Oct 29, 2010 09:53 GMT  ·  By

YouTube's CEO and cofounder Chad Hurley will be stepping down from the position to take on an advisory role at the site. The transition has been undergoing and his duties at YouTube have shrunk for the past two years, so, in practical terms, there won't be much of a change for the site.

He revealed this at an event in Europe and said that Salar Kamangar, currently VP of product management at Google, has been has been the de facto leader of YouTube for the last couple of years.

"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 later confirmed the move in an official statement.

"I will continue to serve in an advisory capacity and am excited to witness the next phase of YouTube’s growth," he added.

Talks about his departure have been surfacing for at least the last year and it's hardly a surprise that he is moving on. A bigger surprise, in fact, is that he stayed on for this long.

Hurley founded YouTube along with Steve Chen and Jawed Karim and sold it after a little over a year to Google, in one of the search giant's bigger acquisitions.

Hurley cashed in rather nicely in the $1.65 billion acquisition. His stock has fully vested in the meantime, so there weren't that many things keeping him at YouTube.

He said that there were a few of things he still wanted to do before he was ready to move on completely. Now though, he is already working on other projects and will be much less involved in running YouTube.

YouTube has been doing rather well lately, though it's likely still not profitable. Google has been touting the site's monetization efforts for a couple of years now, but has not released any numbers and won't say if it has started making money yet.