YouTube said today it has paid out more than $1 million to its user partners through its partner program. The figure came as part of an announcement that YouTube is expanding the program to users in Japan, Australia and Ireland (it was previously only available in the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom).
YouTube doesn’t disclose how it splits its revenue, but we’ll make do with what scraps of numbers we have. The site currently lists 100 partners, though that also includes entities that we’d think would be designated as professional partners rather than “user partners,” such as Universal Music Group and CBS.
Break a Leg’s Yuri Baranovsky said he’d collected $1,600 for more than 2 million views on YouTube. So if that means $800 for a million views (which it doesn’t exactly, but just to get an idea), user partners have been responsible for 1.25 billion paid views so far.
Users complained after YouTube was bought for $1.65 billion by Google in October 2006 that they weren’t being rewarded for their own hard work to make the site what it was. So OK, this math is a little unfair, but if you divide that out, users have now earned about .06 percent the purchase price. Thanks a lot, Chad and Steve!
If you want more current numbers, Bear Stearns estimated that YouTube would pull in $90.2 million in domestic revenue and $13.8 million in international revenue this year, with the vast majority of that coming from banner ads displayed next to videos. YouTube partner videos are the only ones on the site for which YouTube shows overlay ads, which it says it tries to sell for a $20 CPM. Bear Stearns said it expected $22.6 million in overlay ad revenue domestically this year.
Revver, the OG video rev-share site, hit the $1 million-paid-to-users mark first, in September 2007. The site was later bought by LiveUniverse for about $5 million.
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Nielsen, best-known for its rankings of TV programming, said Wednesday it is developing a system that would police Web sites for copyrighted material, and notify site owners and content providers when video has been posted without authorization.
Nielsen is developing the system with Digimarc, a provider of digital watermarking technology. The service, which the companies plan to start rolling out in the second quarter of next year, would tap into technology Nielson currently uses in the services it sells to advertisers and TV networks.
The system would first be used for policing the use of TV programs, clips of which are often posted on user-generated content sites, such as YouTube, which is owned by Google. Much of that content is uploaded without authorization or compensation to the content provider, which has led to tension between Internet companies and Hollywood studios. These tensions reached a peak in March whenViacom filed a $1 billion lawsuit against Google, accusing the company of massive copyright infringement.
The Nielsen/Digimarc system would be offered as a way to quickly discover unauthorized content on sites. To do that, the system would leverage Nielsen’s existing watermark technology, which is used on more than 95% of TV programming distributed today. The watermarks are used by the meters installed in people’s home to identify the programs they watch. Nielsen sells data from people’s viewing habits to TV networks and advertisers.
Besides watermarking, Nielsen also tags over-the-air TV programs intercepted by 700 installations across the nation. For those programs without watermarks, Nielsen creates a digital signature based on unique patterns in the audio signal.
Nielsen’s watermarks and digital signatures are stored in a database that would be used in the copyright-protection system. When a clip is posted on a Web site, the system would search for the watermark. If one doesn’t exist, then the system would create a digital signature. In either case, the identifier would be compared to what’s in the database to find a match. Once the program is identified, the Nielsen system could notify site operators and content providers when a clip is being shown without authorization.
While the system wouldn’t automatically delete unauthorized material, Web site owners could configure their systems to take that step. “The purpose of this system is not to be a policeman on the Internet, but to provide a system where the content provider can have confidence and knowledge of where their programming is being distributed,” Dave Harkness, senior VP of strategy and business development at Nielsen, told InformationWeek. “They also can develop a business relationship with the content distributor, which in this case is the Web site.”
Nielsen is confident it can convince many TV producers to buy into the system, since the company already has relationships with most of these businesses. Convincing Web sites may be more difficult, since many already have some kind of copyright-protection system in place or are developing one. Google, for example, is developing a system for YouTube. In general, most sites take down unauthorized content as soon as the owners notify them.
Nielsen believes it can turn many sites into customers by offering a system that’s ready to plug into their infrastructure, saving them the cost of building a copyright-protection system themselves, Harkness said. Besides generating revenue from the service, Nielson could also use it to track the use of video on the Web and sell the gathered data to advertisers.
If Nielsen launches its service it will have competitors, albeit smaller businesses. Those companies that provide services for policing the use of copyrighted content online include Audible Magic, Vobile, and BayTSP.
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Adobe Systems Inc released new software for its popular Flash Player on Sunday that promises to bring the quality of live video on cellular phones closer to that of video on computers.
Adobe, whose software made possible the rapid rise of pioneering online video site YouTube, said Nokia and NTT DoCoMo Inc would use its new Flash Lite 3 in their new cell phones.
Adobe said more than 300 million mobile devices equipped with previous versions of Flash had already been shipped and it expected more than a billion Flash-enabled devices to be available by 2010.
Adobe’s Flash software is installed on about 98 percent of all personal computers and is used by virtually all popular online video sites, mainly thanks to the fact it works independently of the device that the video is displayed upon.
Gary Kovacs, in charge of marketing at Adobe’s mobile unit, called Flash Lite 3 “the most significant advance we’ve made in mobile” and said it brought Adobe closer to being able to release software versions for mobile and desktop simultaneously.
“It’s probably a few years away. We’ll do it over the next couple to three years,” he told Reuters.
Nokia’s 3.4 million-strong mobile software development group, Forum Nokia, said it would launch a new development community on Monday to help Flash developers and designers.
Nokia, the world’s biggest mobile telephone maker, announced a major new push into multimedia, including video, music and gaming last month, seeking to challenge Apple Inc’s dominance in portable entertainment.
The head of Forum Nokia, Lee Epting, said in a statement: “Flash Lite 3 will enable us to deliver richer content to our customers, such as videos and animated ringtones.”
Adobe, also known for its Acrobat document management and Photoshop software, said earlier this month that its profit more than doubled last quarter on strong sales of new products and as it makes inroads into mobile, video and office worker markets.
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