Since day one, YouTube has lived on a fully community-oriented model where there isn’t any money involved at the user level. This is about to change with a new service called GreedTube, which seems to be an ‘unofficial spinoff’ of YouTube promising to monetize your videos with AdSense and letting you keep a share of the earnings.
The service is simple. It asks for your usual information like title and description, and also for your embed code for the video on YouTube and AdSense ID. Once you’ve submitted it, your video goes on GreedTube — which does look awfully a lot like YouTube — and you get to keep 50% of the revenues made on the AdSense clicks.
In essence, it adds to YouTube what it lacks — for the Lonelygirl15’s to have a chance to make money — while sharing the same look and feel, where ’You’ is appropriately replaced with ‘Greed.’
To me, GreedTube seems like a liable way for YouTube users to monetize, but I don’t think it’s something that every user will instantly start doing or even consider. The great thing about YouTube is that it has a community that doesn’t care too much about making money with their videos, so the content always remains natural, fresh, and original.
For the majority, even if they were to use it, I don’t see this model working anytime in the near future. Most will find it hard to reach the $100-minimum mark every month, some many not even even make $10. Of course, when we’re talking about the popular content (merely 1% of the videos on YouTube), it’s a wholly different story.
[tags]YouTube, Advertising[/tags]
