Who Gets Paid?

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/25/business/media/25youtube.html?ref=technology

If you have not heard of Susan Boyle, she is a singing sensation on the British show "Britain's Got Talent." Her performances are immensely popular, and they can be seen all over Youtube. Despite the immense success she has online, the companies are finding it difficult to make money off of her success, because the videos of her singing are owned by multiple companies and distributed across the web on different web sites. This shows one of the weakness of media distribution over the internet, because it is difficult to get revenue to the owners of the content, given the degrees of separation that can result from the viewer and the creator. This also explains the commercial success of site such as Youtube and Google, as they act as a bottleneck for such distribution (for videos and links respectively), and are in the most favorable position to generate advertising revenue.