Cameraman poses a question to Chad Hurley, 29, and Steve Chen, 27, that goes unanswered: "What does (the deal) mean for the user community?"

That's what thousands of YouTubers are wondering. Will YouTube 2.0 still have room for the bedroom video makers that created the site's billion-dollar identity? Or will the little guy be crowded out by advertising and corporate involvement?

"We could have never built this without the community. That is what we're fiercely protecting," Julie Supan, the senior director of marketing at YouTube, said Wednesday. The YouTube community is also very protective -- including Richard Stern, better known as LazyDork, a rapping, dancing, opinion-spewing defender of the site's grass-roots nature.

"The Wild West feel of YouTube is already slipping away, and within a few weeks it likely will be gone altogether," says Stern. YouTube isn't as lawless as the old West, but it has served as the gateway to a new online frontier. Since its start in February 2005, YouTube has become the pre-eminent site for internet video, drawing a worldwide audience of 72.1 million in August.

After reading this type of thing in many places around the web, I have to ask these people so concerned about YouTube. What is it about YouTube you have personally paid for? How this much bandwidth was paid for at all still amazes me, not to mention the machines and infrastructure YouTube is riding on. Oh that's right I forget, everything on the internet is supposed to be free!

Since it was the `people' that made YouTube, why aren't they being paid billions?" wrote a user named winofiend. This is just too funny!