YouTube to offer YouProfit
By Gareth Powell
People who upload their films to YouTube may soon get a share of advertising revenue. This was said by YouTube founder Chad Hurley to the BBC at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. He said his team was working on a revenue-sharing mechanism that would ‘reward creativity’.
This move is a lot more complex then it would appear and has a raft of implications.
First of all YouTube, which is owned by Google, is in a sea of copyright troubles. The ’safe harbor’ clause — a website is not responsible if naughty people using the site transgress copyright — only applies in the United States, not the rest of the world. Anyone who is a regular to YouTube will know that the amount of copyright imagery that is still up there is very large.
The main point of the new idea is that Google, which owns YouTube which it bought in November last year for $1.65bn, can see a way of making money out of it. Which it is not doing at the moment.
The new system, due of the next couple of months, will use a mixture of advertisements, including short clips measured in seconds rather than minutes shown ahead of the actual film.
If this happens then the quality of the offering has to improve. You cannot expect people to sit through an advertisement to watch some idiot university student pull faces at a camcorder or mobile phone.
YouTube has more than 70m users a month. What is needs to do is move the quality of the video and the numbers viewing upwards and and the copyright breaches out altogether. This will be no easy task.
In a session on social networking Chad Hurley, one of the two founders of YouTube, said the company with Google was currently working on ‘audio fingerprinting’ technologies to identify copyrighted material.
The main problem for YouTube is there are now dozens — possibly hundreds — of other sites such as Revver which already split advertising revenues with users uploading original content. Yes, YouTube has the numbers but it has not yet got the money-making model in place.
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