left earlier.

Hurley and Chen each earned $350 million from their sale of YouTube to Google. Karim's share was $64 million. Kamangar, an early Google employee, has been running the day-to-day operation of YouTube for a couple of years. He's credited with concocting inventive ways to monetize the massive traffic it attracts.

YouTube's launch ushered in the era of "user-generated-content," or UGC, and it was that sort of amateur video that remained its most popular.

By REUTERS -Oct 31, 2010