$6 billion has been invested by venture capital firms into American online video sites since 2005. And that's against only one real payday, Google's $1.65 billion purchase of YouTube, which has only garnered revenue in the low eight figures. True, advertisers spent $17 billion at the television upfronts, as Silicon Alley Insider's Michael Leamonth points out, giving an idea of the potential market that's being chased.

But the online percentage of that upfront spend has been slow to rise over the few years since YouTube was still being incubated at Sequoia, and remains in the single digits while the advertising industry is bracing for a downturn. At a certain point, VCs will come to their senses and stop subsidizing the bandwidth that makes these sites possible, while cable and network sites and startups like Hulu, with the copyright permissions and the content that sponsors love, will continue to outpace any revenue garnered from user-generated content — which one study estimates will account for only 4 percent of the industry's already paltry online video revenues.