YouTube money for YouToo
According to BBC news, YouTube.com will begin to share revenues it makes from uncopyrighted material submited to its site. Somwhere in Wisconsin, Jamey Noname dances with glee… after turning on his webcam.
YouTube company co-founder Chad Hurley said that the decision was made to reward creativity. The main problem that YouTube has faced in the past was copyright infringement issues where people were actually using copyrighted material like music videos and movies clips to create their own videos.
It is believed that taking the approach of rewarding popular original videos might help in decreasing the copyright infringment problems at the same time as it will be increasing the overall usage and visibility of the site. A pre-screening process will probably be added to help seperate the original content from the rest. Whether this will done manually or by image recognition software has yet to be confirmed.
It should also be pointed out that Revver.com already is using this reward based system, but lacks the user/fan base that YouTube has. Surely the fact that Youtube is now owned by mega-web conglomorate Google.com helped ease the tension of “if we post it will they come?” Time will tell if this will improve the content on youtube, but my five says that we should expect more people posting their inane conversations about tampons or whether Han is cooler that Legolas. Until then though Wisconsin Jamey dances the night away.