Viacom's demand that YouTube remove 100,000 clips owned by Viacom has been widely covered the last few days.

The real story, however, is that "content is king." This has always been true and it will continue to be true. Recent months have provided us with countless stories about social networking and Web 2.0 sites that thrive from user created content. This has led many pundits to suggest that "owned content" might not be valuable in years to come. Such suggestions are off the mark.

There will always be a place for "owned content." And those that create such content will continue to have a significant place in ecommerce.

YouTube will always have lots of traffic but apparently it is going to have start paying for "owned content" or it will have to rely on social networked content in order to grow and thrive. In the end the good stuff, the stuff owned by the Viacom's of the world, is what people really want to see over and over again.