Who's Grabbing The Video Star?

Where should you show that fine online video you created? You know, the one that will make you or your company famous, or infamous? If you're looking to get noticed or get discovered it really only comes down to a few high traffic video repositories; but if the Web's free market economy does its thing, then you may not just be famous, you may be a little wealthier too.

An interesting post from Engadget discusses the YouTube video sharing site and its cost and profitability, suggesting in essence that Youtube can not sustain itself (or its growth) without being advertising supported. You could even take this a step further by saying that services such as Yahoo Video (with an existing ad model and which today announced improvements to its video service) and Google Video (which could easily integrate its new video advertising) are actually better positioned to facilitate the "sharing" that is so imperative in user generated content (UGC). How do they do that? Money, dinero, scratch; whatever you want to call it, it may all come down to sharing the profits (at least in part) with those that generated the content.

Interesting Chart via Google Trends