YouTube Revenue Sharing Is A Good Move

Everyone knows that YouTube recently announced that they will soon be sharing revenue of in-video ads with users. While most people think it is a bad move for YouTube, I think it could be great if they execute it correctly.

Yesterday I talked about how Money As A Motivator is ineffective in building a dedicated community. However, YouTube already has built the community to a critical mass. Just as we have seen with Myspace and Facebook, as long as you have critical mass, you can implement features that piss off your users (aka Facebook feed), and still be fine.

Despite this, I think the smartest thing YouTube could do is give the content creator the option of including in-video ads. My reasons:

1. Enough people will choose to do so to make a little money at something they are already enjoy doing for free to create a solid revenue stream for YouTube.

2. Giving the user the option, takes most of the blame off of YouTube. If a user sees a video with an ad, they know that the poster chose to include the video, not YouTube. YouTube is just providing the platform.

Either way, to lose a significant amount of users, YouTube would have to screw up pretty bad with the implementation. Something I don’t expect.

[tags]Social Networking, Social Network, YouTube, Online Community, Revenue Sharing, Brian Balfour[/tags]