Sunday, January 28, 2007

YouTube to Pay Contributors

YouTube will start paying people who upload videos that get generate lots of traffic for the company. YouTube co-founder Chad Hurley was speaking at the World Economic Forum in Davos (surprising in and of itself) and said that the company was forming a plan to share ad revenue.

"We are getting an audience that is large enough to give us an opportunity to support and foster creativity through sharing revenue with our users," said Hurley, as quoted by The Independent. As I've said before, sharing revenue was a must for YouTube to continue its growth.

Starting to get an audience that is large enough? YouTube had 38 million visitors in December; they were at the monetizable (should I trademark this?) level of audience a year ago. The problem wasn't the audience size, it was the lack of advertising infrastructure.

YouTube and parent Google still have work to do to starting attaching a few nickels to each download stream. For now you can spend hours on YouTube while watching nary an ad, and this doesn't bode well for people who hope that YouTube's generosity will allow them to quit their day jobs.

It will be interesting to see if YouTube starts a tiered payment system (50,000 streamed videos as a minimum?), and where the ads will appear (pre-roll? display ads?).

Posted By Jason Dowdell at 09:55 PM
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