I have said it from the very beginning, Youtube is NOT going to make it. Even Mark Cuban thinks so. I love telling the story of Scour.com. Scour became extremely popular right after Napster and right before Kazaa. Scour wasn't based on true P2P like the rest of the Gnutella compatible clients (i.e Kazaa, Morpheus, LimeWire).

Scour had a central server, like Napster, that you had to log into. Scour had the BEST results. You could find way more than just music. Free movies, porn, software, and millions of mp3s. Scour was growing extremely fast without any commercials or press. This goes far beyond a grass roots marketing campaign. There is no need for marketing when you are giving away free shit. You don't have to sell free. You just tell free. The business term is "viral marketing." Person A tells person B there is a store with tons of free media. Person B tells 40 people. You got the idea…I hope so.

Scour was loved by investors because they truly believed you don't need to sell anything in the Internet age, you just need a market share. It does make sense considering it's the same business model magazines have been using for years. We just need the users, the viewers, the clickers, and we can make all the money in selling the ad space.

Scour received 30 million dollars in venture capitalist money. Scour spent it all in 6 months on lavish launch parties and Foosball tournaments.

Youtube is fun, just like Scour. But Youtube is far more guilty than Scour, they host the file. They are storing copyright material. They display copyright material. Youtube's ENTIRE business model is a giant DMCA nightmare. In this day when the RIAA and MPAA will sue a 12 year old for listening to Janet Jackson, Madonna and Greenday, how is anyone really going to invest.

A few months ago I read that Youtube was spending well over a million a month in hosting and bandwidth. It must be triple that now. They are estimating it to be worth over 1.5 billion and rumors of an NBC have acquisition have been floating around for a while. Recently Jay Leno dedicated 15 minutes to showing Youtube clips and then brought out Lonleygirl15 aka Bree aka Jessica Rose.

Youtubes orginal intentions may have been good. So were Scours. They wanted to build something that would generate traffic. Scour was a little looser in their practice, allowing the user to just have it forever.  I am not against the sharing of music, it's music. But I do believe in copyright laws. Make a friend a copy of CD is one thing, selling it for a billion dollars, that's another.

And by friend I mean all the good people on the torrent clients.

Viva B.L.O and the Spaghetti Monster.