It’s a well known fact that YouTube is, at present, a money black-hole for Google, despite its impressive and growing traffic numbers. Silicon Alley Insider, though, argues that Google will not be able to sustain this much  longer and that YouTube is not going to be able to turn a profit anytime soon. I don’t think YouTube is quite so dead, though. In fact, I think they are moving quickly in the right direction, though the monetary climb may be slow.

I admit that largely home-made video is a hard thing to monetize. In fact, an incredibly hard thing to monetize, since it is (a) hard to target and (b) unpredictable. The advertiser can’t decide to advertise on a particular show, they just have to throw the dart at the wall and hope they land on something they like. When that dart has a big check stuck to it, most people don’t want to throw it blindly. Those issues aside, though, YouTube is doing a couple of things that give me hope they can monetize themselves.

1. For one thing, YouTube began offering you the option to buy songs featured in videos. Rather than fighting music in the background of videos, YouTube has somehow managed to reach an agreement where, in most cases, they just put up a lower third ad that shows the song name, album art, and a link to buy it on Amazon MP3 or iTunes, presumably with a commission for YouTube.
2. YouTube has also started offering, along side the roller-skating dog videos, more formal content like old Star Trek TV shows. These can, and are, being much more easily monetized with inserted video commercials.

This is a good start, but it will not get YouTube all the way there. Rather than trying to, like Hulu, fight with movie and TV studios who would rather stay in the 20th century, YouTube should reach out to so-called “new media.” YouTube should be the hosting service for video internet shows. These could be easily monetized, since they are more predictable, and, if YouTube shared the revenue with the producers, it could become an easy solution for new media content producers to make some money.

The fact that YouTube is trying new ideas gives me hope they can survive, although I admit the odds are against them.

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