In Bio, there is endless academic debate about the Drosophila. In AI, the common ground for discourse is Chess. In web services’ business models, the battlefield of choice is YouTube.

I think the main reason why the blogosphere spends so much time talking about YouTube is because their traction is so exciting. However, in addition to this traction, the blogosphere focuses conversation on YouTube because it’s convenient common ground for a discussion on business models. No one needs to preface a blog post with an explanation of what YouTube is, and no one is divulging confidential information by discussing YouTube. Therefore, it’s ideal fodder for debate regarding the future of business models in web services.

I have put together a brief set of highlights from the endless YouTube business model debate.

I’ll start the highlight reel with an old post from an opinion column on Engadget written by Stephen Speicher. He argues that pre-roll ads plus rev share will drive higher quality content on YouTube, thus creating a “Win-win-win” scenario (Content producer, YouTube, and end-consumer all win). Since Stephen’s post we have seen sites like Revver take Stephan’s idea and run with it.

No debate would be complete without “the contrarian.” Mark Cuban has been predicting the downfall of YouTube for a while now because of their reliance on content that violates copyright.

MarketerToday brings an interesting perspective to the debate by focusing on YouTube’s target advertiser. Apparently, YouTube’s ideal advertisers “must be comfortable getting ripped to pieces.” They context for this concern is the user-generated content surrounding (and likely critiquing) the advertising.

Fred Wilson takes a solid educated guess at YouTube’s revenue. It sounds like a difficult task given YouTube’s secrecy, but Fred’s post clearly outlines all his assumptions in a spreadsheet. Fred pegs net revenue around $150MM. Calcanis disagrees.

Ashkan Karbasfrooshan declares YouTube to be wildly profitable with a good analysis of the splash page CPM. Ashkan’s analysis is a reasonable guess of the short-term limits of YouTube’s market cap.

I’ll end my highlights with the CEO himself. Chad Hurley speaks elusively on the subject of YouTube’s business model in this interview blog post with Mark Glaser of Media Shift.