YouTube To Share Revenue With 20-year-old Filmmaker

destinyland writes "YouTube just has signed a deal to share ad revenue with 20-year-old Brandon Fletcher. YouTube had already said they'd implement revenue sharing this summer, but this indicates they're willing to put their money where their mouth was. 10 Zen Monkeys has a funny chronicle of Brandon's enviable march to YouTube money. 9 weeks ago he flew to California to demand YouTube feature his video on their front page. A security guard refused to let him off the elevator — but he made crucial contacts which helped seal the deal 9 weeks later. Taking this business to the next level makes sense in the here and now, when some 70 percent of internet users are streaming video."

Global figures?

[Kangburra]

70 percent of internet users are streaming video

No, this is just USSA users, not the whole Internet.

YouTube are NOT doing this the right way!

[babbling]

They're picking and choosing who they share revenue with as though the traffic they receive from some videos is worth more than the traffic they receive from other videos.

Google should implement this in the same way they do for Blogger. Just let people use their AdSense accounts on YouTube.

Re:why not just...

[Flentil]

Metacafe pays anyone with enough views as well, so long as it's original content. I think YouTube needs to start sharing more fairly like these sites do. It's not like they can't afford to share a little on all popular videos. These smaller sites are doing it already.

Is it just me?

[edittard]

Am I the only one who detects a distinct odor of hype around this story? Tries to force his way into the building ... and then they make a deal with him? Sounds like something from a (bad) movie.

Re:When will they share revenue with Viacom, et al

[Seumas]

Hollywood produces movies to appeal to the population at large in an attempt to make money. Idiots on websites produce videos to satisfy their deprived ego and to substitute for the mommy and daddy they never had and take the place of friends they can't manage to make. I don't know about you, but I prefer to consume content that was at least made with the intention of entertaining or educating me (in turn for a buck) than content that was produced to coax me into posting a "OMG LUV DAT ASS MOMMA - HOOK ME UP WIT DAT!".

The best way Google could reward those who produce content for their site is by offering them free sterilization after 1,000 views.

The internet's last gasp.

[Seumas]

I think we can officially say goodbye to the real internet. Some of you may not be old enough to remember this, but there was a time when people produced content and communities on the internet for no other reason than they cared and enjoyed doing it. Even before the internet, people would spend hundreds or thousands of dollars putting networks of computers together in their home, ordering a dozen or two dozen lines from the local phone company and feeding that trunk into a bank of modems so they could operate a free dial-up community.

People didn't plaster advertising on every page of everything they created. People didn't write articles in their blogs with the sole intention of drawing readers who would boost their ad revenue. People didn't produce self-involved videos in the hope of becoming the next big thing.

There was a time when people created and consumed out of simple interest and passion. Now, everyone from six years old to ninety years old wants to get rich off advertising on their blog, their website, their stupid pointless youtube videos, their comments on other people's blogs, their half-assed website ideas that they hope will get bought up for half a billion by Yahoo! or Google.

Want to see what putting ad banner revenue at the top of the list for encouraging you to find *something* to post on your blog every single day does to the net? Go look at the top ten or twenty RSS feeds. Especially the tech related ones. They are all copies of each other. On a given day, they simply commit blog-incest and rape each other's ideas and posts. By the end of the day, you'll see the same stupid story (usually about a new product, of course) twenty times on twenty of the top RSS feeds. Why? Well, you have to post SOMETHING. Anything, to draw people back to look at more ads while they're reading through your copy and pasted (and often poorly worded) material.

There are days where I wonder why any of us bother to care about "saving the internet" from being overrun by commercial entities and corporations and governments who want it to be nothing more than another commodity or another pipe through which to funnel products and purches into our homes. Why bother? The average Joe and his little sister and his dad are doing just fine turning the internet into one giant ad-plastered cess-pool of sell-outs.

Re:The internet's last gasp.

[destinyland]

You forgot to say: "I am aware of the irony of using the internet to decry the internet's over-commercialization..."

Youtube proved once and for all -

[Shohat]

YouTube (and Digg actually) proved once and for all, that "Web 2.0" is NOT about user generated content, but commercial-grade content being selected by users.
As a blogger, it's hard for me to say this, but honestly almost nobody reads (or shoud read) blogs but bloggers (and journalists, etc...), almost nobody watches vlogs but other vloggers, and in the end of the day, these are probably barely 5% of the Internet users. Regretfully, Google with it's idiotic blog fetish constantly sticks blog links into the result page, and I, like many others have already learned how to avoid blog-looking URLs. The ridiculous thing, is that too often the results are actually short stories that just link to the content users are looking for.
YouTube's "most watched" top 100 are a clear indication to that - the top videos are generally news, Sport clips, music videos, show episodes. Out of top 100, there might be 4-5 original user-made videos, everything else is pretty much "The best things that were on TV today". And if you aggregate total Blogosphere's/Video sharing /Bookmarking sites/ output into some top-topic list, you will see that the content is dictated daily by CNN, NYT, BBC, Wired, Cnet, etc... The user generated "content" is just the middleman in 95% percent of the cases.

Re:Is it just me?

[lastchance_000]

This guy wreaks of wanting so very badly to be more than he really is.

You've just described everyone in the tv and film industries.