An important, if not surprising, item: Another Google/YouTube exec has voiced his opinion that YouTube will be profitable this year.  More interestingly, an outside analyst has done the same, and also forecast a gross revenue figure of almost $1 billion.

Let's start by talking about Citigroup's Mark Mahaney, who generated that estimate.  As Peter Kafka explained, Mahaney took MySpace's established revenue-to-page view ratio and applied it to YouTube's stats.  In this manner, he predicted that YouTube will earn $945 million and $614 million this year in gross and net revenue, respectively.

Next year, Mahaney thinks YouTube might earn $1.13 billion and $737 million in gross and net revenue.

As for the other man who believes YouTube will do more than break even, he's Patrick Walker, a director of video partnerships for Google and YouTube.  Walker thinks YouTube's ability to help sell CDs and DVDs will prove important, along with the introduction of long-form videos.  The site's established knack at getting lots of people to watch ads should be handy, too, of course.

Now there's just the matter of whether or not Google will see fit to inform us about YouTube's performance as time goes by, since the company's generally kept exact figures under wrap.