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YouTube To Pay For User-Generated Content
An anonymous reader writes "Speaking at the World Economic Forum, YouTube CEO Chad Hurley has revealed that the company plans to financially compensate users who produce and upload their content. With Google's purchase of YouTube last year, followed by more aggressive attempts to monetize the site (such as the deal struck with Verizon Wireless), it was inevitable that YouTube would come under pressure to share some of those fruits with ordinary users. But why didn't YouTube pay its users from the start? Hurley said: 'We didn't want to build a system that was motivated by monetary reward. We wanted to really build a true community around video. When you start out with giving money to people from day one, the people you do attract will just switch to the next provider who's paying more. We're at a scale now that we feel we can do that and still have a true community around video.'"
Time to start uploading those old home made videos of the ex-girlfriend (that is if they are paying on a per view basis).
What is to stop the other "communities built around video" from doing the same and turning the thing into the "who'll pay more" type war they say they wanted to avoid?
It's an interesting move (I can't wait for the first "so now they'll pay me for my home pr0n" posts and the "this is /. therefore you are a virgin" replies), but if anyone else decides to pay their uploaders, how different is it going to be?
Ignore this signature. By order.
And they'll distinguish this reliably from copyright infringement how?
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
Seems they need to new find ways to spend their fortunes...
Why don't they start working on their own OS to go head-to-head with Microsoft? If there is one company that can do it, Google Inc. is!
"Sum Ergo Cogito"
Step 1: Upload bad/stupid/dumb/etc video
Step 2: Con people into viewing it
Step 3: Profit!
This is just asking for trouble.
I wonder if I use bold in my signature, people will notice my posts.
... for the First Poster managed to do just the thing I... hmmm... postdicted. (Can't call it a prediction anymore, can I?)
Ignore this signature. By order.
they got wind of any service that would pay for user content in the wind did they?
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
And they're not interested in a "true community" anymore?
Pfft -- I checked out some other sites before that were offering money. I kept my videos on YouTube because I didn't want to monetize my own work!
So... will they pay me retroactively for my 60,000 views?
Back when YouTube provided no profits to submitters, the original creators/sources/subjects of a video probably did not care if some fan/bystander copied and posted a video. As long as credit was given where credit was due, the original creator didn't care how it got posted. With pay-for-submissions, the original creator will care very much and object if someone posts their stuff and make money of their images. (We'll also see lawsuits over model releases -- selling a person's image for profit has its own legal complications)
And I'm sure there will be people of both malign and innocent intentions that will mine the web for videos, do some minimal mashup, intro, or clever titling and then submit them for fun-and-profit. In the time it takes one person to create, from scratch, a "good" video, someone else can copy, tweak, and flood YouTube with dozens or hundreds of copies of other peoples' videos.
I think its great and proper that YouTube should share the wealth with the creators of quality content. But I expect more than a few disputes over who created what.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
Get ready to see your own videos reposted by others in their name. Of course, that's what "piracy" essentially is, so get ready to see the contenet industry filing a lot of lawsuits. Get ready to see the video recommendation system skewed to big-name media-backed "artists." Get ready to see annoying youtube links posted everywhere on the web.
Of course, there will probably be a lot more skillfully-produced and well thought-out material on youtube, too. But will it drown out the cool crazy stuff that's there now?
I really liked the aspect of youtube that it was a level playing field for everyone - big and small. People generated content for the sake of generating content, or viral marketing campaigns (which I'm SOMETIMES okay with but are usually annoying). Now youtube is going to be a competition with people trying to generate crap that will get a lot of hits rather than good "for the sake of it" art.
Just like what happens to a lot of bands when they sell out and stop caring about the music...
or else!
1. Offer users a relatively tiny cut to boost traffic, hurt the competition and look generous/progressive at the same time.
2. Increase advertising to far more than make up for #1 ("The system would be rolled out in a couple of months, he said, and use a mixture of adverts, including short clips shown ahead of the actual film").
3. Profit!
Hmm. It actually looks like a pretty good plan...
"We didn't want to build a system that was motivated by monetary reward"
Umm, didn't want a system with monetary awards? That's why Youtube was sold for 1.3 billion and has ads?
Ohhh.. you meant didn't want monetary rewards for the users! i see.
AmericaFree.TV offers a 50-50 advertising split to indy films as part of the IndyReels program; the money is already going out to ePremier's.
Of course, this is aimed at independent films, not just everyone's home video's.
1) upload episodes of 24 and simpsons or any already heavily viewed video really
2) profit
or
1) upload some clip to youtube
2) have friendly neigborhood botnet controller set up fake views for share
3) profit
Seriously where is the revenue going to come from? They are already paying to license media content from the studios, now they are going to pay users who upload content. So how are they planning on making an actual profit? A five second ad before each clip? That will annoy most of us, and lead to some fun videos like anti-GM videos following GM commercial. Also I imagine a nasty suit from anyone who uploaded any popular video in the past because they helped build YouTube's popularity.
Reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled.
...and, presumably you won't get paid if what you uploaded is copyright - as it should be and a great incentive to upload original content.
The 'community thing' is bullshit of course - I was only looking at metacafe the other day thinking wait... these guys will pay me for the views of my videos? Why am I using YouTube...?
If they didn't pay now, people would move to those who did - it's not about who pays most (yet - that will come in the future when people are used to being paid).
We did this at MP3.com back when it was the "real" MP3.com.
:) Paying users for plays is going to make these problems much worse.
Lemme see if I remember correctly... We had a set amount of money to pay out each month. and we divided it based on some formula based on number of plays. Some of our top artists actually made a decent amount of money.
BUT.
We then had to have several people who's full time job was to catch cheaters. They used to tell me about all the various ways people would cheat. As you might imagine, people can get very ingenious when money is involved.
I'm sure a company like YouTube (google) has the staff to handle it, but my question is: is it worth the headaches? The points other posters brought up about copyright infringement and posting other people's videos are already a problem at YouTube. These are problems we didn't really have at MP3.com (our copyright infringement problems were us being stupid, not our users
--geekd
An interesting comparison is to consider why the red cross does not pay for blood "donations." We always hear the pitch to donate blood, but never let market forces solve the supply shortage. The red cross claims if they paid, then they would have all sorts of "undesirables" donating just to get the cash. Perhaps YouTube doesn't have to worry about quality control.
Perhaps Google can actually afford to pay users this time around, but still. The former MP3.com CEO has shown little ability to actually turn a profit wiht any venture he touches. However, it is proof that Google will then go on to make their own version of Linux. Maybe they'll call it Gindows or Ginspire.
Also, as someone who actually wrote a program to crawl YouTube and download what it finds (in Perl no less), what legal implications does that have for me? Am I now a criminal for "falsibly generating views"?
And what about various tricks I've seen on other sites like this where people just watch the first 2 seconds then exit out, knowing that that counts as a "view" and therefore inflates the view counter and enables the voting box?
I don't understand. Last year, the overwhelming consensus was that Youtube was losing phat sacks of cash everyday 'cuz their ad revenue couldn't possibly pay their bandwidth costs. And now they are making enough money to compensate uploaders for the privilege of hosting their videos? I'm sure their profit margin increased now that Google owns them so Youtube doesn't have to deal with a 3rd party ad agency, but does that really make that much of a difference to the bottom line? Or has bandwidth just gotten a lot cheaper? Or are they just looking to corner the market so that as bandwidth prices drop and Internet ads become more lucrative, they'll be in a position to profit?
18/20 of the top 20 videos are blatant copyright violations when I looked. There isn't much else down lower either.
It's gonna be funny as hell to watch the lawyers devour Google.
This is gonna really distract them from their core business of spying on everyone.
- Adam L. Beberg - The Cosm Project - http://www.mithral.com/
If this was 5 years ago, the star wars kid would be rich beyond his wildest dreams.
Did I mention that Woody stole the tune from a Carter Family recording?
The water gets ever muddier.
KFG
Unless something significantly better comes along, I'm sticking with Revver. The pay has been decent so far for the relatively low effort I've put into it, and they have a history of respecting copyrights and rewarding creators, rather than a history of building audience by hosting copyright violations that ignore the rights of creators. Revver uses Creative Commons licensing, with some added terms to allow for appending an ad and supporting "affiliate" sharing. I can't imagine switching to YouTube, other than to create teasers that direct people over to my content on Revver.
No Laughing Allowed!
> "But why didn't YouTube pay its users from the start? "
Actually, this is a true story: they posted an ad on craigslist in their first months of business,
offering cute girls $100 to upload video blogs or videos of themselves and their friends.
Not one single girl responded.
There's a video on YouTube somewhere of the "early days" when the YouTube guys were discussing
this "plan". Its actually pretty funny.
------ The best brain training is now totally free : )
http://vewgle.com/ The video forum.
Whatever this man means by the word "community" - it is not what most humans understand it to be.
If you're paying some people to participate, they will not be there for community. In fact, having a mixed paid/volunteer crowd creates a situation where it is almost impossible to maintain community activities without significant hiding of information. Either you have a group who gives freely and members benefit from the giving, or you have people who are being paid to contribute and they run a cost/benefit in their head for their time to participate. You really can't have both simultaneously and keep the group together.
See a recent talk I gave on what a community really is http://tinyurl.com/22j9fy
Creative Commons Attribution License still has enough landmines in it to make commercial reuse a living h*ck. For instance, the owner of copyright in a CC-BY work can change the form of credit on future copies of others' derivative works. This is the very reason why CC-BY is not compatible with the GNU licenses. (See also discussion on wikisource-l.)
And it leads to old math tricks, computer 'hacks' being video taped, put online. It looks like content pollution to me.
Please explain how exactly Youtube is "fascist", a word that is thrown around by people who don't actually know what it means almost as much as words like FUD.
Bad/Evil/Greedy != Fascist
In-fact, what you have said sounds more like Saddam Huessin to me, who was definitely not fascist.
The system of government that takes the work of millions and allocates all profits to a small, centralized minority is not democracy. It is not even communism. The best comparison on an economic level is fascism, or even better, fascism's base authoritarianism.
The central control having complete power in this example is the company itself. Youtube accepts content generated and submitted by a huge community of regular people, assumes copyright ownership for itself, earns money based on that content, and never passes those profits to the community who created the content.
The company acts as dictator, setting the terms for what it will accept or not. If it doesn't like something, then it unilaterally removes that content, going against the idea of democratic rule.
In fact, this model is copied all over the net, from Youtube to Digg. This is done in the name of "democracy", but there is nothing democratic about this. Digg even goes a step further to suppressing opposition and criticism by removing content critical of Digg.
A big part of what made Youtube of interest was the fact that the videos were ORIGINAL, made without undue influence, absent the taint that money brings with it. I hope they at least have the courtesy to display an icon next to paid content- I won't be watching a single one of them. I see this as the start of a downward slide - If I want paid content, I'll watch TV or go to a movie.
This also might be a way that they can fight the pending lawsuits by the studios. If you want to be paid for content you upload then YouTube will need certain details so they can pay you. They can then of course pass those details along to the relevant authorities if they come calling about a copyright violation. Let the uploader and the MPAA/studios slug it out.
Blog
> 'We didn't want to build a system that was motivated by monetary reward.'
He's talking about *you*. He was *very* motivated by monetary reward.
Up to now we only had 14 year olds which posed in their underpants because they wanted attention.......
I can see it now. The "starving artist" that creates a video "masterpiece" sues Google since a return was expected that he never got. Take what I just said as you will, but in some shape or form it will probably happen.
In undeveloped countries, the consumer controls the market. In capitalist America, the market controls you.
That history of dance guy is gonna be pissed !
A million monkeys and this is the best sig they could come up with...
This is the first step in a monetization process that involves
Google placing ads on every single video.
The only reason they're paying is because soon they'll be profiting...
------ The best brain training is now totally free : )
I have only skimmed those replies before me, but haven't you people thought of the possible rise in quality of the videos on YouTube? Hopefully, Google will put some sort of verification process into the system so that people aren't getting paid for their shitty videos. Right now, most of the videos are crap. You can hear the microphone buzz louder than the dialogue, and most of the humor is painfully immature. Now more, better movies should be at the top of the most-viewed lists.
I'm biting a troll, but ah well. It is an entirely voluntary decision to submit content to Youtube or Digg or whatever else. If you want your copyright, you can keep it all you want, just don't deal with those companies. If you want to make your own money with your content, neither Youtube nor Digg is stopping you. Comparing them to authoritarian government systems is silly and irrelevant at best. The negative connotations that are associated with the latter only stem from the overall lack of freedom that they bring.
http://zero-to-enterprise.blogspot.com/
By setting the example, you have to pay to get people to load their content, other providers of similar services will have to also play the game or they will lose market share. Google has a shitload of money and can play this game for a lot longer than most. They should prevail and kill all competition.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
Comparing them to authoritarian government systems is silly and irrelevant at best.
The companies are the ones that compare themselves to government systems, specifically democracy. You may call me a troll all you want, but the fact is that democracies do not behave in the manner of these companies.