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In a way, youtube has already made money because the two programmers who created youtube sold the company to google for $1.65 billion in 2006 so they are already rich. The burden now falls onto google and google is not making money on youtube at all. Because, google is financially successful overall, they can afford to keep youtube running even if it does nothing for the company financially. For all intensive purposes, youtube is a subsidized service at the moment rather than a profit-making business venture.

While this works out well for all of us who don't have to pay anything, it's a really bad idea and it can't last forever. Mark Cuban, the owner of the Dalls Mavericks and media guru, blogs about the issue: The next question of course is why would Google stop subsidizing the uploading , hosting and presentation of 80pct of the user generated online videos (excluding commercial sites) viewed in the US? The answer of course is : Because they had to."

Personally, I don't think this is such a big problem for anyone included - the video watchers, the video posters, and the owners of youtube - but we are all so caught up in the "internet should be free" ethos that transcends the internet that commentators and the people in charge of youtube are overlooking the simple solution: charge money.

I know that there's a risk that people will run away from a website if it starts as a free service but then it starts charging money, but I don't think that would it would happen for a couple different reasons. For one, youtube is already an established name brand: it is far more visible platform than anything else on the web. It's far easier to say to your friends or business contacts I'm on youtube than it is to say I'm on vimeo or funnyordie. Second youtube is far more trafficked than any other video-sharing site. It is the fourth most trafficked site on the web. It is of far more benefit to post onto youtube than it is to post on another site.

Most impotantly, youtube doesn't have to charge every poor joe who wants to upload a few videos here or there. It only has to charge a few users. The website www.mozy.comis a good business model. Mozy is a website that offers backup storage for your files so you don't lose them. The website offers you 2 gigabytes free and for larger loads, it charges you. Youtube should go with that same business model where it charges users a small fee to upload more than a certain amount of videos. The ones who upload a lot of videos will likely be the ones who stand to make the most profit from it anyways.

Learn more about this author, O. Konheim.
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