Okay, I couldn’t resist. MediaPost today blogged about CBS using YouTube for their free NCAA tourney highlights. Not that there will be any highlights, since both my team and my alma mater got knocked out in the first round. Stupid upsets. Ahem. Anyway. This comes after CBS partnered with CSTV for their user-generated content contest. This new move is especially important for CBS because they were having trouble accomodating the high traffic levels on their site.

It seemed for a while there that CBS was with Viacom on the “kill YouTube” boat—but apparently not. Guess what, big, huge, YouTube-hating networks. As I just said, “Give the milk away, and make tons more money than you could from selling the milk by slapping some ads on the cow.” The new agreement will offer ad-supported highlight reels through YouTube. YouTube and CBS will split the revenues.

Forget what your mother told you: start giving away the milk for free, and some people will still buy the cow. (If this were about video, I’d say, “Give the milk away, and make tons more money than you could from selling the milk by slapping some ads on the cow.” Anyway…) Everyone’s sweetheart, Linden Lab, creators of Second Life, is the featured case study for MarketingSherpa (free access until Wednesday, so hurry if you want to read it!). The study details how Linden Lab’s use of a hybrid “freemium” content model actually improved their paid subscription rate. Did you sign up for Second Life before September 2005? Way back then, a basic lifetime membership was $9.95. Premium memberships, which enable you to own land in the virtual world, started at $10/month. Linden experimented with their sign up procedure to see what would happen if they eliminated the $9.95 basic membership fee.