Will YouTube Share Revenue For Referral?

The big news in online video over the last few days is Chad’s admission at Davos that they’re in the process of moving toward revenue sharing from advertisements. Fred Wilson mentions it today.

But of course, there needs to be revenue to share with the content owners and the content creators (the people creating stuff on YouTube). And that’s where the monetization system comes in. To date, YouTube has relied on banners to provide revenue.

Chad wasn’t forthcoming on when this new system will be rolled out, but most of the weblog community seems to have taken the remark as a formal announcement. However, I think if done right it’s going to have a similar effect to Adsense, but for video.

By that, I mean that the story will be much more compelling if YouTube also share revenue for referral. If someone embeds a video on their site and it gets viewed, will they share the revenue with the publisher. I’d be interesting to see an economy build around that, and what effect it could have on the videos themselves. Would some of them become more viral because more people stand a chance of making a buck?

Imagine Scouta, Digg, Boing Boing and other sites generating income from links to video. What about if we then shared that with the community somehow. Consumers making money from the video, movies, or television shows they love.

Davos and Video

The conversations over at Davos at the moment are just fantastic. I just wish I was there to be involved. Maybe next year :). In the mean time I’ve been catching a few discussions at Davos Conversations.

In my past life, at Sun Microsystems, I didn’t often agree with Bill Gate. It’s not that I think he says anything revolutionary anymore–though his charity is mind blowing–but his latest comments at Davos confirm a lot of the vision we have for Scouta.

In the years ahead, more and more viewers will hanker after the flexibility offered by online video and abandon conventional broadcast television, with its fixed program slots and advertisements that interrupt shows, Gates said.

Chad Hurley even chimes in with another interesting comment in the article.

YouTube co-founder Chad Hurley said the impact on advertising would be profound, with the future promising far more targeted ads tailored to each viewer’s profile.

We’ve taken an approach that’s a little different to that. We figure that your keen to see the content, not really the commercial. So Scouta tailors the content to you, not the advertisement.

The next 5 years will be amazing, I think I keep saying that. There is a new race for convergence in the lounge room, and it’s all driven by the amount of content that is online.

Anyway, Chad’s a smart guy, for a number of different reasons. So it’s worth checking this video out.