YouTube to Pay Posters
Cited: Wall Street Journal
First, YouTube gave “David After Dentist” fame. Now, it’s giving him a headstart on college tuition. The website announced Tuesday that it would begin offering its 15-minute, one-off stars the kind of ad revenue that was once reserved for high-posting partners and mega-companies.
YouTube
YouTube says the expanded partner program is designed to benefit people like David Devore, the 40-year-old father from Lake Mary, Fla., who in January posted a video of his son’s funny reaction to the sedative he was given by his dentist. The video, originally intended for family and friends, has now been viewed nearly 28 million times.
A few days after Devore posted his video, he received a message from YouTube asking if he was interested in becoming an advertising partner. After he said yes, ads began appearing on his video for everything from dentists to Palm.
Devore declined to say exactly how much he’s made from YouTube, but said it is “in excess” of $10,000. “It isn’t enough to make a career out of. But it certainly is an excellent supplemental income,” said Devore, who recently had to foreclose on his house. He’s taken a more traditional approach to monetizing the fame, too: selling t-shirts featuring his son’s funny phrases.
Devore was an early trial in a program that’s now being rolled out to potentially all of YouTube’s most popular video makers. Tom Pickett, the director of online sales and operations at YouTube, said the move — part of a wider effort to pump more ads into the site — was designed to expand the diversity and depth of content that it sells to advertisers.
“We have dramatically increased the number and percent of monetizable views,” said Pickett. “This keeps us tracking along that path.” He declined to say what percentage of YouTube videos would now contain ads. But he said the company currently had “thousands” of content partners who feature ads in their videos, and this program would open it up to “tens of thousands” of content producers.
YouTube says it doesn’t have a cut-off for how many views a video has to get before its owner will be invited to join the advertising program. Instead, it will use a formula that is based on how fast a video is growing in traffic and its longevity. The company wouldn’t say how much video creators would get paid, but a very popular video could easily generate thousands of dollars for its maker. People also have the option to not participate, and keep their videos ad free.
Videos only qualify if they meet all of YouTube’s terms of service – such as not including any copyrighted music or video footage. Jill and Kevin, the makers of the popular “JK Wedding Entrance Dance” couldn’t participate because their video was claimed by the record label for singer Chris Brown, whose song “Forever” is featured in the video.
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My Take: It was only a matter of time before YouTube figured out how to turn a profit. It had to happen, really, otherwise we would all be deprived of the joys of entertaining wedding entrances, children being drop-kicked, and many, many people falling down.
The good news is, it looks like YouTube won’t go anywhere anytime soon. The bad news? Our already-stretched wallets have a whole new set of temptations to fight.
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