On video sites sharing ad revenue

An article in Cnet today: Google shares ad wealth with videographers, talks about how Google has offered to share its ad revenue with the people who made the Diet Coke and Mentos experiment videos.

This is a really interesting and fairly obvious development - as much as people love to upload copyrighted video to YouTube and get nothing in return, when amateurs make their own videos (and they think they’re worth putting online), they always have little dollar signs in their eyes. I know I do.

Which is one of the reasons I thought it was really smart of Google to launch their video service with an option to charge per view (or buy a lifetime pass), where the price would be set by the uploader and the revenue shared between google and the video author.

I thought that would be the way online video would go, but it’s becoming more and more clear that paid content - of any kind - on the web is going the way of the dinosaurs (one great movie and two mediocre sequels).

What’s going to be really interesting to me is finding out how many video sharing sites (with the insane bandwidth costs and unrealistic economics of serving millions of videos simultaneously individually) will collapse once they realize that splitting text-ad revenue three ways isn’t going to cut it.