According to a TechCrunch report, YouTube’s co-founder and long-time chief executive Chad Hurley – who, in early 2005, founded the online video-sharing site with Steve Chen and Jawed Karim - is stepping down from his position.

Hurley has been holding on as the YouTube CEO for a fairly long time, after having made a fortune from Google’s $1.65-billion acquisition of the online video site in 2006.

The news about Hurley stepping down as the YouTube CEO is not an unexpected one, since reports have been making rounds for the last two years that he is transitioning away from the CEO’s role. Hurley has been relinquishing most day-to-day business decisions to Salar Kamangar – who is famously known as ‘Google Employee No. 9’, and is the company’s VP of product management.

Apparently, Hurley’s transitioning away from his duties as the CEO coincided with the stepping down of co-founder Steve Chen as the YouTube CTO in late 2008. Chen, however, continued to remain with Google.

Meanwhile, with YouTube currently being led primarily by Kalamangar, he has been assigned the task of helping YouTube transform from a very popular ‘unprofitable’ business into one that can use its size and scale to turn a profit for Google.

Despite the fact that the YouTube site reportedly serves up more than 2 billion videos per day, and monetizes nearly 2 billion of those video plays per week, it is unclear how long it will be before the site actually becomes profitable.