DAVOS, Switzerland (Jan. 27) - Chad Hurley, co-founder of YouTube, said Saturday that his wildly successful site will start sharing revenue with its millions of users.
Hurley said one of the major proposed innovations is a way to allow users to be paid for content. YouTube, which was sold to Google for $1.65 billion in November, has become an Internet phenomenon since it began to catch on in late 2005. Some 70 million videos are viewed on the site each day.
"We are getting an audience large enough where we have an opportunity to support creativity, to foster creativity through sharing revenue with our users," Hurley said. "So in the coming months we are going to be opening that up."
Hurley, who at 30 is one of the youngest Internet multimillionaires, gave no details of how much users might receive, or what mechanism would be used.
In October 2005, Revver - which like YouTube offers video clips online - announced plans to attach advertising to user-submitted videos and give their creators a cut of the profits. Revver has said it would split the ad revenue evenly with content creators.
Hurley said that when YouTube started, he and the site's other co-founders - Steve Chen and Jawed Karim - felt revenue-sharing would build a community of users motivated by making money, rather than their love of videos.
But that as the site has grown, the three, who continue to run the company, have come to see financial remuneration as a way of improving content.
Hurley spoke on the last full day of the World Economic Forum, which brings together the world's political, social and business leaders for a five-day gathering on the problems facing the world.
At 30-years-old — a milestone he reached only this week — Hurley is one of the youngest participants at the meeting.
He appeared on a panel that included another bright new face in the Internet, Flickr co-founder Caterina Fake, as well as Microsoft Corp. chairman Bill Gates and others who discussed the future of Web. 2.0.
Fake's photo-sharing start-up was bought by Yahoo , and is the fastest growing photo site on the Web.
The panel discussed the incredible potential of the Web to bring the world closer together, with Gates saying that he saw particular potential for education and health care.
But they also talked about the challenges ahead, including how to protect intellectual property and set up a system of micropayments that will make it easier for companies to charge for content, as well as ways to protect privacy.
The panel also discussed the dangers of another phenomenon of the wired world, the rapid posting on Internet sites of cellphone videos like that of the hanging of former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein hanging that can cause outrage and unrest, and are virtually impossible to control.
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Wonder how this will translate to even more instances of stolen content appearing on the site?
