Making Money From YouTube

The New York Times has an article about the people who are successfully making money from videos that are posted for free on YouTube, but part of its partner program.

The program allows YouTube to highlight videos with original content, and to place advertisements within and around the material. It splits the revenues with the creators.

The program is a partial solution to a nagging problem for YouTube. The site records 10 times the video views as any other video-sharing Web site in the United States, yet it has proven to be hard for Google to profit from, because a vast majority of the videos are posted by anonymous users who may or may not own the copyrights to the content they upload. While YouTube has halted much of the illegal video sharing on the site, it remains wary of placing advertisements against content without explicit permission from the owners. As a result, only about 3 percent of the videos on the site are supported by advertising.

But the company has high hopes for the partner program. Executives liken it to Google AdSense, the technology that revolutionized advertising and made it possible for publishers to place text advertisements next to their content.

"Some of these people are making videos in their spare time," said Chad Hurley, a co-founder of YouTube. "We felt that if we were able to provide them a true revenue source, they'd be able to hone their skills and create better content."