MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. – An article by Benjamin Wayne posted April 9 to Silicon Alley Insider makes the case that YouTube is sagging under the weight of fixed costs that only will continue to rise exponentially, ad infinitum, until the day when the project that is too big and too important to fail, fails.

“The problem lies with the bean-counters,” Wayne wrote. “According to a report by Credit Suisse, YouTube is on track to lose roughly $470 million in 2009. No matter Google’s $116-billion market cap: a half-billion-dollar loss on a single property, even one as large as YouTube, is a bitter pill to swallow.”

Wayne makes a strong case that the economics tell the story, and winning scenarios are difficult to imagine.

“The economics are hard to overcome,” he wrote. “Assuming YouTube delivers the 75 billion streams that Credit Suisse projects for 2009, and assuming YouTube manages to slot an ad for every stream (which is, practically speaking, impossible, given the nature of much of their content), YouTube would have to achieve a $9.48 CPM for every video impression shown,” says Wayne.

Inevitably there will be blowback to Wayne’s contention. Many people feel the inherent value in the fact that so many millions of people will become intractably wedded to their cache of content on YouTube will somehow, in some way, provide a king’s ransom in revenue for the video giant and its Google patriarch. This may be true, but that revenue may have more in common with ransom than it likes if future revenue is secured by what amounts to holding content hostage. This is why the issue of who owns and controls the copyright to content uploaded to tube sites and social networking sites is so important, and cannot be left to the government or corporations to decide. Instead, we all need to work together to find equitable solutions and new models that surely are out there; models that will remunerate fairly all parties with a stake in the production and distribution of online content.

Read the full Silicon Alley story here.