PAUL HAVEN
AP
Sunday, January 28, 2007
Chad Hurley, co-founder of YouTube, said Saturday that his wildly
successful site will start sharing revenue with its millions of
users.
Hurley said one of the major proposed innovations is a way to
allow users to be paid for content. YouTube, which was sold to
Google for $1.65 billion in November, has become an Internet phenomenon
since it began to catch on in late 2005. Some 70 million videos
are viewed on the site each day.
"We are getting an audience large enough where we have an
opportunity to support creativity, to foster creativity through
sharing revenue with our users," Hurley said. "So in
the coming months we are going to be opening that up."
Hurley, who at 30 is one of the youngest Internet multimillionaires,
gave no details of how much users might receive, or what mechanism
would be used.
In October 2005, Revver - which like YouTube offers video clips
online - announced plans to attach advertising to user-submitted
videos and give their creators a cut of the profits. Revver has
said it would split the ad revenue evenly with content creators.
Hurley said that when YouTube started, he and the site's other
co-founders - Steve Chen and Jawed Karim - felt revenue-sharing
would build a community of users motivated by making money, rather
than their love of videos.
But that as the site has grown, the three, who continue to run
the company, have come to see financial remuneration as a way
of improving content.
Hurley spoke on the last full day of the World Economic Forum,
which brings together the world's political, social and business
leaders for a five-day gathering on the problems facing the world.
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