YouTube is a shell company for entertainment production. Obviously the first thing they outsourced (or the more politically correct term “crowdsourced”) when they started was the production aspects. They coopted you into creating content for free, so they could serve it up to others. The next thing they did was outsource/crowdsource the role of program director, by creating “channels” where folks could select line-ups of quality programming. Next, of course, was the ratings system, which they tasked the users with by creating stars, comments, and reccomendations. Along the way they co-opted the users into marketing and distribution, too, when they made their videos remotely embeddable. And then of course, they tried to make money with it, by selling their own advertisements. Somewhere along the line, they realized that they were exceptionally poor at this and weren’t able to make a profit, so now they’re co-opting the users into doing that as well. Here’s the kicker. After you’ve produced, acted in, rated, programmed, marketed, distributed AND sold advertisements for your own work, they LET you keep 55% of the money.