Errrr...its Google we're talking about and they have some really smart people working there. I don't think they will venture into something that wont help them expand their search empire
You'll notice very few ad units while surfing YouTube, and none at all while watching videos contributed by ordinary folk like you or me. The reason? Google fears the legal repercussions of monetizing user generated content that may infringe on somebody else's copyright. But YouTube's homepage is different since it merely displays thumbnails that may lead to infringing content. And it has capitalized on that page by selling a video ad unit in the upper right-hand corner for $175,000 per day (plus a commitment to buy $50,000 more in advertising elsewhere on YouTube or Google). According to Silicon Alley Insider, YouTube is about to focus even more intently on leveraging its homepage for profit by selling large format ads that expand to fill the whole page. The ad unit, expected to come in the following weeks, will start at a price of about $200,000 per day with rates increasing in the Fall. YouTube recently experimented with these expandable ads for Pineapple Express. When clicked on, a video ad for that movie expanded to fill the whole homepage instead of playing back inline. The video was also in high definition rather than YouTube's normal, crummy quality, and it could be viewed in true fullscreen mode as well. YouTube is still trying to figure out how to make more than a trickle of money for Google. The industry is watching to see how effectively the company can monetize in-video advertisements, but these currently are run only in a very small fraction of the site's videos. Overall, YouTube is expected to make about $200 million for Google in 2008 (a tiny 1% of its total sales), mainly from these homepage ads and branded channels, which go for $200,000 a pop. Source: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/08/28/AR2008082801942.html
Youtube has joined many partners to show their tv serials and music video and i read that for this they will share profit with them . Their must be some income source or why goggle will do such things .
They have now announced they are selling $175,000/day video ads on their main page, which should increase their revenue by loads... In 2006 they announced that they serve 100million vids a day. Let's presume they now serve 150million a day (I'd say more but for the record...), let's presume that the average video is about 30mb. That is 4.5 million GB's of bandwidth used per day - just from videos, there is also commenting. message sending and thumbnail displaying etc. Let's say they pay $0.25/gig on bandwidth (which is pretty damn cheap). If you consider that then it costs Google $1,125,000 to run YouTube per day!