For some time now there has been much soul searching within Google about how to turn YouTube, the popular video-sharing site it bought nearly two years ago for $1.65 billion, into a web property that comes somewhere close to breaking even. Forget profitable. That won't happen any time soon, not with YouTube's escalating bandwidth costs estimated to exceed $1 million (£500,000) per day, and not with copyright lawyers swooping in to threaten legal action whenever some teenager uploads a music video or last night's football match.

Let's face it, nobody in the media, telecoms or internet industries but the gaudily profitable Google could afford to absorb such losses. Yes, by virtue of YouTube, Google has a lock on the global online video market (though in the UK, the BBC's iPlayer is a significant rival), serving up tens of billions of videos each month. It just cannot figure out how to monetise all those eyeballs, and quite possibly never will.

Shareholders are not yet pressuring the company to turn YouTube into a moneymaker, but at some point all publicly traded companies are forced to justify their billion-dollar purchases. Google will not be an exception in this case.

And the moment it happens will be a dark day for us all, if it robs us of the pop-culture brilliance of shows like Italian Spiderman, which attracts the attention of people from San Francisco to Sydney. Mindful of the bottom line, no company is going to want to foot the bill for distributing every would-be auteurs' next smash hit.

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  Bernhard Warner

For those of you who have not (yet) been following the adventures of Italian Spiderman, I should mention here it's not actually Italian. (Spider-Man connoisseurs may say there is nothing Spider-Man about it either). It's a parody, the work of a young Australian film troupe that goes by the name Alrugo Entertainment. In the latest four-minute episode, Italian Spiderman is caught in a high-speed motorcycle pursuit. Chased by the villainous Captain Maximum and his goons, Italian Spiderman is briefly knocked off his bike by a fist-full of snakes, then drugged by a cloud of purple smoke before the screen goes black and we're told to tune in next week for the next installment. It's high-quality retro-inspired video snacking, replete with a mysterious asteroid, bad guys in rubber masks, a superhero with an unsightly paunch and furry 'stache. The dialog is in an appalling Italian (with English subtitles), but the Sixties-style soul soundtrack is pretty damn groovy. And our world is better for it. Italian Spiderman is one of those web phenomena that would have been impossible to pull off a year or two ago.

The crew posted a 3min 19sec trailer in November, and it didn't take long to catch on. The first five episodes and the trailer have clocked more than three million viewings, and adoring fans have left nearly 10,000 comments on online message boards voicing their approval.

"We shot the trailer in a week,” Dario Russo, the producer and director, told me in a phone interview this week. “It was a third-year (university) production assignment. It quickly drew 50,000 views on YouTube. The local (film) industry knew about it rapidly from word of mouth from that point. That's when we asked for funding."

Russo went to the South Australian Film Corporation and received A$10,000 (£4,900) to finance a feature-length version of Italian Spiderman, which is half-way through production. Each episode will hit the net first, a strategy Russo believes is crucial if they are ever going to sell the idea on as a television, film or straight-to-DVD venture.

"We have no concerns of cannibalisation by putting it on the net free. That's where the fan base lives," he says, adding that the aim of Italian Spiderman is to build the market first and worry about revenues later.

There is some precedent for turning a freebie into a money-maker in the film industry. Two years ago, I spoke to the young Finnish film director Timo Vuorensola, who sold more than €100,000 (£80,000) worth of DVDs of his Star Trek parody, a movie that he urged fans to download free using BitTorrent. Not only did they buy the DVD and movie merchandise, some fans even pitched in by translating subtitles in various languages and helping to design set pieces.

Similarly, Russo and his team have built enough global buzz for Italian Spiderman to make it one of Australia's most-watched films of the year (even if the film is chopped up into three-minute segments). Sure enough, when I spoke to Russo he was in the middle of a photo shoot for a local newspaper: fielding calls from the press from around the world is part of his life these days.

"YouTube has been great for us as filmmakers, for the exposure," Russo says, adding that MySpace and Yahoo! have also been quick to promote the episodes.

So, a note to Google shareholders: don't demand of Google management that YouTube ever make money. The world will be a poorer place if you succeed.

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Bernhard Warner, a freelance journalist and media consultant, writes about technology, the internet and media industries. He can be reached at techscribe@gmail.com

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