If you were looking for a signal flare to go up that YouTube would begin running pre- or post-roll ads on the videos put on its site this is it. Co-founder Chad Hurley says that the company will soon begin sharing revenue with its users. The article doesn't explicitly say that advertising will be added to the user-generated videos but it's not too far of a stretch.

The $1.65 billion that Google paid for YouTube back in November isn't going to last forever, especially not at the exponential rate videos are being added, and a lot of that money is going to have to go to pay for server space. In order to launch something like revenue sharing there needs to be sustainable income that exceeds operating expenses. So far I've seen nothing to indicate that the banner ads and such currently on the site are putting YouTube in that position.

As Rafat Ali at PaidContent points out, though, this is extremely tentative talk about something that might happen at some point maybe. Best to wait until something actually happens before devoting too many more brain-hours to this idea.