YouTube to Share Revenues with Content Providers

The video sharing megalith announced its intention at the World Economic Summit. H/t MediaBistro. No details on how the payment scheme will be set up. Certainly it will heighten tensions over posts of copyrighted material.

This part of the story stood out:

[YouTube Founder Chad] Hurley said that when YouTube started, he and the site's other co-founders - Steve Chen and Jawed Karim - felt revenue-sharing would build a community of users motivated by making money, rather than their love of videos.

But that as the site has grown, the three, who continue to run the company, have come to see financial remuneration as a way of improving content.

Lately we’ve seen discussions, first on AOG and continuing at RootsCamp, about “sustaining” the blogosphere, including finding sources of funding. I think two of the most attractive features of the blogosphere are independence and the love bloggers have for their craft. I’m not saying that bloggers getting paid would be incompatible with maintaining those parts of the ‘sphere, but it would change things and raise issues.

Watching how YouTube negotiates the thicket will be instructive.

Meanwhile, time will tell whether this will lead to more quality videos on YouTube, or more Bride Has Massive Hair Wit Out.

UPDATE: Eric Vessels in comments provided the link to the video of Hurley explaining it. He starts by saying that they are working on technology that would identify music in a video made by a user and notify the record company/publishing house and those entities could "generate revenue from that." Then he talks about revenue sharing with users. Some of the comments on the YT page are interesting; along much the same lines as my take.