YouTube wants to monetize those moments. According to the announcement, YouTube will determine video eligibility after looking at factors like traffic, virality and compliance with the community's Terms of Service. If your clip is determined to be the next big meme, Google will contact you to enable revenue sharing and offer you AdSense options on your video page. If you plan on following up your hit video with a meme-worthy sequel, the company encourages you to sign up for the YouTube Partners Program and take advantage of enhanced channel features.

Before you run off to make your video, remember a few rules of thumb:
1. Own the Rights: Make sure you are well within your rights to use the music, media, etc. that you plan to incorporate in your video. YouTube won't offer you revenue share if you appear to be walking a legal gray line.
2. Keep it Clean: Avoid using offensive or obscene language and images. Few advertisers want their messaging coupled with something they see as inappropriate or likely to alienate their customers.
3. Entertain and Elevate: The YouTube community may not be the most high-brow bunch, but it certainly knows the hottest memes. Research your subject matter before putting yourself out there. What may be funny or interesting to you could be last month's news to the community (and in Web years, last month actually equals 5 years ago).

While no one is arguing that MySpace has lost its grip as one of the leading music and entertainment destination traffic generators, I disagree with Van Buskirk's choice in SoundCloud as the great equalizer.

Due to the service's ease-of-use and speed, SoundCloud is indeed one of the best file collaboration and music sharing sites. Quite simply, the site does everything right except help indie artists monetize. Meanwhile sites like Mix Match Music and Bandcamp provide solutions for bands to share AND monetize their products.

In particular, Bandcamp's execution is extremely elegant. As with MySpace, musicians upload their cover art, track listings, liner notes, lyrics and audio files. But Bandcamp adds four additional key features:

1. File Conversions: The site converts a single uploaded file into eight different formats to meet device and music player requirements.

2. Monetization: Bandcamp allows musicians to price their tracks and albums as they see fit. There is even the option to let fans decide prices on a sliding scale.

3. Sharing Tools: The service provides embeddable player widgets for Facebook, MySpace and a variety of 3rd party blogs.

4. Analytics: Perhaps most importantly, site analytics measure popular songs, track links and locate where files have been embedded. This means that musicians can search out their best advocates even if they're miles (and sites) apart.

While SoundCloud is definitely a fantastic tool for collaboration and remixing, it's the storefront-style tools like Bandcamp that will either eat or be eaten by MySpace Music. We'll just have to see where the major artists choose to flock in the coming months.

CORRECTION: Earlier the writer described SoundCloud as a P2P site. SoundCloud is not structurally based on a peer-to-peer network of nodes. Instead the company considers itself a "Flickr for audio".

At first glance, these numbers for Twitter look a bit low, but after looking at how people use Twitter, these numbers do make a lot of sense. According to another recent study from the Conference Board, the top reasons for people to tweet are "connect with friends (42%), update their status (29%) and look for news (26%)." The study also found that two out of three Twitter users use the service to interact with friends.

It is also interesting to note that another recent study from the NPD Group found that Twitter users are more likely to buy music than non-Twitter users. Chances are that this is also related to the demographic makeup of Twitters user base which tends to skew a bit older, but it also clearly shows why Twitter could be such a valuable source of traffic for retail sites.

In many ways, it is probably a good thing that brands are still trying to figure out how to best utilize Twitter. If brands want to make good use of Twitter - which, for many would mean driving traffic to their sites - they have to become part of the community. We would love for Twitter to find a viable business model so that the service can stay afloat even as it grows, but in the end, most of us use it as a personal communications medium and unless brands can find a way to become part of that in an authentic, non-creepy way, they won't be able to profit from Twitter's rapid growth - and maybe that's a good thing, too.

While he would not release exact sales figures, Twitter co-founder Biz Stone was quoted in the post as saying, "The idea is if they are getting value out of Twitter, then we could add more value to what they are doing and we could get some revenue... We think we'll get to something this year, however simple, that shows we're making some money."

While many organizations and individuals claim to have made modest to massive amounts through their Twitter marketing (e.g., Dell cites a sum of $3 million made through its Twitter efforts alone), the microblogging service itself has yet to announce a concrete monetization strategy, much to the consternation of the larger tech community.

Twitter was recently cited by comScore as being the fastest-growing web property. With 18 million users, it is also the third-largest social site.

The company has received funds of around $55 million dollars from a bevy of private investors and VC firms so far, according to various announcements they and their investors have made since the startup launched in 2006.

Todd Chaffee, actually a board member of a company that has invested in Twitter, was quoted on the New York Times Bits site and Silicon Alley Insider as having said that Twitter would be offering advice on purchase decisions as part of its monetization strategy. However, Twitter CEO Evan Williams roundly countered these remarks yesterday in blog comments.

Williams wrote, "To be clear: Todd is a Twitter investor and a very smart and helpful guy.

"However, he is not actually on Twitter's board and, in this article, he's brainstorming on his own. These are not in the least bit concrete plans of the company."

Oh, snap!

Back to the drawing boards, you Twitter-monetization speculators. There will be no commercial recommendations for you.

Or will there?

Chaffee is also quoted as predicting stream-parsing by user-defined groups and general categories as upcoming Twitter features. You know, kind of like third-party services such as TweetDeck are doing already.

In Chaffee's defense, he's been in the VC biz for 25 years and was on Forbes Magazine's 2009 Midas List.

We have often wondered how an application like TweetDeck or Seesmic could make money from their efforts. Tweetdeck, after all, is the most popular desktop Twitter client, yet it doesn't feature any advertising or pro versions, so providing customized versions of the app to bands and brands seems like a very smart way to actually make money for TweetDeck.

Blink-182 on Twitter

Blink-182 (assuming this is an official account), joined Twitter in February, but have only posted three tweets so far. Two of them are actually announcements for the TweetDeck client and were posted within the last hour. However, the band's singer, Mark Hoppus, and drummer, Travis Barker, are clearly active Twitter and Tweetdeck users, so this combination seems like a very good fit for TweetDeck. Especially, because both of the band members actually seem to engage their fans on Twitter.

Similar Deals Coming Soon?

We are still waiting for confirmation that money actually changed hands in this deal, so we have contacted TweetDeck and will update this post once we hear back from them.

According to a DM we got from the TweetDeck team on Twitter, however, "this is just the beginning, wait until you see what else we've got coming up next." We are also awaiting the release of the next version of TweetDeck in the near future. Chances are that this will not be a one-off deal between Blink-182 and TweetDeck, but that the company is actively looking for similar deals with other brands.

But relying on page views is no longer an option. The lion's share of revenue that publishers generate comes from advertisers, and advertisers are now demanding to see more actionable ROI on their advertising dollars. Publishers are feeling the crunch.

ReadWriteWeb's own Bernard Lunn moderated a panel here that addressed a couple of the challenges that most publishers struggle with these days. Below are some of the salient points that emerged from the discussion.

How to Reduce the Cost of Creating High-Quality Content

• Embrace better tools to make processes more efficient. It is a fact that too many publishers are clamoring for an ever-decreasing share of the advertising pie (revenue). Publishers need to be leaders in innovation. Two-thirds of the industry is waiting for someone to lead the way; most of these followers will fall by the wayside, and the others will work from the platforms that the leaders become.
• Get readers to write content. Look for the top commenters in your reading community. Some of them would likely contribute posts to your site. Reach out to them.
• Write content that readers want. Website logs show which topics and posts draw the most interest from readers. Use this information to understand what content your readers want.
• How do you profit from content that has depth but takes time to research and write? Bernard emphasized that publishers make money by selling ads, and this money is typically tied to page views. A publisher can run a quick post like, "Lindsay Lohan's Twitter Meltdown," which may take mere minutes to write and generates 200,000 page views, whereas an in-depth post on something technical, which could take several days and several interviews to write, may generate only 20,000 page views. So should you bother writing those quick posts that are inevitably regurgitated by a ton of other publishers? Content with longevity eventually earns more money (like films, it generates revenue for years). Refocus your content so that it has staying power or can be archived somewhere for future licensing.

How to Increase Revenue

• Maximize your brand elsewhere. Andraz Tori, CTO of Zemanta, noted that not all media is monetizable. He believes that the consolidation of content and the creation of content via crowd-sourcing (e.g. Wikipedia) will ultimately drive the price of content to nothing. (Although some publishers will be able to charge for content, the way that D&B can still charge $10,000+ for profile reports on private companies). By spending time on in-depth content creation, you build your brand, allowing you to extend that brand to conferences, report sales, etc.
• Advertisers want engagement. Julie Nielsen of appssavvy said that so much inventory is available for advertisers to buy from, they don't even know where to look. Advertisers want actionable results; they want to track their ROI, and a click is not revenue to them. Publishers need to sell to advertisers that are relevant to their audience and then educate advertisers to purchase differently, partly by offering advertisers data (beyond mere clicks) that tells a deeper story about their brand engagement.

The panel obviously didn't have all the answers, but it started a good discussion that we hope to continue here. What ideas do you have, and what opportunities do you see in this shift in publishing?

Author: Ravit Lichtenberg is the founder and chief strategist at Ustrategy.com -- a boutique consultancy focusing on helping companies succeed. Ravit works with CEOs, marketing groups, and Social Media managers to craft customer-centric engagement strategies that result in higher customer value, stronger customer community, improved monetization, and higher profitability. Ravit authors a blog at www.ravitlichtenberg.com.

By now Facebook should be accustomed to criticism. Despite having had a tremendous growth spurt, it seems to be on a trial-and-error journey, guided by an ever-changing map and an elusive destination. In a way, it acts like a child in transition to puberty, slow to catch up on change, impressed by its new-found power, and definitely not bothered by such nuisances as "planning" for its future. But in the end, by will or by force, it too will have to grow up. What can Facebook do to make the transition less painful? What will it take for Facebook to start thinking like the grown-up company it is becoming?

Better to Have B-Level Strategy but A-Level Execution

That's what Kulwant Singh, Dean of the National University of Singapore's Business School, told us each day when we entered his classroom. It's a pretty basic principle, but one of the toughest for companies to uphold.

Facebook is still a pretty simple business: it is an online platform that facilitates community-building and provides multiple methods and points of interaction for users to express themselves and connect and share with each other. Its strategies, then, should also be pretty simple and its execution near flawless. That hasn't been the case, however. Facebook has failed to demonstrate that it is truly able to monetize its platform, and it continues to invest in meaningless endeavors, such as the recent redesign. This is due not to a lack of vision or talent but rather to the mile-long canyon between Facebook's strategy and its ability to execute.

Facebook's Strategy Simplified

In a recent interview, Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook COO, said the company will be focusing on growing its community and on monetization. To add some clarity to an otherwise generic statement, we can say that Facebook's strategy most likely includes these three key goals:

1. Increase user base. Grow network effect even beyond the current 175 million user base.
2. Increase wallet share. Leverage existing platform and find new ways to make money (e.g. applications, advertising, revenue share on partnerships, paid services).
3. Maintain and grow leadership in social media/networks. Effectively compete with and beat other online media platforms and tools on which users spend time and money, or form a partnership (like with Twitter) for a piece of the action.

As with all strategic plans, each of these goals can be further broken down into multiple objectives, each of which has its own specific requirements. All that's left to do is execute them. But in Facebook's case, the flow from strategy to execution is disjointed, resulting in a very bad case of broken telephone. What should have been a relatively easy and flawless execution has turned into a terrible blunder that continues to put Facebook in the hot seat for not realizing its potential.

Facebook Vision Realized

While it may have started out as a project by a couple of passionate students, Facebook today, like most successful startups, is in the business of making money. Advancing this vision does not mean spending what must have been countless hours of team meetings to discuss the corner radius on the new profile chicklets. Nor does it mean risking getting sued for quietly attempting to take over user data. It's time to lay down some fundamental principles to help Facebook bridge strategy and execution:

1. Start thinking like the large company you are becoming. Instead of kneejerk responses to competition and internal whim, Facebook needs to set a long-term vision and work backwards, taking into consideration priorities, technological capabilities, and company as well as (most importantly) user needs. When a company knows what targets to keep its eyes on, it can choose one of many roads depending on the circumstances at the time.
2. Choose an identity and stick with it. Is Facebook a fun startup, or a large successful company? Engineers and geeks, or business people? Is it about connecting or sharing information? The next couple of years are going to shape Facebook's identity and redefine its culture, focus, and value proposition. Planning ahead by testing a few ideas can be of tremendous help to reducing noise and confusion.
3. Listen to your users. It's not just about blogs, notes, and user comments. Facebook should proactively seek to understand its growing base of user segments, their needs and desires, and their relationship to upcoming technologies and Facebook's own strategic objectives. This will enable Facebook to design a complete experience (not thumbnails) that turns users into customers, while making it extremely difficult for competitors to match the experience.
4. Grow with your market segments: While Facebook may have started with tech-savvy early adopters, it is now certainly crossing the chasm and attracting different user segments. Does Facebook understand the value proposition it offers to each of these segments? What about the growing base of 35- to 49-year-olds who are now flocking to social networks? Does Facebook know how to keep its original evangelists active? Keeping a close eye on these evolving segments and making sure its services speak to their unique needs will be key to Facebook's success.
5. Implement a co-creation architecture. Facebook could learn a great deal from the open-source environment by creating both feedback and contribution channels. The addition of OpenID and the increased flexibility for developers were significant steps forward, but they need to be integrated into a more holistic tool set and be linked to a strategy that answers more than, "How do we make money off our users?"
6. Dare to change. Fear of change is one of the greatest pitfalls of established businesses and makes it easier for startups to take a significant share from them. Apple's iPhone, BlueNile, and Zappos are but a few examples. Only by focusing on the whole experience and daring to break out of its own mold will Facebook maintain momentum and growth.
7. Seal those gaps. This is a tough one for most people, more so for companies. It means pulling up the curtains, going from room to room, and figuring out what works and what doesn't. It also means sitting down and devising a strategy to address all those gaps in a way that enhances the business while not hindering its operation. Not an easy task, but crucial for growth.
8. Stay honest. Stating that public-figure pages are good for users is borderline disingenuous, and placing friends' photos on ads is probably grounds for lawsuits. Take the example of Hulu CEO Jason Kilar, who says clearly that ads mid-program are Hulu's way of monetizing an otherwise free platform. Facebook should clearly distinguish between pursuing business objectives and meeting users' needs and should thus communicate the true intent of its actions.

For a people-based business, it's shocking how little attention Facebook pays to understanding its own users. Less shocking is how poorly it has been executing its strategy, given the nature of this developmental stage it is going through. Parents often look for signs that those terrible teenage years are over and that their child is finally coming out of his or her self-involved state. For Facebook, this will happen when execution matches strategy, when the terms "user" and "customer" are integral to every single one of its strategic goals, when useless design tweaks finally meet their end, and when Facebook provides services and goods that users actually want. If nothing else, though, we can always take comfort in knowing that teenagers don't stay teenagers for long.

It's a dramatic move that could pave the way for other media companies to do the same and effectively open up international markets. People complain, but do you think that viewers would pay a similar monthly fee for international access to Hulu, for example? We do.

We're still waiting for examples of US customers willing to pay for online services (the iPhone app store is a related example) but it will be interesting to see if the rest of the world is. Last.fm's announcement is an interesting response to the advertising market's belief that only eyeballs from certain countries are "worth" advertising to.

Meanwhile, the vehement insistence by users that every damn thing on the web be free works hand in hand with the rise of over-saturation in advertising. Let's see what kinds of user experience, features and services we can get by paying a little cash - shall we?

When we say that semantic technology has a whole lot of awesome potential, this is a fun example of what we're talking about. If it can be done for restaurants, we expect similar analysis of online sentiment can be sold for all kinds of different real-world sectors.

Now restaurant owners can subscribe to receive a PDF of their monthly reports for an introductory price of $15 and a regular price of $25 per month. (Here's a sample report, in PDF format.)

Simple charts and a straightforward presentation can offer restaurant owners nervous about the Wild West of online opinion a bird's eye view of what's really going on, month by month. On the down side, the reports may enable those business owners to spot and track down negative reviewers to hassle them for the injustices they've no doubt done to a fine eatery.

Think many restaurants will go for it? That depends on how it's marketed, but we expect that today's coverage in the San Francisco Chronicle will help.

We first reviewed semantic and natural language processing review aggregation service BooRah this Spring and said we could foresee giving up Yelp for it. Then in December we called BooRah one of the Top 10 Semantic Web Products of 2008.

Now this latest offering has got us really excited; its simple utility and mainstream appeal are really compelling.

We love the idea of selling aggregate reports of online activity, intelligently analyzed, to mainstream businesses effected by online activity. Sales, marketing and PR firms have paid hefty sums for these kinds of reports, often clumsily gathered and presented, for years. Aim the semantic web at the problem, give it a good price point and offer it to a very large sector of businesses and we may just see some action in the semantic technology sector after all.

Update: Our original title for this story referenced Yelp, whom we mistakenly thought were included in BooRah's aggregation of reviews. Yelp contacted us to say that they are in fact not included. We hope that will change soon - it would only make both sites more useful.

Hyatt was joined on stage by Twitter co-founder Evan Williams, who once again repeated the "wait and see" answer when asked about his monetization strategy. Side-by-side with Current's success, Twitter's continued stalling seemed more unsatisfying than ever - but success in general felt more possible when we saw what Current has done.

Hyatt said that surveys show viewers prefer user generated advertising 9 to 1 over Madison Avenue's creations. Anecdotally, though, we know that recent history is littered with examples of campaigns where a trickle of users produced a handful of boring ad segments for uninspiring products.

How Did They Do it?

How has Current done it? Here's our theory. The TV station and news video website has a large audience of edgy young thinkers already, they eat their own dog food with non-stop risk taking and innovation and they've got great cachet with a sizable and desirable crowd - fans of company co-founder Al Gore. Current probably gets a lot of terrible ad and content submissions, but they must get enough that there are some really compelling submissions to choose from. Current site visitors participate in that selection process, which you can check out in action here.

This may or may not be a formula that's accessible for other companies, but we're sure that everyone who saw Hyatt's talk today took note: someone is doing it. Current has found a way to make real money with user generated ads. That's pretty remarkable, and we expect that if and when more examples of this kind of success emerge in coming years - Current will be remembered as a trailblazer in yet another part of the new media world.

Watch this space for full video coverage of Hyatt and Evan Williams on stage, along with more from the O'Reilly/TechWeb Web 2.0 Conference, to be posted on ReadWriteWeb later today.

• YouTube has brokered a deal with Viacom to run full-length episodes of television shows from CBS
• Hulu.com saw a 52.5% month over month increase in traffic in September 2008
• According to Reuters, YouTube boasts 330 million users and Hulu just 3.3 million users

Wired.com interviewed several of Twitter's VC backers who remain "bullish" on the subject. Investor Bijan Sabet of Spark Capital notes that Twitter will introduce a business model of some kind within the first half of next year. Others are also betting that Twitter will find a revenue model this late in the game just like Google. Henry Blodget of SAI even suggested a future valuation of $1 billion or more for Twitter. We think anything is possible at this point.

A Dumb Question

Earlier we noted that Fred Wilson of Union Square Ventures initially felt the question of whether Twitter would monetize was the stupidest question in the world. He stated:

"It's like the stupidest question in the world: How's Twitter going to make money. It's like 'How was Google going to make money? Eventually Google was going to make money and they figured out how to do it and they figured out a great business, and I think the same thing is true with Twitter."

Wilson has recanted his statements, but we do agree that Twitter could very well duplicate Google's formula for success. However, Google is not Twitter and vice versa. We're talking about two completely different services. There's still a chance that Twitter won't find a successful revenue model. For all we know, luck may have been on Google's side. Up until recently, Twitter couldn't say the same with numerous outages and stability issues plaguing the service. Personally, I agree with Mark Evans sentiment that the question is not dumb at all. The question at hand could arguably be one of the most important questions any company could ever answer.

But Twitter won't survive if it doesn't find a great revenue model. This matters to all of us.

If Twitter fails to find a revenue model and hits the deadpool, it will have a chilling effect on innovation. That matters to all of us in the innovation economy. Sure, you could live without Twitter, but what about the funding chances for that brilliant idea of yours?

No Rush But It Has To Be Right

Twitter has top tier VC backing and enough cash to wait till they have scale and the right revenue model. But when they launch it has to be just right. In this climate, Twitter would probably not recover from a Beacon like fiasco. Nor can Twitter do well with a smorgasboard of revenue models, where none really moves the needle and all irritate users just a bit. It has to be one absolutely compelling model that enables Twitter revenue to scale the same way their usage scales.

Adwords Is The Gold Standard, But This Is Tougher

Adwords is the monetization gold standard. The fact that Google did not invent it is irrelevant. But how many new revenue models like this have we seen in the last 10 (or even 100) years? That's right. This is tough to get right.

But Twitter's challenge is even tougher. Google was not creating an entirely new type of service. It was Yet Another Search Engine, just a better one. They could just use/improve a revenue model developed at a different search engine. Twitter has created an entirely new type of medium, which is what makes it so exciting. So there is no obvious place to borrow a revenue model from.

This requires serious creativity. Yes the words "revenue" and "creativity" were just used in the same sentence, welcome to the new world!

Why Did Adwords Work? Two Acid Tests

These are the two things that Twitter's Magic Revenue Model has to achieve that Adwords did so brilliantly:

1. Do not irritate/interrupt the user and even occasionally add value to the user.

2. Provide a value proposition that is so compelling that even conservative buyers give it a try.

Show That The Wisdom Of Experts Works

My horoscope today told me to "pick a controversial topic and ask someone smart what they think about it." Well, I am taking that to extreme and asking lots of smart people what they think.

Wisdom of crowds is "so last cycle". Wisdom of experts is what really works. That is what we have here on ReadWriteWeb, lots of really smart innovation experts. Give us your one best idea for a Twitter Revenue Model and show us how it meets the 2 acid tests defined above.

While I still know nothing about game shows (I don't even have a TV at home), there is something intriguing about Amuso at a business model level. Amuso may be a good example of that rare breed of startup that is both viral and monetizable.

The rule of thumb is: "The more viral it is, the harder it is to monetize".

For example, Communication services such as Twitter and Hotmail are perfect for viral adoption but hard (not impossible, but hard) to monetize. They maybe great businesses, scale first and monetize later can be a great game plan if you have plenty of funding. But they are certainly hard to monetize.

What about Entertainment? YouTube is perfect for viral, but has monetization issues. Traditional entertainment is simple to monetize - you create something that people want and charge them for it - but is only viral as a bye-product of occasionally creating a great hit that everybody talks about.

Amuso says they are in the magic quadrant at the top right hand corner that is both viral and monetizable. Let's look at that a bit closer, poke around in the magic numbers.

How Amuso Works

In this case a picture says it all...

Parsing The Amuso Model

Here is the basic deal: user generated game shows.

COMPETE
Enter photo and video contests to show off your talent.
VOTE
Support your favorite entries and invite friends to come vote for yours.
WIN!
Win the most votes with your entries and take home the prizes!

Contestants want to get famous and make money from prizes. Who are they: Next Top Models, Pop Idols, Comedy Kings and more.

The "community" breaks down as follows:

10% Contestant
90% Members/Voters

Amuso takes a share of the prize money.

It Looks Like It Might Be Working

After only two months, Amuso has already attracted 100,000 monthly visitors, 20,000 registered contestants and paid out over $10,000 in cash prizes.

That is good traction by most start-up standards.

Investors Who Funded Skype

The founders are two ex-Yahoo!-ers, Jordi Bartomeu, CEO and Barak Rabinowitz. They told me that their investors had been investors in Skype. Which means that the investors have done well and understand how to get viral growth. For more on Skype investors see this old blog post from 2005.