By now you've probably heard about the whole Viacom-YouTube situation.  Viacom demanded YouTube take down over 100,000 video clips containing material to which the network conglomerate owned.  YouTube honored the request.  Kate Kaye, writing for ClickZ, has an interesting post that fits very nicely as an "aftermath" piece to recent fiasco.

Kaye's post looks at the value of consumer generated video to companies… and notice that it differs depending on the company.

In particular, she looks at a company called ViTrue whose technology platform runs not only Viacom-owned VH1's Talentload.tv site, but also contest sites for TBS, Planet Smoothie, and snack food vendor Lance.  From the perspective of ViTrue's CEO, Reggie Bradford, the first step is to establish an audience for branded video destinations.

A report released last week by Compete showed two main trends:  1) The Google+YouTube combo controls about half of the world's online video watching and 2) The top 10 online video sites are general-purpose destinations covering a wide variety of topics.  Viacom's move to have its content pulled from YouTube underscores the need of brands to keep their content at their own destinations… if those sites are ever to succeed.

That's why Bradford and his company have focused first and foremost on building recognition for destination video sites and less on advertising.  Eventually, he said, advertising would be a component of the branded video experience.  But for advertising on those sites to be a truly viable option, eyeballs have to be collected: 

"We're creating a meaningful user experience between brand media companies and target consumers," he said, adding, "Once that gels, we can start looking at distribution of ads and creating monetization of content."

Kaye suggests that the smaller niche video sites, like VH1 and TBS, might be the first to succeed at monetizing online video in a meaningful way.  As I've said numerous times, the more targeted the advertising, the better.  Brand sites and niche video portals could better target advertising for their audiences than a general-purpose site that must cater to a larger audience.

Whatever the outcome, Viacom's move could be the first of many to come as more brands move to create and control their own user-generated media.