YouTube Ads Turn Videos Into Revenue

YouTube is an increasingly fruitful place for advertisers. And although users may post clips of programming protected by copyright law, content owners are allowing the videos to stay up -- for a split of YouTube's ad revenue.

Remarkably, more than one-third of the two billion views of YouTube videos with ads each week are uploaded without the copyright owner's permission but left up by the owner's choice. They are automatically recognized by YouTube, using a system called Content ID that scans videos and compares them to material provided by copyright owners. Those two billion views, a 50 percent increase over last year, according to the company, are just 14 percent of the videos viewed each week on the Google-owned site. But that's enough to turn YouTube profitable this year, analysts say.