Make Money With Your Videos Today: Dump YouTube And Upgrade To A For-Profit Video Sharing Community
Although many of us are waiting for YouTube to finally announce the launch of it’s community profit sharing program, it’s probably not a good idea to hold your breath. If you’ve got tons of great video content just sitting there on your hard drive and you’re itching to make a buck by doing something with it, there are a couple of YouTube-like alternatives that will pay you money for your content. Check it…
Earn 5$ Per 1000 views on Metacafe
The first site on this list is Metacafe. The site has a rewards program based on the number of times your video is viewed by visitors. There isn’t much fine print here. It’s as simple as it gets. The more your videos are watched, the more you get paid. Under their current program, you’ll earn $5 for every 1000 times your video is viewed. There’s only one catch. Similar to a lot of affiliate programs and Google’s Adsense program, you don’t get paid until you hit the $100 minimum payment threshold (approximately 20,000 views). While it might seem an insurmountable hurdle, any YouTube video fan knows that 20,000 isn’t that hard to do if your video catches on. Good quick videos can be incredibly viral and a low budget video shot on a home camera can generate millions of views over its lifetime. Take this video of Freddie “the YYZ Guitar Hero” on YouTube, for example. Since October 2006, the video’s been viewed on YouTube over 5 MILLION times. In a profit-sharing program like Metacafe’s, this video would have earned….ummm…carry the two…… $25,000 to date (and counting).
Hold on, we’re not moving on just yet. There’s more. If you have a website but don’t have any videos of your own you’ll be able to get in on the action pretty soon. Metacafe is about to launch an affiliate program for publishers where you can easily embed videos into your website or blog (YouTube style) and get paid based on the number of views. It hasn’t been officially launched yet, but you can check it out on their affiliate page.
My Top For-Profit Pick: Revver
Revver, although similar, has a slightly different revenue model to Metacafe. In my opinion, this could be A LOT more lucrative than Metacafe’s basic per-view program because Revver’s publishing tools make videos 10 times more viral. Here’s how it works… Users still earn money based on the number of views a video gets. However, instead of paying per view and leaving the content as-is, Revver inserts advertisements onto users’ videos and pays them a 50/50 share of the profits from those ads. The more viewers a video gets, the more money you get. Here’s where the program really gets good…when you upload a video to Revver, in addition to attaching an ad, they also attach unique tracking technology to the video. Revver ads can be served like YouTube on ANY blog or site, anywhere on the Internet. Since ads are attached to the video itself and dynamically served wherever your video travels, there’s no restriction on how your videos are distributed. The more people email your video, post it to other websites or download it from P2P networks, the more money you could earn. Consider that for a second. Now we’re talkin!
One last thing on Revver - For Bloggers and other Wordpress users, Revver’s got their own plugin for video publishing within posts and sidebars. How…ahem…convenient.
Beating Google To the Punch: Flixya’s Embedded Adsense Ads
This one’s worth mentioning for historical purposes, but I think it’ll probably be phased out soon. Flixya is a lot like Revver in that is shares ad revenues on a 50/50 basis with its users. However, instead of using their own ads, Flixya uses Google Adsense to serve ads into video pages. Although they beat Google’s recent adsense-for-video program (fed by YouTube) to market, Google’s Adsense for video program is now available free to all adsense publishers as of a few months ago (which you can see in the right sidebar of this site). Publishers under Google’s adsense for video lets you keep 100% of the click revenue and it works seemlessly with Adsense serving related content in classic Google style, so I don’t see Flixya being a real player in the for-profit video sharing arena for very long. I thought I’d acknowledge it though. ;-).
