YouTube CEO Chad Hurley speaking at the World Economic Forum last week confirmed that YouTube was almost ready to begin sharing advertising revenue with end users, as well as with its major content partners. The system should be perfected and launched in the next few months, he said.
YouTube has been one of the few video sharing sites to hold out against revenue sharing and Revver is widely accepted as the first rival to offer it and MetaCafe also does now, in an attempt to attract consumers away from uploading their video only to YouTube.
Of course YouTube still has to build a system that makes sure that it is not paying someone for a video that it borrowed from one of the major US television networks.
But in the long run this is a phenomena that Faultline talked about in the early days of user generated content, and we predict that once this practice becomes widespread, professional video creators will be able to build up a portfolio of video snippets that stay in the system long term (with a long tail), earning money for years to come. This should lead to a new generation of professional specialist short form video creators which come from outside the film industry, who will drive up the video food chain (making more and more professional videos) and slowly fill in the quality gap between home video and Hollywood.