YouTube has to do this to dig out of their gigantic monetization hole:<p><a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/is-youtube-doomed-2009-4" rel="nofollow">http://www.businessinsider.com/is-youtube-doomed-2009-4</a><p>They have a net loss of _half a billion dollars a year_. Even at Google that's not the kind of number you can ignore.<p>Basically, YouTube gives a ton of revenue to small video producers who are popular in niches, but doesn't earn any money from those guys because advertisers are too scared to put ads on user-generated content. So instead of changing advertiser behaviour (which would be really hard), they are instead trying to funnel users to content that <i>can</i> be easily monetized. It remains to be seen if this will work or just piss off their users and kill YouTube.