For
YouTube to be profitable and legal, they have to find a way to leverage their assets
(audience, toolset, and community features) to the benefit of copyright
holders.

Chad
Hurly and Steven Chen (YouTube’s co-founders) are against putting
advertisements at the beginning of videos, but they are looking at other
options.  

According
to The Economist, “One idea is for
“brand channels” in which corporate customers create pages for their own
promotional clips… The second experiment is “participatory video ads”, whereby
advertisements can be uploaded and then rated, shared and tagged just like
amateur clips.”

What
about commercials or teaser content on YouTube – with an ad on the page that
includes the day and time a show will air on TV or the release date for a
movie?  

I
never watched Jon Stewart
until I saw him on YouTube. Now I look
for him on TV.

When
discussing this with a friend the other day, she referred to YouTube as a
“giant focus group”.  

What
about formalizing that function? Someone
could upload content about or from new projects and get audience feedback. (That might be part of what they’re calling
“brand channels”.)

The
bottom line: There are smart people out there that can come up with ways to
profitably and legally use such a popular platform.

One
has to ask, what’s getting in their way? 

(More
on that question tomorrow)

UPDATE: There is a great article about YouTube and Warner on the Knowledge@Wharton website.