“The site has installed a ring tone search engine and lists scores of cell phone ring tones atop its highly trafficked page,” reports Red Herring’s Scott Martin.  “People can find Shakira and Britney Spears ring tones along with links for gambling, concerts, and dating.”  Not to mention Nissan cars, Tai Chi, and Louis Vuitton.

That’s a pretty far cry from the aforementioned rollformers (although I’ve heard the 8 Stand x 2 x 10” Dahlstrom #550-8 is popular with some young people).  But Red Herring quoted Baris Karadogan, who wrote, “[F]rom what I hear, that is generating them north of $1000/day.  That’s $360K straight to the bottom line, at 10% pretax that’s like finding $4M of revenue all of a sudden.  That’s luck.”

Mr. Girkins may not entirely agree – he’s apparently still pursuing a lawsuit filed against YouTube when this all first started.  It almost seems as if the problem has taken on a life of its own, as Mr. Girkins said the new search engine “more than covers costs for hosting.  But we have a lot of attorney costs, too.”

Still, among the Web’s many lemonade-from-lemons situations, uTube’s reversal has to be among the most impressive.

Is that a web 2.0 shadow?

Well, I guess the wave of laughter erupting after that didn’t go by unnoticed, and UTube has now reconsidered… and is trying to monetize all that traffic, it seems (70,000 people per day, according to them), despite having gone to court suing YouTube earlier. Quote Mambo in the forum:

[U]tube.com has taken advantage of the extra traffic, and has created an advertising-dominated search engine box, on the top of their main homepage.

The sponsored links are laid-out to look like videos, some with their own “ratings”.

There’s a couple of search suggestions to get you started, like poker and ringtones. And when you click the UTube logo, you’ll end up on a “what’s hot” listing linking to searches for britney spears, nintendo wii and what-not. Here’s the top search result for poker, along with the unrelated web cam girl and the fake rating (both appear on other ads, too):

I wonder if there’ll be a round III in this battle…

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Philipp Lenssen from Germany, author of 55 Ways to Have Fun With Google, shares his views & news on the search industry in the daily Google Blogoscoped.