Will's Web Watch: Tuning in to YouTube

About six months ago an email landed in my inbox from a friend with a link to a video clip. The URL pointed to YouTube.com. I'd not heard of it before then and thought nothing of it, given it seemed just one of many websites out there hosting video clips.

But now just half a year later there can't be many people on the internet - or the planet - who aren't familiar with YouTube. The site was officially launched in December 2005 by Steve Chen and Chad Hurley having started it initially in mid-2005 as a means to share videos between friends. YouTube was intended to do for video what Flickr had done for photography and to provide the web 2.0 generation with a place to post and view user-generated content.

Since then things have sky-rocketed. In July the site served more than one hundred million videos in a single day. And the popularity of the service has seen its uses change and evolve.

Now the founders talk in far grander terms of the site's potential, with Chad Hurley expressing an intention to become the "next generation platform to serve media worldwide".

And businesses, celebrities and even governments are waking up to the idea that YouTube is fast becoming the platform for getting their message across. Despite a botched first attempt, the UK government has been posting public service videos on YouTube - realising if 'the people' are comfortable with the platform then why swim against the tide.

Celebrities such as the inexplicably ubiquitous media-darling Paris Hilton - no stranger to videos of herself appearing online - have also launched their own channels to do battle with those unlikely celebrities created purely by YouTube.

And this brings us neatly to the question of how YouTube will ever make money from its wealth of content. Partnerships with businesses appear to offer a direction for YouTube to mature commercially - a route that would allow its founders to resist the temptation to go for blanket advertising across the site.

With a community as large as YouTube's the obvious answer would always be advertising but the founders have both expressed concerns about doing anything to disenfranchise their users. Ideas such as 'pre-rolls' - short ads that viewers must sit through before they see a clip, which are commonplace on other such sites - have therefore been dismissed as too invasive. What advertising there is on the site is currently pretty discreet.

However, there has been heavy investment in YouTube and backers tend to want to see some return. As such I would expect to see greater branding, more channel sponsorships and more ad units on YouTube over time. But the backers - who are likely to be a fairly canny bunch - should be pretty happy with their lot at present.

At the moment the return has been in the building of a community which, in terms of making money online – whether you host videos, sell books, rent DVDs or publish news - is the most important step.

Users are also making money out of YouTube. There have already been instances of contributors landing recording contracts on the back of content posted on the site and others landing deals with production companies.

Others have used clips to drive visitors to their own sites realising that giving content away elsewhere, with an imprint on the clip stating the name of the originating website, can be an effective driver of traffic.

But not everybody likes YouTube - or at least the effect it can have. Microsoft recently had to act quickly to get leaked videos taken down from the site, featuring Ricky Gervais in a training video for the software giant.

Some people have suggested Microsoft's actions smacked of spoilsportishness. However, the likelier explanation as to why this video was removed rests in the wording of the site's terms and conditions, which permit YouTube and other users non-exclusive royalty-free permission to use and reuse any clips posted on the site.

The terms include clear instructions that copyrighted material should not be posted by anybody other than the copyright owner. Only there is widespread disregard for that rule. As such copyright owners are increasingly having to monitor YouTube - which makes itself unaccountable for the content on its site - to check their intellectual property is not being used and abused.

It may only be a matter of time before YouTube becomes embroiled in the kind of discussions that dogged Napster over hosting copyrighted material but searches of the site still reveal far more user-generated content than copyrighted material, suggesting the community is self-regulating to a degree.

And it wouldn't be a piece about YouTube without pointing you towards some of the best of it. The biggest craze on the site to date has been for showing what happens when you drop a packet of Mentos into a bottle of Diet Coke. It's explosive stuff, as you can see here, here and most impressively here.

Some people have too much time on their hands.