Scott Karp looks at YouTube’s effort to monetize their service, and concludes that they are becoming a traditional media business:
“Google needs to monetize YouTube on a massive scale, and nobody’s figured out yet how to do that with other people’s copyrighted material or with low quality content that only amuses small numbers of the content creator’s friends — and that gives advertisers the willies. So YouTube is trying to leverage its other asset — a platform for up-and-coming talent to distribute their content for free.”
“Never mind the buzzwords like partner, revenue sharing, and of course user-generated content… if you reframe it… you realize that this is actually the traditional media business. Great content attracts an audience that is attractive to advertisers. Content producers are compensated by the media company for their work.”