Widgets have been primarily a marketing tool, used to drive traffic to a destination site, with Youtube being the most obviously successful at doing this. Once there, monetizing traffic on your own site is uncontroversial. But few others have been able to
YouTube fills the role of that place to get prerecorded video in the same way CNN fills the role of live news. Currently, no other site comes close to enough critical mass needed to serve the value of this entry point.
