WhatTheBuck

The New York Times has carried a story titled, “YouTube Videos Pull In Real Money,” about the Youtube Partner Program. (And, one imagines, the story was inspired in part by recent hype for Hulu.com.)

The article cites Michael “What The Buck” Buckley and Cory “Mr. Safety” Williams as examples of the potential income opportunities available from the program.

YouTube are as coy as ever to reveal any statistic information about the program as a whole. The most interesting thing to note, particularly for video creators, is that ad-enabled videos form just the very highest tip of a much larger iceberg. Brian Stelter writes:

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.

Cory Williams had previously had his income revealed to the world during an appearance on The Tyra Banks show. Williams sat there dumbfounded before asking, “Who told you?”

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