Rocker Peter Gabriel mingled with the moguls at Davos to pitch a selfless goal: gathering the media’s support for a video site that exposes human rights abuses around the globe. Gabriel is the founder of a group called Witness, which aims to be a central repository for videos that expose human rights abuses. (See video from last year’s TED conference where Gabriel discusses the role of citizen media in human rights abuse exposure.)
Witness has created a video “hub” that organizes the videos by country, depicting human rights abuses in a way that only video can. Gabriel wants media groups to support Witness with money or technology and says he’s in talks with Google, which now owns YouTube, about supporting the project.
Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 1:24 PM | Print | Comments (1)
The big buzz in the blogosphere, as well as the mainstream press, is the news that YouTube co-founder Chad Hurley mentioned at Davos this week that the meteoric video sharing site will soon share revenue with video uploaders. It all started when Jeff Jarvis posted a video of Hurley speaking (from the audience, it appears) at the World Economic Forum.
As I watched the reaction mount to Hurley’s “announcement” (it seemed to me that Hurley just mentioned the idea as one YouTube is kicking around) I was so tempted to chime in on the import of this news. After all, YouTube has built its business on a bunch of free and freely contributed content, so the notion that YouTube would actually start paying people something for their videos is mildly interesting. I couldn’t, however, figure out why this was such a big deal.
The BBC talked to Hurley who confirmed that YouTube is working on a plan to “reward creativity.” Does this surprise anybody? YouTube has been attempting to monetize its massive audience since the get-go and has been exploring a variety of business models. As Om points out , other video sharing start-ups, such as Revver or Metacafe, have been trying to distinguish themselves by paying contributors in the hopes of siphoning traffic away from YouTube.
Moreover, plenty of web-based content distribution systems share revenue with contributors (the rapidly growing BlogBurst splits revenue with bloggers and Brightcove allows video providers to share in ad network proceeds.) What’s the big deal with YouTube embracing this kind of business model? Why is everybody so excited? Beats me.
Of all the reasons that people are advancing as to why YouTube will take this step, the one reason I don’t buy is the one offered by Hurley himself — i.e. by paying people, YouTube will start receiving “more creative” videos. Anybody who is truly creative already considers YouTube the first stop on the way to stardom.
Any would-be movie director or aspiring actor or talented screenplay writer risks makes sure to put their videos up on YouTube today. It’s the big-time of web video viewership. Who are the creative geniuses out there that might not choose YouTube if the Google-owned site doesn’t pay them a share of revenue?
Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 12:09 PM | Print | Comments (0)
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