James Delahunty
31 Jan 2007 15:23
Recently we reported that YouTube plans to share revenue from advertising between the site and the user who uploads video clips to the site. YouTube Chief Executive Chad Hurley told this to an audience at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. However, he did not give any specific details on how YouTube will pull this off, and many are left with questions and doubts.
YouTube is the largest video site online, but there are several others who already offer revenue sharing deals to lure users to post their own content. Some of these sites also focus more on video quality than YouTube. However, the thing that sets them apart from YouTube is the audience of 30 million that YouTube generates monthly.
So that brings up another question; how will YouTube differentiate between users uploading pirated content and those uploading their own works? Whether or not people uploading works subject to copyright will receive a share for advertising is yet unknown, but the outcome is easy to guess.
Will YouTube have to implement some form of tracking system for pirated content to make sure users do not benefit from somebody else's work? If so, that would be quite a large task. "I'm sure they are working on a plan but it's certainly not a trivial undertaking," said Allyson Campa, vice president of marketing for Metacafe, which shares advertising revenue with video creators. "The tricky thing is the rights issues."
YouTube is already working on "audio fingerprinting" technology to tackle piracy. Either way, with such an audience, and so much video content, it will be interesting to see just how much revenue YouTube generates for regular users.
Source:
News.com