YouTube plans revenue sharing with content providers

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Stepping towards a revenue-sharing mechanism that would "reward creativity", people who upload their own films to video-sharing website YouTube will soon get a share of the ad revenue, YouTube co-founder Chad Hurley confirmed.

The system scheduled to be out in a couple of months will apply only to people who own the full copyright of the videos that they upload on the YouTube website, Hurley specified.

Though YouTube had resisted this business model before, Mr. Hurley speaking at the World Economic Forum in Davos yesterday said “People were principally motivated to share content online ‘to get a reaction’. Since being taken over by Google, however, we are getting an audience large enough where we have an opportunity to support creativity, to foster creativity through sharing revenue with our users, so in the coming months we are going to be opening that up."

The company is currently working on "audio fingerprinting" technologies to identify copyrighted material.

However, along with the success story, YouTube has also repeatedly clashed with music publishers and film studios over copyrighted material that has been uploaded to the website.

In late January, Twentieth Century Fox served YouTube with a court order stating the company to reveal the identity of a YouTube content provider who uploaded four episodes of the popular television drama "24" ahead of its airing.

Furthermore, in December 2006 NBC ordered YouTube to take down digital copies of a "Saturday Night Live" sketch that had been posted to the site.

However, the company says that it is quick to remove copyrighted material from the site that was brought to its attention.

Founded in February 2005 by three former employees of PayPal, YouTube is a popular free video sharing website which lets users upload, view, and share video clips. It uses the Adobe Flash technology to display video.

Headquartered at San Brun, California, USA, the company was named TIME magazine's "Invention of the Year" for 2006.

Currently handling a monthly traffic of over 70 million users, the company was acquired by Google Inc. in October 2006 for US$1.65 billion.