Youtube Web Site

Chad Hurley, co-founder of YouTube Inc., says he always gets the same question: "When are you guys going to make money?" The answer he gave television executives at a broadcasting conference last month: "I don't think there's going to be a silver bullet." That's why YouTube, Google Inc.'s enormously popular video-sharing site, keeps loading up on new advertising formats: It's trying to see what works.

When University of Central Florida junior Nicole Nissim got stumped in trigonometry, she checked out what was showing on YouTube. Nissim typically scours the video-sharing website for clips of bands and comedy skits. But this time she wasn't there to procrastinate on her homework. It turned out YouTube was also full of math videos. After watching a couple, the psychology major said, she finally understood trig equations and how to make graphs.

Warner Music Group's videos began disappearing from YouTube this weekend, the casualty of a contract impasse between the music company and the Internet's dominant video site. Negotiations broke down last week over licensing fees for Warner's music and videos, say people familiar with the discussions who were not authorized to speak publicly.

The removal of Warner Music Group's videos from YouTube over the weekend highlights the growing tension between music labels and websites over what is becoming an important source of revenue for the beleaguered recorded-music industry: advertising and licensing fees from music videos, the foundation that built MTV but which has now largely migrated to the Internet.

The graffiti artist who gained notoriety on YouTube with his daredevil tagging exploits pleaded guilty today to nearly three dozen felony vandalism counts and was released from jail after serving time since last May, prosecutors said. Cyrus Yazdani, one of Los Angeles' most prolific taggers, who is known in the tagging world as "Buket," admitted to 32 counts with the special allegation that damage exceeded $50,000. Judge Steven J.

YouTube is being blocked by Brazil's second-largest fixed-line telephone operator in response to a judicial order banning a steamy video of supermodel Daniela Cicarelli, the telephone company said Monday. Brasil Telecom said it blocked access to YouTube across a wide swath of Latin America's most populous country late Friday after receiving the order. The widely viewed video shows Cicarelli and Brazilian banker Renato Malzoni in intimate scenes along a beach near the Spanish city of Cadiz.

Twentieth Century Fox Film Corp. has subpoenaed YouTube, Google Inc.'s video-sharing site, to reveal the identity of a user who uploaded four episodes of the TV show "24" ahead of their airing. The subpoena filed Jan. 18 in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California requests that San Mateo, Calif.-based YouTube help identify the subscriber so that Fox can stop the infringing immediately. The subscriber also uploaded 12 episodes of "The Simpsons."

Chad Hurley, co-founder of YouTube Inc., said his wildly successful website would start sharing revenue with its millions of users. Hurley said one of the major proposed innovations was a way to allow users to be paid for content. San Bruno, Calif.-based YouTube, which was sold to Mountain View, Calif.-based Google Inc. for $1.65 billion in November, has become an Internet phenomenon since it began to catch on in late 2005. About 70 million videos are viewed on the site each day.

Viacom Inc.'s demand Friday that YouTube remove more than 100,000 clips from the popular online video site is more than brinksmanship at the bargaining table. It's a battle of the brands. The entertainment conglomerate's insistence that YouTube remove such coveted content as highlights from "The Daily Show With Jon Stewart" and "The Colbert Report" signals that it believes these brands have enough cachet to attract an online audience, with or without YouTube.

Google Inc.'s YouTube.com agreed to display warnings on its website in Japanese not to upload copyrighted materials to the popular Internet service, a group of Japanese media firms said Tuesday. The decision comes as a part of ongoing talks between YouTube and the Japan Society for Rights of Authors, Composers and Publishers, which last year pushed the San Mateo, Calif.-based company to erase 30,000 video clips from its pages because of copyright infringement.