by Shauna Zamarripa

Created on: October 06, 2008   Last Updated: October 28, 2008

YouTube can take up hours of our time, systematically addicting us to watching sneezing pandas and tireless renditions of Chocolate Rain' or Numa Numa', it can provide us with infinite amounts of streaming video content on just about every subject imaginable, from the useless, to the hilarious, to the instructional, to the completely mundane. With all of this internet prowess said video titan possesses, the ultimate question remains Can YouTube make money?

Sure it can, if the maniacal talking corporate heads behind the video giant got together and decreed, "Let there be a service fee." However, should this evil be allowed to reign in our over-pixilated existence, the riots and flaming on message boards around the globe would be so notorious that it would literally crash the internet. Okay, well, maybe not that dire of a situation, but you can bet it would be bad.

So, without lending credence to the most obvious of ways that YouTube could make loads of cash, why not explore another solution to exploit funds from an obviously addicted public.

YouTube content producers could start charging a fee to view their content. Naturally, YouTube would get a cut of this, being that they are hosting the material, and because they would take a cut anyway since they have lots of highly paid lawyers. The only problem with this scenario would be that it would only really work for content producers that are very popular, and get lots of page views, however, with as many hits as YouTube gets each day, massive amounts could be generated in such a fashion, over time. This would mean that the people are in control of what they want to charge, or even if they do want to charge for views of their creations, which would prevent the aforementioned rioting in the second paragraph. At the end of the day, the creators make money, YouTube makes money and everyone can sit around the fire roasting marshmallows and singing camp songs. All in all, it's a pretty perfect existence.

This change would take some time to successfully implement in its entirety, but, it could very well be the most user friendly solution to make everyone some cash. YouTube talking heads, I hope you're reading this, because we definitely want half!

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