YouTube rewards British video-clip creators with a share of ad cash

Amateur British film-makers who submit popular clips to the video-sharing website YouTube are to be financially rewarded for their handiwork. YouTube, which is owned by Google, says it will give a share of the advertising revenue from its most watched clips to the creators, in some cases allowing them to earn as much as £1,500 a month. One Briton who is already being paid for his work and whose films have been watched millions of times has earned almost £4,000 since April. The scheme will be eligible only to people who submit “a significant number” of videos, and for clips that are watched regularly, though Google declined to be more precise about the criteria. It also declined to say what the video creator’s share of the revenue would be. “You don’t have to have submitted a vast number of videos – we’re just talking about people who generate a lot of traffic for the site,” a Google spokesman said. YouTube is the most popular video-sharing site on the internet – visited by 129 million people each month – and in America the makers of its most popular videos make as much as $40,000 (£20,000) a year from their films. Ten hours of content is uploaded by its users around the world every minute. In 2006 a video that showed two “scientists” dropping Mentos mints into Diet Coke bottles to create a giant, foaming geyser, was watched tens of millions of times. The clip resulted in hundreds of copycat videos, and the pair – known as EepyBird – being invited to give a demonstration of the experiment at Coke’s headquarters. Under the new scheme, if a YouTube member is selected as a “partner”, an advert will appear at the bottom of each of their videos when they are played. The advert, which takes up 20 per cent of the screen, will run for 10 seconds and then disappear, but if a viewer clicks on it, a portion of the revenue YouTube generates will go to the video’s creator. One person likely to benefit is Lauren Luke, 26, a self-employed mother of one from South Shields, South Tyneside, who five months ago started making videos showing girls how to put on make-up. She has now made 102 – each about 10 minutes long – which have been watched a total of 2.1 million times, and has 345,000 regular viewers on her “channel”. Ms Luke’s most popular video explains how to achieve a look modelled by the singer Leona Lewis. James Provan, a 25-year-old computing science student from Aberdeen, has already cashed in on his work, having been invited to become a partner last year. He has earned about £3,700. Mr Provan’s videos show items of food coming to life in a stop-animation style, similar to that used to make the Wallace & Grommit films. His most popular video, which shows a pancake dancing, has been watched 2.2 million times.