YouTube to share revenue

There are good ideas and bad ideas. This is a great idea. If YouTube arranges to share even a minute portion of their revenue with uploaders (community members), there will now be little incentive to build a competing site with a revenue sharing model.

Speaking at the Davos economic forum, CEO Chad Hurley made it pretty clear.

“We are getting an audience large enough where we have an opportunity to support creativity, to foster creativity through sharing revenue with our users,” Hurley said. “So in the coming months we are going to be opening that up.”

Despite the low barriers to entry here, this could snuff out any challengers even before they get to a VC firm to pitch a Me Too idea. Mind you, one could always try to build a competing site, and use the % of revenue shared as a draw. But with Google’s advertising power, you’d have to assume that film students showing their clips on YouTube will do better, even if Mr. Hurley gives them just a few points.

This is a killer idea. Would Microsoft have ever dreamed that up? Would they let a 30 year-old run a billion dollar acquisition, post-closing? This is the genius of Google.

MRM