Revenue Sharing is For Dummies
Or is it?
Hot off the press from the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland comes the news from Chad Hurley, co-founder of YouTube, that the site would implementing a system of revenue-sharing among users within a few months time.
In order to "foster creativity," they plan to take from Google’s (quote unquote) "large pool" to offer payments for uploaded videos. The amount has yet to be determined. I think it is safe to assume they won’t be dishing out the dollars for the illegal material that has prompted threatening lawsuits, putting a damper on all the initial enthusiasm for the venture. (Venture being the operative word. $1.65 billion. Damn.)
In any case, I’m digging the comment by Will Zaichkowski on Wendy Davis’s Mediapost blog. He says,
As a business model YouTube is shaky at best, upping ad revenue to
generate some bottom line may very well kill off the enterprise. I think that we sometimes forget, sites like YouTube exist for and because of their users – piss-off the users and then what?
If paying users is going to mean more ads and pre-rolls, he’s right, it just might piss some people off. Three-quarters of them to be exact. A Harris poll released yesterday showed that 75% of frequent YouTube users said they would visit the site less. Will the whole thing come crumbling down? Get your popcorn ready.
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In related news, the domain name YouBoob.com has just been sold on Ebay for $1.5 million. What do you think makes it more valuable, being a spill-off for YouTube traffic, or as…something else? As noted in the product decription, this domain is "all you need to make the next big thing in porn, or other suchy boobery."
