YouTube To Finally Pay Top Users

YouTube is announcing today a program to share advertising revenue with its top 20 to 40 producers of original content, shows like lonelygirl15, Smosh, LisaNova and others. According the YouTube blog, these producers will receive the new status of Partners, and YouTube will promote these as their top stars, helping them monetize their videos. For now, banner ads will be the source of the money, but when YouTube starts trying pre-roll and post-roll ads maybe this summer, that’ll be part of it as well.
YouTube’s handling this smart, choosing the big names to get money and not just rolling out revenue sharing for everybody. Offering a revenue share for small players just makes it likely we’d see lots of shows motivated by greed, and not exactly getting anything for it. The “community” needs to be one submitting content for artistic reasons or social reasons, not because they […]

Original post by Nathan Weinberg