IP Democracy: Don't Quit Your Day Job, But Web Video Pays

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?

Posted by Cynthia Brumfield on February 15, 2007 7:21 AM to IP Democracy