Google Shares Ad Wealth With Videographers

Rockgod writes to let us know that Google has begun sharing advertising revenue with the makers of a popular video clip. From the article: "[This] is a groundbreaking deal that could drive up the costs of competing in the fledgling video-sharing sector. The search company has agreed to turn over most advertising revenue generated by the latest video from Fritz Grobe and Stephen Voltz, creators of 'The Diet Coke & Mentos Experiment,' according to Peter Chane, a senior product manager for Google Video."

Brilliant...

[sirgallihad]

Congrats google, you've set the stage for a new era in digital video on the web. If the creators have the monetary incentive to produce their film, then there's a good chance that they start producing higher quality videos more often. Now, we just have to ask ourselves, why didn't youtube think of this in the first place?!?

Re:Brilliant...

[joe 155]

almost... but you made one crucial error; "there's a good chance that they start producing higher quality videos more often"

Elephant Dreams did ok, a full length film made in that way could do really well and could make a little money, but it won't get as many hits as someone just making a really cheap video of themselves lighting a fart (...if anyone has a video of this, do post a link), not to mention the fact that I could make about 3000 of the really low quality type videos in the time really talented people could make another ED.
What I'm trying to say is that I think this will lead to more really low quality videos which try and caputre a "funny" moment and then just send out thousands of links to it

Re:Brilliant...

[Firehed]

I doubt that Google is too down with the idea of hosting a full-length film released in 1080p. A multi-gig viral video of sorts (or even not that viral, but something not distributed via Bit-torrent) is basically about the same as slashdotting a server running a P1 with a 56k connection. Call it a PII on a T1 in Google's case.

That said, even funny viral videos tend to lose their humor when it's been converted to such low-bitrate flash that you can't even make out the above mentioned anal explosion. I certainly agree that we're more likely to see more of this kind of content - you can hit that long tail niche-y stuff with the short clips that full-length stuff simply can't do, regardless of how well it was made.