YouTube Will Pay You For Your Videos

YouTube CEO Chad Hurley, speaking at the Annual Meeting of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, says YouTube is going to start paying for user-generated content. Of course they won't be the first -- other sites that pay you for uploading videos include Revver, Brightcove, LuluTV, Break.com, MetaCafe, and Eefoof. Of course what YouTube has that those other sites don't have is a huge viewer base, and a lot of people uploading their own videos.

Why is YouTube just now getting around to "sharing the wealth"? Hurley says:

We didn’t want to build a system that was motivated by monetary reward. We wanted to really build a true community around video. When you start out with giving money to people from day one, the people you do attract will just switch to the next provider who’s paying more. We’re at a scale now that we feel we can do that and still have a true community around video.

I don't really believe that particular spin, but in a way it makes sense. If they'd paid for content from the beginning, they would've attracted a very different "community" of uploaders.

But the big questions are, will there be an influx of uploaders who are only in it for the money, and if so, what impact will they have on the established YouTube community? Oh yeah, and how much YouTube SPAM will I get from people trying to con me into watching their video so they get paid?

Joe at Dygitiscape compares it to Jason Calacanis' move to pay users for generating content at Netscape.com but I don't think it's all that similar. First, Jason was interested in poaching the top submitters at Digg, Reddit, NewsVine, etc. Second, he was only interested in hiring a few of them. Third, he did it all Calacanis style, which tends to make a lot of people think he deserves a good hard cockpunch. I don't see any of that happening with Hurley and YouTube.

Nicholas at Rough Type says that making a clear connection between revenue-sharing and the expansion of advertising will help minimize user revolt, and that "rewarding creativity" will encourage competition among YouTube uploaders to provide better content, get more views, and generate more earnings for themselves. I hope he's right, but I worry that a lot of uploaders will be more interested in the views and the dollars, and not too worried about the quality of the content they provide.

Tony Pierce at LAist shares my concern (a several others, most of which involve lots of lawyers), predicting that revenue-sharing might result in "an unending amount of LonelyGirl15 wannabes, not to mention worse fakes, and just plain dumber videos whose only intention was to get visits, thus money."

In any case, I think it's definitely something to keep an eye on.

Here's a YouTube clip of Chad Hurley's announcement at Davos:

(via Jeff Jarvis at BuzzMachine)

Save on Gifts With Online Coupons

Having survived another holiday season (and thoroughly enjoyed it!), it's time to start thinking about gifts again. As I've admitted here before, I'm not the world's greatest gift-giver. Not even close. But I do try to give gifts that are a bit unique. Sometimes that means I get reactions like "What the hell is it?" or "What am I supposed to do with that?" Other times I get somebody something they hadn't seen, or even thought of, before but that they instantly fall in love with or decide they don't know how they managed to live without it. Those times are rare, but I'm getting better.

One way I look for unique or unusual gifts online is to spend a lot of time checking out small "mom and pop" type online stores. Another way is to use the big shopping portals to find online stores I haven't seen before. One type of shopping portal I really like are the coupon sites, and because different coupon sites feature different stores, I tend to keep quite a few of them bookmarked -- CouponChief, FatWallet, CouponCabin, etc. Using coupon sites helps me find really cool gifts and save a few bucks at the same time.

For example, CouponChief keeps me up-to-date on potential savings from some of my favourite sources of great gifts -- Adagio Tea coupons, Figis.com discounts, and great deals at Solutions.com.

Using coupon sites, price comparison sites, and product and merchant review sites are all great ways to find new products and online shops that you might never have discovered otherwise. And in many cases, they can help you save a few dollars as well. Keeping a few in your bookmarks, or even throwing together a little personal links page (online or offline), is a good idea.

Disclosure: CouponChief is paying me (through PayPerPost.com) to talk about their site. But they don't pay me to use their site to find great deals at sites like Gaiam, Books-a-Million, Alsto's, Cyberguys, or HenryFields. It would be totally cool if they did, though.

Personalized Advertising on Digital Billboards

As I've mentioned before here in a number of previous posts, I have a love/hate relationship with advertising and marketing. On the one hand, I sell things. Advertising and marketing the things I sell helps me sell more of them. I'm also a bit of frugal person -- I don't like to throw my money away. Sometimes a company's advertising and marketing efforts help me save money. A lot of times, they try to do the opposite. In either case, I think consumers need to know what how advertisers and marketers try to influence not only their purchasing decisions, but a lot of other behaviours and attitudes as well. So I try to pay attention to what the advertisers and the marketers and the sellers are all up to.

One of the latest developments in the wonderful world of advertising and marketing is the MINI Motorboard.



MINI USA has put these billboards in New York, Chicago, San Francisco and Miami, and has selected a number of MINI owners in each city and invited them to participate in the pilot project. Each person who agrees to participate sends MINI a bit of info about themselves, and in return they get a special key fob to put on their keyring. The key fob communicates the owners identity to the Motorboard as the car approaches, and the Motorboard displays a personal message customized for that particular driver, based on the information provided when they signed up.

I don't think it takes much to see that these messages could be used in all sorts of ways. Including, of course, customizing advertisements to individual people. In a way, that's cool. I like targeted advertising. That's one reason I joined PTR programs, and why I let some websites store cookies on my computer. Because if the ads are going to be there anyway, I'd prefer that they were ads for things I'm actually interested in. In another way, it's not cool. It's another weapon in an advertising and marketing arsenal that is used to achieve a single, all-important goal. To get my money.

As the NY Times points out in an article on digital billboards, these things are developing into huge money earners for the advertising companies, with profit margins around 70% (as opposed 45% for old-fashioned static billboards). And digital billboards mean advertisers have more choice -- instead of renting a billboard by the week or the month, they can buy spots on a digital billboard for a single day, or even just a few hours. Now they can not only pick the location, they can pick the number of times their ad will be shown in a day, they can choose particular times of the day, etc. And if we see more of the technology being used in this MINI campaign, they'll be able to choose to show their ads when particular people are driving by.

I love the idea and I hate it, too. I love it when I have some control over which ads I see. I hate it when companies try to make me their bitch.

Does Amazon Owe You Money AGAIN?

A year ago I blogged about RefundPlease.com and AmazonPriceWatch, two services that help you take advantage of Amazon's 30-day price guarantee. You tell them what you bought, and how much you paid, and if the price drops within 30 days after you're purchase, they send you an email letting you know so you can go claim your money from Amazon.

So why am I bringing up this old news once again? Because while reading about RefundPlease.com in a LifeHacker post from last week, I learned about PriceProtectr.com from one of the comments (thanks eleazar!).

PriceProtectr.com works the same way as the others, but it isn't just for Amazon. It tracks prices at BackCountry.com, BestBuy, Circuit City, Costco, Future Shop, Jenson USA, Office Max, Sears and Target.

Looks pretty sweet!

Scanning Shoppers' Brains

Science Blog has a post about scanning shoppers' brains to try to understand what happens when they're deciding whether to buy something or not. The study was conducted as a joint project by researchers at Carnegie Mellon, Stanford, and the MIT Sloan School of Management, and published in the latest issue of Neuron (Abstract).

The researchers put subjects in an fMRI machine and then let them look at products on a computer screen. When they saw the products, a part of the brain called the nucleus accumbens (associated with the anticipation of pleasure) was activated. Then, when they were presented with the prices (they only had $20 to spend), if the price was too high, two things happened -- the insula (associated with the experience of pain) was activated and the medial prefrontal cortex (associated with balancing gains versus losses) was deactivated.

Up to this point, it just looks like a bunch of scientific mumbo-jumbo, but here's where it starts getting interesting. By watching the rMRI images, the researchers were able to predict whether or not the subject would buy the product or not. Unfortunately, since most people don't do their shopping while lying in an fMRI machine, that's probably not going to mean much out here in the real world. At least not yet.

But what about in the future? How long before there are scanners that can monitor our brain activity while we're walking around inside a store? Will the store computer be able to watch what's happening inside our heads, and if we look at a price and our medial prefrontal cortexes deactivate, will the price of the item be automatically adjusted downward in a second-chance effort to entice us to make the purchase? Will they add brain scan information to the profiles they create for us, and use it to create more personalized advertisements and individualized prices?

And when they do all this....will we like it?

Payments for December 2006

And now to December.

eBay $101.67
eJury $10.00
Total $110.67

Yearly Total $1466.09

eBay again was based on sales involving zero effort on my part. Which is a shame, really. I would've liked it if we'd put some real work into it to see if we could do some serious Xmas sales. Oh well, maybe next year.

And that yearly total isn't bad, either. Nearly $1500, plus if I'd included eBay profits for the first couple of months, the numbers would be even better. That's over $1500 that me and my family wouldn't have had if my wife and I weren't spending a bit of time and energy to earn a little extra money online. And for the most part, we had a lot of fun doing it!

Goal for 2007? I'd like to at least double it (the money and the fun)!

Mostly by doubling our eBay sales (and profits!), but also by getting into some affiliate marketing, and monetizing more of my writing (one way or another). Plus a couple more ideas I've been thinking about for a while.

Best wishes to everybody in 2007!

Payments for November 2006

With all the nuttiness and confusion involved in my life for a big chunk of November and December, I just realised I didn't post earnings for those months. Time to catch up. So here's November.

eBay $108.81
PayPerPost $7.00
Total $115.71

Yearly total $1355.42

Not a bad month, especially since I did almost nothing to earn it. The PPP post was written way back at the beginning of October, and the eBay money came in despite the only thing I did was ship items after they'd been ordered. No auctions. No advertising. No nothing. So all things considered, I'm a happy boy.