Content-partnered YouTube is being corporatized

Advertising Age's Abbey Klaassen notes that while Google's advertising model for YouTube will encompass 3,000 professional content partners and 70 independent partner channels, "curiously absent were the flushing felines and lip-syncing college kids popularized by the poster child for user-generated video."

There's an obvious conclusion from this. Abbey states:

Considering that giant Google spent $1.6 billion for YouTube primarily for its user-generated content, that might come as a bit of a shock. But given that even smaller sites such as ManiaTV have begun to eschew free-for-all user-generated video, it seems to add up to an admission that, while your cousin Joe's video may draw a lot of eyeballs, it will never draw a lot of paying advertisers.

I tend to disagree.

Take a look at YouTube's Most Viewed videos page at the time I made this post.

Swill.

Hundreds of thousands of page views for this swill, sure, but hundreds of thousands of "eyeballs" of viewers who, like, buy stuff. Stuff via ads that could be triggered when a user clicks.

The big takeaway here: I hope that Google isn't content partner-corporatizing YouTube to the extent that the user-generated video that monetized YT to grow up to be an enticing acquisition target is not going to be shunted off to a corner of the service.

I hope I'm wrong, but I fear that's what we are seeing.