Make Content, Support the World’s Charities
As you might have guessed, I am not particularly in love with the idea of watching the big guys like YouTube.com get rich on my measly content, but that’s how it works, in part. My two videos have had a total of about 200 views. YouTube reported at the time of its sale:
YouTube currently delivers more than 100 million video views every day with 65,000 new videos uploaded daily…
Which of course means that individually my two videos are worth absolutely nothing. But then that is true of all the other millions of videos. However, collectively they are worth some part of that $1.65 billion that Google paid for the site. After all, without all of us watching and uploading, then what is YouTube worth? Which brings me to my idea.
Let’s call it my Mr. Smith Goes to YouTube idea. Instead of collecting pennies from boys around the country to build a park, YouTube pays out some portion of its earnings to charities designated by the content providers like me. I don’t want the pennies or fractions of pennies my videos bring in, but what if YouTube put them in a virtual jar and all of us uploading could watch that jar grow and then the money get turned over to charities which the uploaders collectively chose.
And if your video hit a homerun and got tons of views, let’s say its worth was more than $200, then the money would start coming to you directly. The first $200 earned, after a reasonable cut for YouTube, goes to charity, and then the rest to you. I am sure someone with an idea of how mathematics and computers actually work could make this happen.
Besides competition is going to force YouTube to do something for the citizen media folks. Wikipedia’s Jimmy Wales has set up a wiki site that if your topic gets advertising revenue you get to keep 100 percent of it. I already have an idea for it. I will provide information after I figure out how to set it up.
Here is more from ZDnet:
Wikia, a commercial counterpart to the non-profit Wikipedia, will go even further to provide customers – bloggers or other operators who meet its criteria for popular websites – 100 percent of advertising revenue from the sites they build.
“It is open-source software and open content,” Wales said in a phone interview. “We will be providing the computer hosting for free, and the publisher can keep the advertising revenue.”
That could prove disruptive to business models of websites that provide free services to customers but require a cut of any resulting revenue in return.
Ka-Ching, the citizen content money race is on.
