YouTube Turns Pay-Per-View

According to Financial Times, YouTube is making a deal with major American movie studios to launch a global pay-per-view service by the end of 2010. YouTube’s popularity, plus Google’s search technology dominance, could make a fresh revenue model to compensate falling DVD sales. And this can be YouTube’s way of generating more income.

According to Forbes, the free online video community has an estimated $ 200 million revenue for 2008. But considering the lawsuits they got for copyright infringement, getting a million views without seeing real money can be frustrating to Google — the company that owns YouTube. Since YouTube is exceptionally popular, it must be potentially profitable. And they can possibly be, if Google keeps on rolling out their video rental service which debuted last April. But it seems that there is not much money on cat videos, on-the-street news footage and the Rickrolls, because most of YouTube’s popular videos are homemade.

Have you noticed that their logo no longer says “Broadcast Yourself”? Is this an omen that pay-per-view Hollywood movies will extinguish the user-uploaded movies that we’ve come to love?

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