The coming dramatic decline of YouTube?

Mark Cuban had this the other day: The Coming Dramatic Decline of Youtube.

What is it about youtube.com that has made it so successful so quickly ? Is it the amazing quality of user generated content ? Is it a broadband fueled obsession with watching short videos ?

No & No.

Youtube’s rapid ascension to the top of the traffic ranks can be attributed to two and only two reasons:

1. Free Hosting from any 3rd Party site
Hey, why pay for bandwidth for a video if you dont have to ? A blog, a myspace page, an email, any website. Just throw in some html in Youtube.com foots the bill for bandwidth. Sure you are limited by size of file, but so what. Just chop it up into parts 1 through N. Its fast, easy and free.

Come to our website and use our video hosting services, we can party like its 1999 all over again !

2. Copyrighted music and video. …

This so reminds me of the early days of Napster. They were the first to tell you it wasnt illegal. They didnt host anything but an index to link to all the illegal downloaders. Youtube doesnt upload anything illegal and will take down whatever you ask them to. Sounds legit right ? …

And the New York Times follows up Saturday with this: YouTube’s Video Poker.

YouTube has also become a vast repository of video taken without permission from television shows and movies, not to mention home movies constructed — with nary a cent paid in royalties — from commercial music and imagery.

Mr. Hurley was surrounded by curious media executives at Allen & Company’s annual Sun Valley mogulfest in July. They wondered: friend or foe? Is he earnestly working to make YouTube and its exuberant users conform to the existing standards of copyright law and contractual obligations? Or is he cynically flouting the law to enable YouTube to grow rapidly, calculating that he will be able to cut a more advantageous deal later, or perhaps sell the company to someone else who will be able to sort through the mess of liabilities?

JD Lasica, founder of Inside Social Media, is also a fiction author and the co-founder of the cruise discovery engine Cruiseable. See his About page, contact JD or follow him on Twitter.