Quick quiz for bloggers. You’d be happy with 100 million visitors and 5 billion hits a month on your website, right?

Before you respond, here’s part 2: would you be happy with all that traffic if you were losing $40 million a month to service it?

If you’re Google, the answer is emphatically yes. The website in question is YouTube.

How could that be? Well, about three months ago we noted that despite a veritable Niagara Falls of visits to its site, monetizing YouTube’s content and making Google’s $1.65 billion investment back “has not proven to be a slam-dunk thanks to the complexities and potential liabilities of copyright.” Even all that advertising revenue generated by billions of clicks did not add up to break-even let alone a profit.

To turn things around, Google realized it was time to stop giving content away. Furthermore, it had to recognize that it is an entertainment medium that has every right to monetize that content. In short, Google had to go Hollywood.

Google has now gone Hollywood.

Brian Stelter and Miguel Helft of the New York Times report that the company has reached agreement with such glittering media outfits as Sony and MGM to bring law, order, and revenue to what is now a slapdash enterprise. The vehicle for this turnaround is professionally made videos generating advertising revenue. They cite Hulu, a site that carries reruns of TV shows like “The Office”, as the competitor to beat. But they are also aggressively developing a music videos program. “Last week the site announced a joint venture with Universal Music Group to create Vevo, a separate destination for music videos,” the reporters tell us.

Google chief executive Eric Schmidt assures us that the site would continue to carry non-professional videos.” They may not be the financial lifeblood of the company, but they are its driving spirit. We certainly hope that will be the case. As we wrote when the scheme was first announced, “The very zeitgeist of the 21st century represented by the ingenuity, the spontaneous combustiveness, the wacky hilarity, the instant, viral, visceral responsiveness of a public that knew what it loved and voted for it with billions of mouseclicks, may now be giving way to the slick creations of Hollywood television and film companies backed by studio and network money, branded sponsors, and calculating marketers.”

How do we feel about the westcoastification of YouTube? Here’s one opinion – mine:

Well, Hollywood, there are millions of us who don’t want YouTube to mature. We like it just the way it is — embarrassingly sophomoric, amateurish, LOL hilarious, pathetic, dopey, dirty, funky, and utterly counterculture. It belongs to We the People. Can’t you go co-opt some other industry? We can think of a lot of them that could use your genius, your money and your values.

Richard Curtis