Say good-bye to the user-generated-content hype

A search on Youtube for Mentos and Coca Cola comes back with 9,000 search results - welcome to the world of "User-generated-content." Do we really need all these great videos or the 2,320 results for "lonelygirl"? The best content on Youtube et al is still produced professionally by companies like Viacom, NBC, ABC or Fox.
Granted, there's the occasional user-generated success such as Geriatric 1927 but most of the good stuff comes from our favorite big-company producers.
The same applies to journalism - most of the successful blogs have morphed into professional networks or standalone companies - not much "user-generated" anymore. My point is - good content costs money to produce and people are willing to pay for good content (in the form of money or consuming ads). The ease of putting text, audio or video online has definitely led to increased creativity and freedom of expression online - but the day where user-generated takes over the world is still far far away. In the previous boom companies like theglobe.com and Geocities already allowed users to create a ton of content - 99.999% of which is long forgotten.