More and more readers are talking about the decline of print media, and its growing competition on the web.

Publications like The Rocky Mountain News and The Seattle Post-Intelligencer have disappeared, and even the great Canwest media empire is walking a line dangerously close to bankruptcy. Online - new user-generated hyperlocal news sites are popping up in an attempt to replace them, when profit seems to be a rare commodity.

According to a recent report by analysts at the financial services company Credit Suisse, sites like YouTube, which rely on user-generated content (UGC), cannot be sustained for much longer either.

The report states that this year alone Google will lose $470 million on the video sharing site. That number is five times greater than the expected $85 million loss to The Boston Globe.

While print and new media seem to be at odds with one another, they share a common problem: advertising. UGC sites are struggling to sell enough advertising to pay for the costs of storing and distributing their content. The same way that newspapers have to pay for printing and delivery of the paper.

Google is paying enormous fees for its high-speed broadband connection that processes data at the equivalent of 30 million megabits per second. Which is approximately six million times as fast as your home Internet connection. And all of this costs Google an estimated $360 million a year according to Credit Suisse.

With Google selling ads on fewer than 10 per cent of its videos, how can we expect that they will be able to sustain themselves for much longer, with no cost to users?

As an advertiser, it’s simple really. Homemade videos shot from cell phones or other amateur video devices, capturing shots of people fainting, celebrity mishaps, and sporting event brawls, to name a few, are not an advertiser’s dream. And they certainly don’t want to pay to have their logos attached to them.

Similar UGC sites like Flickr and Facebook face the same dilemma. For storing all of your memories at no cost to users, these sites are getting relatively little in return, and it is unclear how these companies plan on making good on their investments.

On the other hand, professionally produced content, such as iTunes, news articles, game videos from MLB.TV and Hulu, a video site that shows TV shows and movies, seems to be making money online.

While YouTube has been trying to match Hulu in the non-UGC business to create higher profits, it won’t solve the problem of high overhead due to their ever-growing hosting services. Unless Google engineers can come up with a solution quickly, the possibility of an ending is definitely in sight.

Unfortunately for the user, that will likely mean restrictions on bandwidth, or this wonderful idea of UGC in a “free” online world, will soon become a pay-per-use scheme. I guess nothing really is free, at least not forever.