the economics of free

Rain Man would say now "YouTube sucks"

While all well and good, it actually emerges that giving things away for free is a profit seeking model. Hulu for example has been making money by re-airing digital copies of popular shows and selling brief advertising space embedded in the episodes. The reason YouTube makes no money (or in fact loses almost half a billion dollars a year) is the content it uses often sucks and nobody wants to be associated with it in the first place. It suffers an additional problem in that it's actual popular content is somewhat difficult to predict and thus successfully market the things that "don't suck", or at least the things people actually viewed in great frequency. Hulu already has a built-in predictor in the form of the relative popularity of a given show, particularly with the millennial generation probably more likely to find cable TV annoying.

The reason the internet as a whole has failed to monetise everything is simply because not everything that is produced or shared via the internet has any monetary value or even seeks such value. I know for instance that I do not produce such things. Most of what is produced in the sort of democratised way of the Internet actually is quite worthless in economic terms, but it is subsidised by the things that are shared that do have some economic value. There are specific industries (journalism for example) that needed to draw this distinction and somehow monetise their products but that have instead moved the other direction and sought to give away more free content by producing more crap content instead of focusing on the actual embedded advantage of journalism (namely, the freedom of the press to do investigative reporting and produce quality works that people will read and be informed by).