If you're wondering what Yahoo Video is, don't blame yourself. Yahoo's video site, the descendant of the foolhardy $5.7 billion acquisition of Mark Cuban's Broadcast.com in 2000, is a grab-bag of funny cat videos, sports and news clips, and third-rate Web originals.

Yahoo Video has struggled to compete with YouTube's reputation as an all-in-one destination and Hulu's clearly curated collection of primetime entertainment. Its prehistoric video technology and Dallas operations center, a legacy of the Broadcast.com deal, has meant that it costs Yahoo more to serve up a video than Google. It hasn't helped that the video group has had a revolving door of leadership. Onetime Yahoo Music chief Ian Rogers ran it briefly before leaving for a startup last year, handing it over to Yahoo Media chief Scott Moore, who promptly split for Microsoft.

Yahoo has also shuttered Jumpcut, its user-generated video site, in favor of Flickr, which now hosts what it calls "long photos" — mostly personal clips taken on digital cameras. Cuban, the founder of Broadcast.com, predicted that most videos on the Internet would be home movies. Shame he didn't tell Yahoo that before he sold it a $5.7 billion bag of goods.

Update: A tipster at Yahoo points out that Broadcast.com wasn't the only bad investment Yahoo made in video. More recently, its $200 million purchase of Maven Networks went sour:

I'm not sure if any tech news blogs have carried this info but there has been a significant shift in Yahoo! video strategy. For the past month or so, and last week in particular the entire Y! video product management team and key engineers have either moved on, resigned, or let go. For a long time the team has been pushing the management to take on a more "Hulu-like" or premium content approach but with portfolio rationalization and internal politics, the key guys pushing for this change have been moved out. Last year Yahoo! spent almost $200 M purchasing white label publishing company - Maven, that strategy is also out of the door, video is now in a sad state in Yahoo! abandoned and in maintainence mode. The sad part is that folks currently leading the video charge and the ones with poor vision, execution capability, and responsible for putting the company $200M in the hole! Yahoo! continues to amaze me. Hulu, YouTube, and others will now be leaders in video monetization.

On New Year's Day, after a fight on a BART train, police pulled Oscar Grant and others off the train at the Fruitvale station near Oakland's airport. Witnesses with cell phones and videocameras captured Johannes Mehserle, a police officer for the BART rail system, in the act of shooting Grant. A local TV station ran one of these clips Sunday. But Grant's death wasn't widely reported until cameraphone footage was posted until Tuesday, sparking protests in downtown Oakland Wednesday night which turned into a riot.

The reason why is clear: Another death by cop in America's inner cities, rendered in bloodless black-and-white text, would go unremarked by readers. But the video, which shows Mehserle, seemingly unprompted, reaching for his gun and shooting Grant, is chilling. Mehserle resigned Wednesday.

BART officials first claimed there was no surveillance tape — then said they'd discovered one that didn't show the shooting incident. Even that evidence was impounded as part of the investigation, leaving the witnesses' YouTube clips as the only record.

Was Mehserle reaching for his Taser, as some suggest? We still don't know that and other key facts.. A vibrant local news industry might have done more on the story before the Internet made it big news. But Oakland, which has one local paper, the Oakland Tribune, run by a chain known for cost-cutting, is emblematic of the increasingly wide swathes of America which go uncovered by proper journalism.

It's easy to celebrate mediarogue, the YouTube poster who some might call a "citizen journalist." But isn't it disturbing to think that, as easily as it became a national scandal, Grant's shooting might well have disappeared into the morass of mind-numbing clips offered on Google's online-video schlock factory — a death unnoted by our fickle, impatient minds?

AOL France bid a classy adieu when Time Warner closed its Internet outpost in the country last year, offering a perfectly executed single-take lip-dub.

The online group singalong, a triumph of Internet narcissism, has become an elaborate art form with its own rules. The offering from eBay France breaks most of them, ensuring its lameness.

But what else should we expect from a company which has coasted on its auction monopoly and failed to innovate as Amazon.com and Google snuck up from behind? The eBay video is an imitative pastiche, with moves culled from Broadway shows and music videos with no rhyme, reason, or style. Much like eBay's own website.

Unlikely, save for one determined Atlanta fan with a taste for hip-hop cartoons. Superdeluxe's staff was laid off in May, but it took the Time Warner subsidiary seven months to move a small portion of its video library over to AdultSwim.com and shut the site down.

Turner isn't the only one finding it hard to get a laugh. Funny Or Die, which has never matched the popularity of "The Landlord," the bossy-baby clip from Will Ferrell, has morphed into a collection of cooking videos and videogame walkthroughs. Heavy.com is in management disarray, and is trying to make money on its advertising network rather than funny videos. eBaum's World, bought by the older brother of Google founder Larry Page, is entwined in a baroque financial disaster. And JibJab, famed for its political-satire musical numbers, seems to make more of its money through serving as an advertising agency for the likes of OfficeMax and Honda.

Why the serial failures? One could point to the struggling market for online advertising, or sponsors' unease with the racier fare preferred by the young male demographic they're hoping to reach.

But I think it has more to do with the nature of humor. Telling someone that they're about to hear a really funny joke just raises expectations. A website dedicated to laffs will find its viewers inevitably drifting away as the gags go flat. Sad as it is to say, people go to YouTube prepared to be bored — and then they're delighted to find something mildly amusing, becauses it's so unexpected. There's no business to be built around such idle surfing — but it's the very nature of how people get their laughs.

Need more examples? Here are commercials from MSN, Yahoo, and Ask.com. (I found them using Google and YouTube, a Google-owned video-hosting site.) Do any of them articulate a reason to switch search engines?

Everything that makes YouTube a time-wasting creative desert is just fodder for Gripp's brilliant mind. Take "Young Girl Talking About Herself," which remixes clips of well, exactly that, paired with lyrics of a frenetic energy that reminds me of They Might Be Giants or Weird Al Yankovic.

"If this catchy tune were made into a real 3 minute song I'd download it," one commenter writes in a YouTube comment. But that misunderstands Gripp's genius. If he were just copying Yankovic's schtick, he'd do classic three-minute rock songs about the Internet, designed for radio play; or he'd just carelessly slap a bunch of viral-video references into a song, like Weezer.

How backwards! Three minutes might be right for archaic formats like the LP, but it's wrong for the Web. Most of Gripp's video-mashup songs are one minute or less in length — exactly right for the YouTube attention span. The joke doesn't get played out. It's over before you know it, and leaves you hungry for more — click, click, click. But enough words. Behold the brilliance of Parry Gripp!

"Shopping Penguin"

"Dramatic Chipmunk Hey"

"Spaghetti Cat (I Weep for You)"

"Hamster on a Piano (Eating Popcorn)"

"Cat Flushing a Toilet Music Video"

"This Is My Ringtone"

"Robot Hamster"

"Puppy Time"

"Do You Like Waffles?"

ComScore, a Web-traffic measurement firm, reports that visitors to Hulu.com dropped 11 percent from October to November, when it only drew 4.8 million viewers. NBC.com dropped by half, from 14.1 million to 7.2 million. Which only makes sense, says Peter Kafka at MediaMemo, since NBC.com and Hulu were the two places where people could see legal copies of Tina Fey's Palin impressions for Saturday Night Live.

Look, I realize Palin has gone back to Juneau to sort through all the clothing the Republican National Committee bought for her. But new media badly needs some star power. Can't we give her her own YouTube channel or something?

The star of the Times piece is Michael Buckley, a fast-talking and overbearingly gay celebrity commentator — think Ted Casablanca, if Ted Casablanca lived in Connecticut. Buckley says he makes $100,000 a year on YouTube ads. Google sells the ads and splits the revenue with Buckley, as it does with other video creators it has dubbed "partners."

It just gets worse from there, if you're looking for online originals. Take "Fred," the most-subscribed partner with 700,000-some regular viewers. A guy pretends to be a six-year-old, Fred Figglehorn, who speaks with an Alvin and the Chipmunks voice. (Yes, that's the extent of the schtick.)

These crap shows are the future of moneymaking on the Web — trite reworkings of tropes that we first watched in basic-cable reruns, lying on the floor of our dens?

If it's bad news for the culture, take schadenfreudian delight in the thought that it's bad news for Google, too, which spent $1.65 billion buying YouTube and is thought to be shelling out hundreds of millions more a year on servers and bandwidth.

At least Google can sell ads on partner videos. Most of the clips on YouTube are of such questionable ownership and quality that Google doesn't dare sell ads next to them. A Google spokesman says "hundreds of YouTube partners are making thousands of dollars a month." Well, that's vague enough, but it tells us that Google's annual take from these videos runs somewhere in the tens of millions of dollars. It turns out that crappy video is a crappy business. Justice!

Eric Garland, CEO of an online piracy research firm, told the Wall Street Journal Disney's investment in 56.com is "ironic" and "shocking." John Ball, Steamboat's managing director, says the company invested in part to help 56.com curb pirated videos. But 56.com is just one of six Chinese companies in Steamboat's portfolio, all of which aim to distribute movies and videogames online.

And that's the dirty secret of Disney and other media companies. They don't ultimately care about shows like Hannah Montana. What matters is their channels of distribution, through which such evanescent fare courses — and 56.com promises to be another one. Viacom isn't suing YouTube for $1 billion because it's upset about piracy. It's upset about piracy happening on a channel it doesn't own.

Slapping an infomercial on YouTube will generate far worse publicity than talking to friendly Detroit-based hacks on the automotive beat, who are every bit as dependent on the U.S. car industry for their paycheck as assembly-line workers are. The 81,724 YouTube viewers who have watched the clip are as vicious as ever, rating it two stars out of five (a mercy rating, surely), calling for GM's collapse, and decrying the notion of a government bailout. The only upside for Detroit's messagemakers: The instant YouTube reaction allows them to take their PR campaign back to the shop all the sooner.

If so, it's scant reward for America's CTO. If transition co-chair Valerie Jarrett's two-minute talk yesterday is any indicator, most of these clips will be no more exciting than a White House press release. Obama himself, though, has one of the most awesome telepresences I've ever seen. Mr. President, get yourself a bulldog and a skateboard and you'll blow Avril Lavigne and Justin Laipply right off the Most Viewed (All Time) page.