Last year we posed this question to bloggers: Would you be happy with 100 million visitors and 5 billion hits a month on your website – if you were losing $40 million a month to service them? That’s the question that Google has been asking itself; the hemorrhaging website in question is Google’s corporate subsidiary, YouTube. The very amateurism that had made YouTube the Fabulous Behemoth was draining its resources.

Google realized it was time to stop giving content away and to recognize that it is an entertainment medium that has every right to monetize that content. In short, Google had to go Hollywood, with professionally made videos generating advertising revenue.

The New York Times‘s Brad Stone has looked in on YouTube and found its strategy beginning to take grip. That seems like a good idea given the fact that it attracts more than 2 billion views daily.

Stone writes that “Google executives said in January that the site, which has perennially lost money, had increased its revenue, and that ad space on YouTube’s home pages for 20 countries was sold out every day toward the end of 2009. Many analysts say YouTube could break even this year for the first time, after five years of large losses generated by its high bandwidth and storage costs.”

To learn how you can monetize your website when it attracts 60 billion views every month – or even a mere 6 billion – read At YouTube, Adolescence Begins at 5.

Of course, not all of us are happy to see YouTube go Hollywood.  Last year we wrote:

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

Every Blogger owes a debt of gratitude to newspapers and magazines. This posting relies on original research and reporting performed by The New York Times.