Have you ever watched one of MRirian’s YouTube videos?

If not, here’s your chance:

On behalf of YouTube, thank you for watching this video. You just added one more view to its current 3,122,864 views (as of a few minutes ago). Would you like perhaps to add a rating to the existing 14,220 ratings, or maybe a text comment? Hey, text comment #19,826 could be yours! Or you could try to create your own wildly popular 34-seconds long silent stare, and add it as the 21th video response?

Assuming a $1 CPM on YouTube ads, this video added ~$3K to YouTube’s revenue.

Should UGC web sites split revenue with the content creators? Would that be an incentive for content creators to create more content?

Would you create a video and upload it to YouTube for a very, very small chance to become wildly successful and receive %75 of $3K?

My guess is no, that’s not a very good incentive.

If you create content because you are passionate about something, attaching a low $ value to this labor of love could actually be quite a counter-incentive.

And if you are creating content with the explicit intention of having this content generate a check from Google at the end of the month, well, you may want to re-evaluate your ROI on this vs a real job.

P.S. Yes, a $5 to $30 CPM could change the picture, at least for videos.

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