YouTubers are in the money

Social media can now make you money as YouTube have announced that users who upload their films to the video-sharing website will soon get a share of the ad revenue.

YouTube founder Chad Hurley has told the BBC that his team was working on a revenue-sharing mechanism that would "reward creativity". The system would be rolled out in a couple of months and use a mixture of adverts, including short clips shown ahead of the actual film.
YouTube has more than 70 million users a month and was recently bought by Google but it will be interesting to see how the YouTube community reacts – you know what bloggers are like, they kinda hate big business and this might be a step too far. What do you think?
The offer applies only for people who own the full copyright of the videos that they are uploading to the YouTube website. It will be interesting to see how they do the maths on allocating revenue to each video.
According to recent reports YouTube is working on "audio fingerprinting" technologies to identify copyrighted material. This was revealed by Hurley in a session on social networking at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. Davos is probably something else the bloggers hate – particularly so given the chairman of Shell’s comments denying global warning on the BBC’s Radio 4 Today Programme.
Other video sharing sites such as Revver already share advertising revenues with users uploading original content, but only YouTube has managed to attract an audience measuring in the tens of millions – which means big bucks.
My view? I always thought that this would be the natural extension of UGC – collectives would become quasi-income generating sites where everyone would share a shekel from the traffic generated. Google get a share and I get a share – if I could ever be bothered to upload a video. A problem as I don’t even have a camera.