The long awaited anouncement from YouTube.com has arrived to share revenue with users for their hard work.
“In terms of paying users revenue against the content that they are uploading, we definitely are going to be moving in that direction,” said YouTube co-founder Chad Hurley at the World Economic Forum in Switzerland over the weekend. The mechanics of the revenue sharing system have not been disclosed. Smaller video sharing communities like Revver pay video uploaders by splitting revenue 50/50 from clickable ads displayed at the end of each video.
There are many other video sites that do this already, namely MetaCafe.com. YouTube.com has over 580,000 videos on their servers right now — according to Google’s index. With that many users submitting content, uploading, downloading, viewing, everything involved with the online video realm, YouTube actually has a lot to benefit from if they go this direction.
YouTube has been for a while now, just taking all the revenue generated by advertising and pocketing it (well actually, Google is pocketing it). Now the users (that’s you and me!) have a chance to earn a couple extra bucks by submitting some awesome videos.
This is some great motivation for users to continue using YouTube and to keep uploading great videos. YouTube’s senior management may have come to the conclusion that the YouTube “buzz” would die off soon, but this is certainly a great way to keep that from happening.
