Scott Kirsner at The New York Times has this piece today about how user-generated videos are starting to pay off — in cash. One fellow profiled, an amateur magician, earned $13,000 so far from 30 short clips he posted to Metacafe.
Metacafe pays creators $100 when a video has been viewed 20,000 times and $5 for each additional $1,000 views. The payoff for Metacafe, and for the pioneer of the practice, Revver, comes when a viewer clicks on an ad at the end of the video. Metacafe’s Arik Czerniak claims that a popular video can get 500,000 views in an afternoon with just a thumbs-up from a pool of “video-addicted” reviewers.
The Diet Coke-Mentos guys earned $35,000 from their oddly viral video, while Kent Nichols, one of the Ask a Ninja guys, claims he earned $20,000 last year on Revver (that was, of course, before Ask a Ninja cut a deal with Federated Media worth $300,000/year.)
Break.com will generate for its creator at least $400 for an accepted video and $2,000 if the video makes the home page. And let’s not forget, although the Times’ piece doesn ‘t mention it, that Chad Hurley sucked the oxygen out of the blogosphere during the Davos summit by merely suggesting that YouTube would start paying creators for their videos.
Is all this payment fomenting a new generation, or a new category, of “entertainment professionals?” People who apply their talents to scooping up the bits and pieces of money doled out for web video (and admittedly some of these payments are big bits) and cobbling them together into full-time jobs? Although we’ve seen a few folks turn this pay-per-view system into a vocation, can it continue?
Cynthia Brumfield at 7:21 AM|Comments(2)
I enjoyed your recent article blog post about the NY Times article on online video payouts. I'm the marketing manager for AtomFilms.com and I just wanted to share a little bit about our history with you since we were the first online video site to offer a revenue sharing program to content creators. Since 1998, we've paid over $3 million in royalties to creators. Many of our top contributors have earned five-digit paydays, and a fortunate few have made over $100,000 in royalties -- off one hit video! If you've got a few minutes to kill, check us out some time. Thanks!
Posted by: Sarah at February 16, 2007 12:00 PM
Metacafe doesn't pay based on ads at the end of a clip and ad revenue. It's based solely on the views themselves.
Posted by: Julianna at February 16, 2007 2:47 AM
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