In the supposed cutting-edge business of online video, old looks more and more like the new new, which makes you wonder: is the Web's most evolved content medium actually devolving?

Just this week, Yahoo! announced the partial shuttering of Maven, a company they purchased in early 2008 in order to, in their own words, create a "state-of-the-art consumer video and advertising experiences on Yahoo.com and Yahoo’s network of leading premium video publishers across the web”.

Not so much.

Yahoo!'s Maven-driven vision for the future of web video turned into a 17-month-long nightmare fraught with logistical and technological failures for both Yahoo! and their partners, let alone consumers.

While Yahoo!'s capacity to polish the silverware as the ship goes down seems to know no
bounds in recent years, the fading web giant has company in failing to advance online video model:
Web video shops, such as EQAL, 60 Frames announced exits from the original content game recently, Microsoft has pulled back on its Soapbox video, and the grand daddy of them all, YouTube, still struggles to court premium content providers in hopes of turning a significant buck.

And therein lies the age-old quandary the Yahoos of the web world keep asking through to today: How do you make money off this damn thing?

There's no doubt people view gobs of video online: YouTube still grows at a whopping rate, up by 16 per cent in April with 16,785,432,000 videos streamed out of the U.S. Yet very few people click on the associated ads, usually at a lower rate than even graphical or text ads embedded in text-based web pages, and thus commanding very low ad rates. YouTube's lucky if they even get advertisers to hawk their wares around videos in the first place, as a majority of the site's content falls in the homespun Cat on Toilet seat genre. You can't blame Starbucks and GE for taking a pass.

Putting the medium in the hands of the masses is a fine concept that lies at the heart
of the Web's original ethos and still largely egalitarian playing field. But when it comes to top-quality video content that also serves the almighty dollar you have to look an old-school model, which serve as the underpinning strategy at nascent Hulu.com, one of the few bright beacons for the future of online video.

For the unaware (which is a lot of us in Canada, as Hulu's blocked north of the border due to rights issues. You can Google "US IP address," for a "creative" work around, but that's another story) Hulu emerged as a response from major U.S. TV networks, sick of seeing most of their content illegally uploaded onto YouTube without reaping the benefits. NBC, Fox and the rest of the studio/network gang got together to create a video portal, featuring their own popular TV shows in order to court consumers and advertisers through full length shows, such as 'Lost' and '30 Rock'. Think of Hulu as a super-network.

Since the TV writer's strike that ended in early 2008, Hulu has continued to gain in
popularity scoring, along with the TV network's own individual sites, 53 per cent of the
ad-supported online TV market in 2008 and 10 per cent of the total video market share, according to a report by Screen Digest.

YouTube has recently tried to claw back some of the premium content market share with its new Shows section, but according to Tubemogul, the 3,215 full-length TV episodes available only average 7,407.9 views per episode.

Screen Digest reports Hulu brought in $45 million in ad revenue of a total US online TV market that generated $448 million in 2008. Further, Screen Digest predicts the total revenue for broadcaster-supported online video in the US will grow to $1.45 billion by 2013.

Big numbers in isolation. Until you compare them to television, projected to generate $67-billion in revenue by 2013, even as the original boob-tube audience share continues to decline.

Video-based web destinations have also seen some success in the branded content concept, whereby one advertiser sponsors original web content, either through video player page "takeovers" or product integration in storylines (See a 'Bruno' movie page takeover here).

But again, the dollars in branded content are still minute, and have shown more success in capturing target audiences' attention through crafty integrated marketing rather than direct profit. Truthfully, even the branded content concept just twists what Ed Sullivan did in the 50s with acts such as Elvis "brought to you by Mercury - the big 'M'!".

It's back to the future all over again.