From poking around on the internet, opinions are still varied – though you can throw out everything written before it was bought by Google. Most of those pieces concluded that despite claims that YouTube would become “the next Google” and one day go public, it really had no business plan at all.

Google of course has all sorts of revenue generating streams, but none of them figure to have the oomph to even come close to paying for YouTube’s costs. The most interesting suggestion I’ve seen recently is that it’s simply a loss leader for Google. Google obviously wants to become the de facto source for finding all video on the internet, and Google Video may become the portal that points to YouTube content, mixed with all sorts of premium content you can pay for. That way they corner the market on monetized video, by controlling free video. Clever.

Mark Cuban always maintained that it’s still just a Napster waiting to implode when it has to finally deal with copyright lawsuits. I suspect there’s some truth to this, though Google has deep enough pockets to never let anything implode. But there will no doubt be a change in what people can get away with.

What interests me the most is what sort of high-profile partnerships will evolve. I already pointed to CBC’s pilot project with Google Video; I’d be lying if I didn’t say I hadn’t pondered whether the whole CBC Archives site (my employer) shouldn’t just port over to YouTube and have done with it. There are all sorts of reasons why that won’t and probably shouldn’t happen, but you can bet someone is already doing just that. So then YouTube becomes the source of all things video – baby videos, last week’s episode of Lost, music videos, historic footage… why go anywhere else?

Be that as it may I checked out the ‘March of the Emperors’ which has to be one of the best TV advertising bits I’ve seen in recent memory. Thanks for that.

In my experience (and in this particular case as well) it’s seldom the actors and writers themselves who object to having their stuff on the internet. They deserve their cut, sure, but in the words of Cory Doctorow, their enemy is obscurity, not piracy.

No, it’s usually their representative unions fighting on their behalf. And that’s their job, of course, and without it you can bet they’d get no cut at all. But amazingly, there’s still a presiding fear that teh internets are going to change everything, and generate buckets full of money for somebody without content creators getting a slice. It’s the same argument we heard 10 years ago.

To be fair, the major broadcasters and websites haven’t helped much. For every iTunes (which pays the artists) there’s a YouTube (which doesn’t); and because the established system is so adversarial, both unions and corporations go into discussions asking for the moon, get angry and walk away.

I really wish for some sort of deus ex machina, where God or Stephen Harper or Bill Gates would step in and say something like, “All content creators will henceforth be paid 10% more up front and share future revenues. Now everyone stop bitching about format and get back to work.” But that’s unlikely.

I appreciate the practicality of the “long tail” argument – that the internet does well with things that will never have a viable revenue model. Practically speaking, everyone could probably just turn a blind eye to this and let YouTube do its thing. But the rights issues are the same, and so is the bickering.

You are right about the control issue, though. I’ll get myself in trouble if I say anything more than that.

To be honest I tend to find that Youtube is also a very special case as its function is very specific. It’s great for catching little clips of things that peak your interest and frankly would seem to make the viewer *more* likely to seek out the original source. The Quality is invariably so so and it’s not like anyone (sane) would use it as a method to actually try to watch significant chunks of programming.

So I almost always come to the conclusion that what this really comes down to is *control*. Goodness knows that we the corporate overlords hate it when people essentially go out of their way to give us *free advertising*. We are so enveloped in our need to spin every last thing that spews from our satanic mills that the simple thought of our product becoming part of the public milieu is anathema.

Or am I just paranoid?

p.s. Good post man.