YouTube to share ad cash

YouTube has plans to share advertising revenue with people who post their own content. This comes as Bill Gates predicts an online video revolution We're told the YouTube ad revenue sharing programme, may see short commercials placed ahead of films, although the details are sketchy.

Naturally the announcement of this development was rapidly posted on YouTube. Here via Buzzmachine is the founder of YouTube Chad Hurley speaking at Davos

Plans are still in a very early stage and it's hard not to sympathize with YouTube bosses as they try to anticipate potential pitfalls. Consider this for example: we've a number of instances of controversial material being posted to internet video sites - presumably you'd want the system not to reward youngsters posting videos of insanely dangerous stunts, for example? And even with more respectable content idenifying the original source of a piece of User Generated Content (and thereby properly assigning revenues) can be very difficult. These are of course just idle speculations that may not turn out to be real problems after all Revver has been sharing ad revenue with video creators for a while without incident. But they do highlight the challenges ahead. It will be interesting to see what the final scheme looks like and how YouTube changes to accommodate it.