YouTube to Emulate RateItAll

At a recent conference in Davos, YouTube founder Chad Hurley announced that soon, YouTube would begin allowing contributors of video to share in the advertising revenue associated with their contributions. This sounds a lot like the RateItAll Economy Program, right?

And I think it's great news. Back in August of last year I wrote a long rant on this blog about how I felt that too many sites were exploiting the contributions of their members. Here's an excerpt:

Now big companies and venture capital firms are realizing that people are happy to work for these Web sites for free. Thousands of new "user generated content" sites are launching. Thousands hoping to be the next YouTube, the next MySpace - thousands hoping they can slap together a site, and have volunteers make it worth millions.

It ain't right, and it ain't sustainable. It took me a while to realize that revenue sharing is the only possible direction for RateItAll, but I'm happy to say that we are still one of the only sites on the Web to step up to the plate on this.

I'm thrilled that YouTube has come around, and I hope that others will follow.

I hope that the primary reason to visit RateItAll never becomes money. If that happens, something about our community will have been lost. But that doesn't mean that we shouldn't do things the right way and reward contributors.