Paying YouTube content creators easier said than done
NYTIMES.COM
January 31, 2007
Greg Sandoval, for News.com
Unlike many who post widely watched content on YouTube, Stephen Voltz and Fritz Grobe were angered by their video's popularity on the site.
Fans had posted the clip, "The Diet Coke & Mentos Experiment," at YouTube without permission. Voltz and Grobe were flattered, but the "Mentos" video earned $30,000 at Revver.com, another video-sharing site that pays content creators, and the pair believed they could have doubled that total had the clip not been made available for free on YouTube.
In the future, a budding video auteur trying to turn a buck may not have to worry about YouTube siphoning traffic. YouTube Chief Executive Chad Hurley told an audience at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, last weekend that the video-sharing site plans to compensate video creators.
The No. 1 question industry insiders are asking is whether someone can profit from posting clips from episodes of Friends or Lost or other material that doesn't belong to them.
That's a crucial difference between YouTube and most of the sites that already share revenue, said Oliver Luckett, one of Revver's cofounders. Metacafe and Revver screen clips before they go online so they aren't paying for pirated material. The screening process should guarantee that ads will appear alongside clips that are appropriate to an advertiser's message.
"Clearly, YouTube, which tells users they don't want copyright-protected material illegally posted on the site, doesn't want to end up paying people for posting what someone else owns. But with such a big audience, experts say, YouTube will need to install a system that accurately tracks and handles payments to a massive list of posters. The company says that more than 60,000 clips are uploaded to the site each day. And that it is only fair for the creators to get some money for helping them make YouTube so popular."
By: Christina Hilken
January 31, 2007
Greg Sandoval, for News.com
Unlike many who post widely watched content on YouTube, Stephen Voltz and Fritz Grobe were angered by their video's popularity on the site.
Fans had posted the clip, "The Diet Coke & Mentos Experiment," at YouTube without permission. Voltz and Grobe were flattered, but the "Mentos" video earned $30,000 at Revver.com, another video-sharing site that pays content creators, and the pair believed they could have doubled that total had the clip not been made available for free on YouTube.
In the future, a budding video auteur trying to turn a buck may not have to worry about YouTube siphoning traffic. YouTube Chief Executive Chad Hurley told an audience at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, last weekend that the video-sharing site plans to compensate video creators.
The No. 1 question industry insiders are asking is whether someone can profit from posting clips from episodes of Friends or Lost or other material that doesn't belong to them.
That's a crucial difference between YouTube and most of the sites that already share revenue, said Oliver Luckett, one of Revver's cofounders. Metacafe and Revver screen clips before they go online so they aren't paying for pirated material. The screening process should guarantee that ads will appear alongside clips that are appropriate to an advertiser's message.
"Clearly, YouTube, which tells users they don't want copyright-protected material illegally posted on the site, doesn't want to end up paying people for posting what someone else owns. But with such a big audience, experts say, YouTube will need to install a system that accurately tracks and handles payments to a massive list of posters. The company says that more than 60,000 clips are uploaded to the site each day. And that it is only fair for the creators to get some money for helping them make YouTube so popular."
By: Christina Hilken
posted by Licensing 3 @ 11:54 AM
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