Well yes and no. That is a very complex question and one that might be better for an actual conversation. Youtube and Vimeo want to make money. They don't take

Well yes and no. That is a very complex question and one that might be better for an actual conversation. Youtube and Vimeo want to make money. They don't take kindly to you hitting their revenue streams which are, generally, ads. However, they do work with people very well, though it is slow and bureaucratic. So to give you the simple answers: Was it possible for you to monetize the videos as you saw fit? Hell no. But it was possible for us to monetize the videos. Were you allowed to place your own ads with them? Yes Or strip Youtube's ads and place your own in the metadata? We worked with them to accomplish something like this yes. Or did you have another way to monetize? Yes, this too :) We made a bit of money on this system we built and it was more or less self sustaining. The issue was that it actually wasn't that profitable. We had another product which was almost like a little helper we made internally for ourselves that turned out to be a TON more lucrative so we gave up on the video and image network and eventually shut it down. Sometimes you have to just know when to fold them.