December 11, 2008
YouTube Videos Pull In Real Money
By BRIAN STELTER
Making videos for YouTube — for three years a pastime for millions of Web surfers — is now a way to make a living.
One year after YouTube, the online video powerhouse, invited members to become partners and added advertising to their videos, the most successful users are earning six-figure incomes from the Web site. For some, like Michael Buckley, the self-taught host of a celebrity chatter show, filming funny videos is now a full-time job.
Mr. Buckley quit his day job in September after his online profits had greatly surpassed his salary as an administrative assistant for a music promotion company. His thrice-a-week online show is silly, he said, but it has helped him escape his credit-card debt.
Mr. Buckley, 33, was the part-time host of a weekly show on a Connecticut public access channel in the summer of 2006 when his cousin started posting snippets of the show on YouTube. The comical rants about celebrities attracted online viewers, and before long Mr. Buckley was tailoring his segments, called What the Buck? for the Web. Mr. Buckley knew that the show was only going to go so far on public access.
But on YouTube, he said, Ive had 100 million views. Its crazy.
All he needed was a $2,000 Canon camera, a $6 piece of fabric for a backdrop and a pair of work lights from Home Depot. Mr. Buckley is an example of the Internets democratizing effect on publishing. Sites like YouTube allow anyone with a high-speed connection to find a fan following, simply by posting material and promoting it online.
Granted, building an audience online takes time. I was spending 40 hours a week on YouTube for over a year before I made a dime, Mr. Buckley said — but, at least in some cases, it is paying off. 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.
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