We first got a sniff that YouTube was planning on sharing revenue with its video creators at the beginning of this year.
The revenue that YouTube will be sharing will come from the new video ads that YouTube announced earlier this week.
YouTube has not said if all video uploaders will get a share or whether it will just be a select few.
Reading between the lines
Clue 1:
Scott Kirsner got wind of these video ads a couple of weeks ago when Wallstrip revealed that YouTube had talked to them about new video ads and a 50/50 revenue split.
Wallstrip is a finance-oriented site that has a Guru account at YouTube and has posted over 140 semi-professional videos.
Clue 2:
Then earlier this week Ms. Reiner, the woman in charge of advertising at YouTube, said:
“The idea is to generate long-promised revenues that Google can share with the more than 1,000 ‘premium’ content creators whose video material is available on YouTube”
Clue 3:
When YouTube first announced it would be integrating video sharing the YouTube founder Chad Hurly made two interesting comments:
- Firstly they were looking to “reward creativity”
- And secondly the reason they stayed away from revenue sharing in the first place was because YouTube “didn’t want to build a system that was motivated by monetary reward”.
This leaves me with three facts:
- YouTube has been talking with premium content creators already about revenue sharing (clue 1).
- Google wants to share revenue with the ‘premium’ content creators (clue 2) .
- YouTube has previously been worried about monetary rewards ruining the larger YouTube community (clue 3).
It’s all about the premium video!
Those three facts lead me to believe that YouTube may be considering leaving out the little video producers and only offering revenue sharing with premium content creators.
The question is what defines premium content creators. The quality of their videos, the fact they are from a big TV network (e.g NBC), how many viewers the video can pull in or something else?
