As wildly popular as the video sharing site may be, YouTube's sinking like the Titanic (too soon?) into a big pile of VC debt. TechCrunch blogger Michael Arrington runs a rumor that YouTube took another $25 million, more than tripling its total funding. Some quick Excel-ing yields the following.

YouTube's venture capital (measured here in millions of dollars) is increasing exponentially. Now what can be done? Answers after the jump.

First off, they could just blow all the money at their current rumored burn rate (oh no, that phrase is usable again?) of $1 million a month. Say they have $5 million left from the last two funds, for a total pot of $30 million. That'd bankrupt them by November 2008, just in time to miss homemade bootlegs of the Hillary Clinton concession speech. Just for fun, I graphed that out too.

Oh boy, graphing is fun!

But costs will rise as YouTube becomes more popular, until it completely saturates the lip-synching and performing-on-SNL market. Given these costs, YouTube's VC feeding frenzy will need to grow by magnitude. Will we see an exponential curve that suddenly plateaus? I couldn't make Excel do that, so imagine it. In your brain.

YouTube faces two exit strategies:

1. Go public. With enough ad revenue, YouTube could eventually turn a profit. The $25 million would buy it time to get in the red and IPO by late 2008. But IPOs are still rare in the new boom, and with total investments of over $35 million, YouTube needs to act fast or hit an impressive market cap from the start.
2. Get sold. Not much of an option. Google has its own video setup. News Corp. has too many movie, music, and TV properties to buy a piracy-ridden site like YouTube. Microsoft just doesn't need the technology. The only hope may be Yahoo, where YouTube could complement Flickr and make Yahoo a stronger portal. And changing the title to "YahooTube" won't even raise anyone's eyebrows.

Did YouTube Just Raise another $25 million? [TechCrunch]
Your Tube, Whose Dime? [Forbes]