In a keynote conversation on the fracturing content landscape and how to make money from it, Velocity Interactive Group’s general partner Ross Levinsohn and founding partner Jon Miller pointed to interactive media as the big monkeymaker. Facilitated by Jack Feuer, editorial director of UCLA Magazine and MediaX columnist for MediaPost, Levinsohn and Miller talked about the impact of online video sharing, specifically user-generated, “prosumer” content and super-professional content.

Levinsohn deems prosumer content the most interesting as more people have been producing higher quality content and finding distributors, and called UGC the hardest to monetize, citing the example of the lack of ads and even lack of desire of ads on YouTube videos. Elaborating on the prosumer side, Miller described it as the “expanding middle” as more and more consumers have been gravitating towards it. “How does the money get there?” he asks, adding that the “money wants to follow the consumer.”

Switching gears, Levinsohn talked about the impact of widgets and their potential to generate revenue, predicting that, “like any other thing, widgets will get weeded out and we’ll move on. People tend to gravitate towards it not really knowing why.” He concluded that the goal with widgets is – of course – figuring out how to monetize them and watching them evolve.

Continuing the discussion of the ever-evolving internet, Miller, the former chairman and CEO of AOL (NYSE: TWX),  explained that the progress of the internet can be divided into three ages: the early to mid-90s marked an era of communication, the rise of instant messaging. The early part of this decade saw the rise of search while now, with the dominance of social networking sites like MySpace, Facebook and Twitter, is the age of convergent content communication, a blend of the previous eras. Levinsohn, who was president of Fox Interactive when when News Corp (NYSE: NWS). acquired MySpace, jumped in to talk about virtual worlds and their relevance to the younger generation of internet users, but emphasized the importance of looking beyond, looking for what comes next, instead of jumping on the social media bandwagon now. He stressed that he “would not be investing in another social media site, just as [he] would not invest in a YouTube competitor, just as [he] wouldn’t invest in another portal… it’s idiotic.” (Ed. Note: That should make Levinsohn’s presence on our deals panel at EconSM08 even more interesting.)