BBC: YouTube to Start Sharing Revenues
This according to the BBC:
People who upload their own films to video-sharing website YouTube will soon get a share of the ad revenue.
YouTube founder Chad Hurley confirmed to the BBC that his team was working on a revenue-sharing mechanism that would “reward creativity”.
The system would be rolled out in a couple of months, he said, and use a mixture of adverts, including short clips shown ahead of the actual film.
I have thought that if YouTube had a vulnerable spot it was that it was turning its content providers like me into a sharecroppers. Lawrence Lessig fears:
a world we’re seeing too much of all ready: large entities that create sandboxes for “sharing,” but then effectively claim ownership over everything built within that sandbox. This is, in my view, not a sharing economy. It is instead simple sharecropping.
I even have an idea which I posted earlier for how the YouTubes of the world might best share those profits. I wrote:
… 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 those pennies in a virtual jar and all of us uploading could watch that jar grow and then the money gets turned over to charities which the uploaders collectively choose. (Remember there are millions of us uploading, that’s a lot of pennies.)
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.
So maybe someone at YouTube has figured it out.
I found this item thanks to Mark Hamilton’s Saturday squibs. Lots of good information pointers reside in those squibs.
