YouTube to reward users for posting creative videos

January 29, 2007

YouTube has announced it will share the revenue, yielded due to video clips placed at the site, with their copyright owners. At present day YouTube represents the most popular site sharing on-line video. In 2006 it was acquired by Google Inc. As it was mentioned by Chad Hurley, YouTube's co-founder, at the World Economic Forum, held in Davos, Switzerland, the idea of paying amateur videographers was suggested by the desire to motivate and reward creativity.

The revenue-sharing naturally implies the site's administrators will have to prescreen the video clips before presenting them at the site to guarantee their authenticity. The task is a complicated one, as about 100 million videos are submitted by 70 million users to YouTube every day. It also implies the clips taken by the users from movies, music videos and TV shows will not be accepted as they used to be up to the current time.

It is quite a turn for the company as its initial success was built upon placing all the clips without prescreening them. However, it enables YouTube to avoid confrontation with videos' copyright holders. To fulfill the task of video prescreening, YouTube will have to apply the image-identifying technology elaborated by Google's best specialists.

It is difficult to forecast whether the overall plan will bring further success to YouTube. Consider the competing site Revver that still has considerably less users is found among the first who shared its ads revenue, and GUBA, the site provided with image-recognition screening technology, also does not reach the popularity enjoyed by YouTube.