In a mildly surprising statement over the weekend, YouTube co-founder Chad Hurley indicated that the video sharing site would begin to share revenues produced by its videos with their creators “in the coming months.”
This is far from a revolutionary idea. Revver, and more recently Metacafe, are two video sharing sites that are already implementing similar ideas.
Hurley said that he avoided going this route before YouTube was acquired by Google because he “didn’t feel it was a great way to build a community. We wanted to keep it pure.”
So, why the change of heart?
“We are getting an audience large enough where we have an opportunity to support creativity, to foster creativity through sharing revenue with our users,” he said to the Financial Times in Davos, Switzerland, which was where Hurley was attending the World Economic Forum.
This news was probably what Revver and Metacafe have been dreading all along. Not only does YouTube have an audience and brand name awareness that trumps both, but with Google as its big brother its pockets are very, very deep. This is not to mention that their advertising prowess online has been more than excellent, and it should be expected that Google would leverage all of its expertise to make this tweak as beneficial for them as its users.
Details concerning the sizes of the payouts are not yet known.
One has to wonder whether Hurley feels like a sellout or not, and how YouTube’s faithful users and viewers will see the move. There will certainly be some users who will be encouraged to improve the quality of the videos that they post on the site, but there will also be those who might be a bit turned off at the monetary incentives thrown into the ring.
Creativity, spontaneity, and pristine fun now run the risk of being tainted by greed and dollar-sign motives in the land of YouTube.
Last week, a post on Google’s official blog hinted at Google Video becoming more of an aggregate Web video search tool and YouTube taking on the exclusive role of the video sharing site.
Sources:
http://www.webpronews.com/insiderreports/marketinginsider/
wpn-50-20070129YouTubePlansToShareTheCash.html
http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20070129/tc_afp/
britainusitinternet;_ylt=Aj4uOyS5DFDGprKZAfxqcRb6VbIF;_
ylu=X3oDMTBjMHVqMTQ4BHNlYwN5bnN1YmNhdA--
http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2007/01/look-ahead-at-google-
video-and-youtube.html
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