Okay, as some of you may know, Youtube has been in the news a lot lately. Many of the stories have been focusing on how Youtube revenue continues to fall short of it's expenses. With the new story concerning the Iphone's video-sharing apps being bad for Youtube as it heralds another flood of poorly-shot amateur videos, some people (for whatever reason) have asked me how I feel about Youtube's "inevitable" fall.

First, there is nothing inevitable about it. Ignoring the fact that they have Google as a parent company, this is not the first time that a new type of internet business has struggled with becoming profitable. Remember Amazon? In their early years, their struggles with actually turning a profit became something of an running joke with people.

http://www.exploitationnow.com/comic.php?date=2000-08-02

These days, it's hard to even remember a time when Amazon was not the sales juggernaut that it is today. While Youtube doesn't have the advantage of actually selling product to people, it does have the advantage of widespread acceptance not just in internet culture but acceptance in our worldwide mainstream consciousness.

[When I say this, I realize that "worldwide" is a misnomer as some places struggle with basic necessities while other places have limits on what their citizens can view on the net. However, I don't really want to bother with a country-by-country breakdown.]

So, now that we've established that it is not inevitable that Youtube will sink beneath the waves, what can be done about it's situation? As has already been said, Youtube's widespread acceptance is what is killing it in profitability. Much has already been said about ads and advertising on Youtube so I won't go into that here. I also won't go into the need to continue to cooperate with outside forces such as networks concerning content. Trying to fight movie studios/networks over uploaded videos of movies/shows is a losing game for Youtube and they've been smart enough to recognize that. In the end, cooperation makes them look bad when they ask Youtube to remove things instead of Youtube and you aren't wasting money on legal.

No, the answer is for Youtube to stop being the internet archive for every video on the planet.

Now, some will protest this as there are already enough "filtering" ideas floating around out there. In this case, I'm not talking about filtering at the point of entry. That would kill a lot of the interest in Youtube. I'm discussing filtering by age. My idea would go like:

1) All videos over a year old are placed on legacy servers. For those who are not in the know, legacy server is a term used by companies to describe older servers which are used to support older/archived applications. These servers don't get as much support in the company because their applications are accessed less but it still allows people to access older applications.

2) All comments over a year old are deleted. A comment in and of itself takes up no space. Millions or even billions of comments take up a lot of space that noone is EVER going to look for. Even the original authors aren't going to be looking for that comment that they made in 2007 about a music video they saw at the time. I realize that some people seem to think that they are dispensing eternal gems of wisdom but, really, "ROFL. That was great!!!"-level commentisn't something that anyone including the authorwill come back to.

3) All videos that haven't had a comment in over a year get deleted. Yes, I know that someone will want that video of Grandpa doing the Funky Chicken at a strip club to be immortalized forever. However.....no one else cares. Most of the videos that we watch on Youtube are things that a small number of people watch once and never look at again even if we thought it was a great video at the time. (An example of this was a video that was passed on to me of two girls who agreed to kiss on camera for their boyfriends. Both girls were excellent kissers and, despite protestations at the beginning of the video, they seemed to really enjoy the kiss. At the time I did the reaction and thought it was exceptionally hot. However, not once have I ever gone back to search for that video.) This method also allows the people who originally uploaded the videos to keep it up on Youtube if they really think that something should be immortalized yet don't want to waste their own HDD space with the video. If a video is so unimportant that even the original creators can't be arsed to make a comment on it every year or so, then the video is just wasting space.

These three things could be set up with an automated script which would take minimal effort to create and maintain. While I admit that these methods wouldn't save as much as some of the harsher filtering methods that have been suggested, they wouldstill save Youtube a lot while maintaining their reputation as the "go-to" spot for videos.