Chad Hurley is the man who wanted a site to post home videos on the internet and, with his friend Steve Chen, set up YouTube and became a billionaire.

The accidental empire created in February 2005 now hosts 13 hours of new content every minute and carries with it a weight of expectation and responsibility that does not always seem to sit well with the 31-year-old.

YouTube may have been adopted as the internet's premier destination of video but it is not clear how it will make money, particularly given that its cost of hosting is not cheap. Video advertising has not taken off and Google, the company's owner, remains remarkably coy about a business that it bought for $1.65 billion in 2006.

Google doesn't break out figures for YouTube - if they were good, you'd imagine the company would do so. Nor is Mr Hurley, in London to help show the Queen around the company's UK office, going to oblige. He declines to reveal any details. Indeed, Google disclosed in its last regulatory filing that it had “yet to realise significant revenue benefits from our acquisition of YouTube”, thereby ramming home the point.

Om Malik, a blogger and analyst, estimates that YouTube should manage about $125 million (£77 million) this year, up from $80 million last time. Bear Stearns had the 2007 number at $90 million. Either way, it's not a lot for all the video it hosts but luxury advertisers don't want to sit next to a dogfighting video.

Mr Hurley argues for patience and says nobody should expect a silver bullet solution to YouTube's hunt for revenue. “We are happy with our progress but there will not necessarily be a single answer when it comes to monetising the site. There will be a suite of solutions,” he says, making it clear that the plan has long evolved past a belief that video advertising will be the dominant form of income.

“Video will definitely be part of the answer,” Mr Hurley insists, but there are hints of an enhanced search offering too. Already YouTube takes some Google-style text ads on its site but the idea, imprecisely, is to “develop something within that space”, perhaps through recommendation services or paid-for promoted videos. His imprecision appears characteristic too, at least on this occasion, when squeezing out details from the laid-back businessman proves tough.

Is the content appealing enough for advertisers, given so much of it is amateur, or illegally copied? With the typical internet entrepreneur's faith in the democratising nature of the media, he sticks to the view that “YouTube will always be a great mix of the professional and the amateur”, although money will predominantly be made from one of the 900 channel partnerships that YouTube has with media companies. Those revenues will be shared with the media owner, though.

Ask, for example, whether there is so little prior warning as to what a video might contain, making it easy for a child to find something violent or sexual, and Mr Hurely does become animated. “I have two small children as well; we have clear policies and clear guidelines, and we have given tools to the community so they can flag or notify inappropriate content.”

With so much video being uploaded, Mr Hurley offers no hope that YouTube will ever concede any kind of rating system and so users must place faith in the ban on “sexually explicit content”, “gratutious violence” plus “gross-out videos of accidents” and “bad stuff like animal abuse, drug abuse or bomb making”.

YouTube is constantly dogged by news about unsavoury content; last month, after pressure from The Times, it was forced to ban gang videos in Britain. But Mr Hurley is cautious about self-censorship. “I'm not sure it is our job to solve the world's problems,” he says, sounding almost overwhelmed by the pressure of dealing with the string of complaints. “I'm not trying to hide from responsibility but we also have to respect freedom of speech.”

The problem, of course, is that YouTube's home-video liberalism is precisely what makes the site so popular. But the attitude that “everything reasonable goes” does not always leave advertisers or viewers quite so convinced.

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