Eamonn Fitzgerald's Rainy Day

According to Le Monde, "YouTube va partager ses revenus avec les internautes", while El Pais plays it as "YouTube (también) te paga". Meanwhile, CNN is reporting that "YouTubers to get ad revenue share". Big story!

Now, consider this video: "The secret to finding the hidden music track in Windows XP!" Notice how many times it's been watched? 399,276 views at the time of writing. One more thing. There, on the right-hand side, under Producer Rewards, it says: "This video has earned $1,963."

All the noise about the YouTube payment plant is put in perspective by taking a look at Metacafe's Producer Rewards™ program. You can see that Reel Stunts has pulled in $25,932; massagenerd has earned $22,588 and maverick99 is on $22,297. Nice work. But because money doesn't grow on trees, the deal is like this:

"Metacafe will pay you $5 for every thousand views your video gets on our site. Payment starts after your video reaches 20,000 views and has a rating of 3.00 or higher — which tells us that the viewers like the video. On top of that, the license to Metacafe is a non-exclusive deal — you retain ownership of your video. Metacafe helps build your brand by marketing your content and making you money."

Last week, we met Eyal Hertzog co-founder of Metacafe. He's rightly proud of the site's 17 million unique users each month, and he says its bank of 450 million video clips, makes Metacafe the third video broadcasting site in the world behind YouTube and Google Video. So how it is done? Well, first there's $19 million in venture capital, and then there's a desktop client that uploads and downloads the videos, only about 20 of which are newly approved each day. Instead of a YouTube style fat pipe of content, Metacafe relies on just a small number of selected videos to drive a large amount of traffic. Hertzog says that Metacafe's system is superior to its rivals because the content is first reviewed before being posted, and it also uses an anti-duplication algorithm to make sure each video is posted only once, which makes finding videos easier.

Porn is filtered out, successfully, but the comments could do with more monitoring and the humour is often quite juvenile, but Metacafe shows that one does not have wait for Google/YouTube to make the first moves. However, now that the 800lb gorilla has made its play, Om Malik thinks that the Metacafe business model is in big, big trouble.