YouTube Starts Revenue Sharing With Power Users

Bilal Hameed | 11 Views

Om Malik is reporting that Youtube will start sharing revenue with its popular users like LisaNova, renetto, HappySlip, smosh and valsartdiary from today. Previously YouTube only shared revenues with large Media corps. The news is now live on YouTube blog as well.

According to the Youtube Blog:

Participating user-partners will be treated as other content partners and will have the ability to control the monetization of the videos they create. Once they’ve selected a video to be monetized, we’ll place advertising adjacent to their content so participating user-partners can reap the rewards from their work.

The revenue shared with these users will be generated from traditional banner and CPC advertisements placed beside their videos on Youtube. This is a good start but is certainly not enough because most Youtube videos are actually consumed on blogs and social networking sites. Although BBC previously reported that Youtube will be launching pre-roll ads which was re-iterated by Red Herring in April but we still don’t have any official news from Youtube about when pre-rolls would finally launch.

Revenue sharing is the sole reason why Media Corps like Viacom got pissed off at Youtube, because they wanted to negotiate a hefty amount for their content. Something Google was unable to offer due to lack of pre-roll advertisement, banner and CPC ads only go this far. To make things look uglier Revver, Metacafe and Joost already offer pre-roll advertisement and Joost as a result of this has managed to cut content licensing deals with a number of Media companies.

Its about time Youtube starts giving back to its users who have helped made it what it is, the destination of choice for video sharing. Our previous coverage of Youtube and its competitors is here.

These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages.