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.