Through Content ID, a service that protects copyright holders, enables them to profit from music appropriated by users, and lets them track user sentiment (via YouTube Insights), Google has found a way to monetize video socnet YouTube.

In general, Content ID enables companies, such as music labels, to track unofficial uses of their content, then decide whether to forbid that use (by stripping a video if its music, for example) or monetize it by adding music-purchasing buttons alongside the content.

The integration between Content ID and YouTube Insights enables companies to track viewer count, the most-viewed part of a video, audience demos and geographic region. Content owners can also compare audience demographics between "claimed videos" — that is, unofficial visual interpretations of a piece of music — and "official versions."

For example, Sony Music used Content ID to "claim" a user-generated wedding video, "JK Wedding Entrance Dance," which featured a Chris Brown song. The video rapidly became the label's eighth-most-popular video on YouTube, inspiring Sony to gauge how the video's demographics differed from its existing market and come up with new distribution, sales and marketing ideas.

A feature called Hot Spots also IDs the "hottest" parts users rewind to within a video, giving media firms an exact spot where users closed the clip and lost interest as well. With it, copyright owners can gauge why YouTube owners chose to mash up, edit and upload their videos the way they did.

The system also lets users track blogs and other sites where videos appear, as well as keywords people have used to find the videos in a search engine.

"Some partners have millions of claims in the system," said product manager David King of Content ID (via MediaPost). "From a marketing and business intelligence perspective, we needed to find a better way for them to understand their audience."

In toto, all major labels, studios and broadcasters in the US rely on Content ID to protect their copyrighted content. And over 1000 companies in the world have accessed the technology — not necessarily to stop users from appropriating copyrighted content, but also to better understand their behavior and decide how best to contribute to the conversation.

Data released from comScore in August 2009 reveals that 161 million US internet users watched an online video during that period. August in particular reached an all-time high, with over 25 billion views. Google Sites accounted for 10 billion of those, maintaining its No. 1 position in the US. (Microsoft ranked No. 2 with 547 million, followed by Viacom, with 539 million videos viewed.)