Arik Czerniak, co-founder and former CEO, will remain on the executive management team to focus on strategic product issues and partnerships. (I interviewed Czerniak in a recent article for The Daily Reel.) Very often a founder will hold onto a company long after it has outgrown his entrepreneurial skill sets, so Czerniak’s passing of the reigns is an interesting one.

One could argue the company is establishing a new CEO to make itself more marketable for sale. Metacafe recently announced a U.S. headquarters and expanded executive team. Alternatively, as BloggingStocks predicts, this could ice rumors of Yahoo acquiring Metacafe.

Metacafe is the largest independent online-video site — attracting a global audience of more than 17 million unique viewers consuming 550 million page views every month (comScore, December 2006).