Despite its massive bandwidth bills and a less-than-proven revenue model, YouTube plans to pay its contributors for their video content.
Co-founder Chad Hurley told fellow delegates at the World Economic Forum in Davos that the company is working on a way to pay users.
Hurley didn't give any details about how exactly a revenue share might be structured, according to AP: "We are getting an audience large enough where we have an opportunity to support creativity, to foster creativity through sharing revenue with our users. So in the coming months, we are going to be opening that up."
That's nothing new for video sharing sites: the Coke & Mentos guys reportedly made $30,000 from their video on Revver, but the sheer volume of content on YouTube is staggering. But the audience size is staggering too and that's where the advertisers come in. No doubt it'll be a share of revenue on ads either displayed alongside the videos or, more controversially, a share of video ads at the beginning and/or end of clips.
Online ad firm wunderLOOP scores $5m funding
In addition to his new Joost web TV project, Skype co-founder Niklas Zennström is one of several high-profile investors behind wunderLOOP, a behavioural advertising and content targeting firm based in Luxembourg.
Zennström has invested £5m in the firm along with angel investor Klaus Hommels, venture capitalist Howard Hartenbaum and the European Founders Fund.
wunderLOOP technology is already used by AOL, Tiscali, Lycos and T-Online. Hartenbaum told the Times that the technology allows ads to be much more targeted and therefore increased the value of ads to advertisers.
Google and Microsoft battle for UK web top spot
Google and Microsoft are still neck and neck in the battle for the most popular UK website. comScore's latest data on UK web traffic puts Google at 25,751,000 unique users for December 2006 and Microsoft at 25,721,000 - both up 3% from November 2006.
The BBC sites were up 2% to 16.7m, Time Warner sites up 7% to 13.9m and Sky up 22% to 9.5m.
Retail sites saw a huge increase in traffic thanks to Christmas, with Dell recording the biggest percentage change of 52% from November to 3.9m. Sorry Jeff.
The overall UK web population, excluding web cafes, mobile phones and children under 15, was up 1% to 29,788,000. GAME.co.uk, Dixons and Play.com were all up more than 20%. Apple saw a 17% increase to 9.4m users during December and was the twelfth most visited site in the UK.
A few losers though: Wikipedia saw a 3% drop in users to just over 9m and DMGT's sites lost 8% of traffic to 6.9m.
Mobile internet hots up
More data: December 2006 saw a record number of people accessing web services on their mobiles, according to data from the MDA.
December 2006 recorded 15.9m people using mobile internet services, the highest number yet and partly driven by Christmas gifts including SlingBox, which allows users to access live and pre-recorded shows on their set-top box using mobile devices.
Germ: Channel 4's viral video competition
Channel 4 launched a viral video competition today in partnership with BoreMe.com. Students on graphics, design and advertising degrees at Central St Martins and various other colleges can enter the best video, best still image and best interactive viral as part of their courses.
There's a separate category for professionally produced virals and the winners of all categories will be exhibited at the ICA later this year.
You have 61 days left to submit your film through the Channel 4 website. No dancing purple hippos please.
Last year's ICA show attracted a record number of visitors and derision from Brian Sewell, no less. "Frankly, I don't see what this has got to do with art," reported the Independent in an old piece that's not online.
"This kind of thing really has no intellectual foundation. It's all feeble rubbish. It makes me wonder why this place is given money."
Please please enter, if only to infuriate Brian Sewell again.
Copying blogs
Blog etiquette dictates that copying and pasting parts of blogs is generally OK if the source is credited and linked to. It's all about the links, after all.
But it is always odd, though, when newspapers do this in print. Mike Coulter on Digital Agency.com is remarkably calm about his turn in the Sunday Times yesterday, but didn't actually know until a friend tipped him off.
Yep, there's a credit. But how often have you been reading a newspaper, spotted something from a blog and then gone to look it up? I don't think I've ever done that. It's about context.
There is also, as Mike delicately puts it, more than whiff of cheekiness about newspapers using "free" content from blogs. If it's good enough to use several paragraphs of, isn't it good enough to pay for?
I think I hear the sound of ice creaking, so I'd better leave it there.
Thanks Ben.
Most emailed
Always worth checking out the most emailed stories from the BBC. The last time I looked, top story was "World's tallest man saves dolphin". Not a headline you see every day.
Today's delights include "Duck comes back from dead, again" and "Woman gives birth to giant baby". It was an eyewatering 17lb. (The baby, not the un-dead duck.)
