LOS ANGELES (Hollywood Reporter) – 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.
More recently, though, major media companies have embraced YouTube as a marketing and distribution device and the site's top videos nowadays come from the likes of Justin Bieber, Lady Gaga, Eminem and Miley Cyrus.
Exceptions include a 56-second video of a baby biting his brother's finger, the six-minute "Evolution of Dance" and a video of a baby who can't stop laughing, all of which remain on YouTube's Top 10 list of the most popular videos in its history.
"For the past two years, I've taken on more of an advisory role at YouTube as Salar Kamangar has led the company's day-to-day operations," Hurley said in an emailed statement. "I will continue to serve as an adviser and am excited to witness the next phase of YouTube's growth."
-yahoo
