• Business Week, Wednesday, May 9, 2007 10:33 AM

YouTube has finally started paying content producers for their work. But only a select few -- whose videos draw enough traffic to make any money at all. Web video comedian Christine Gambito says that while she is happy to participate in YouTube's new compensation program, the video-sharing site is still be more useful to her as a promotional vehicle than a real moneymaker. "You can't sell your DVD on YouTube," she says.

And, most likely, you won't earn meaningful ad revenue, either. That doesn't mean that sites like YouTube aren't a great resource for budding content producers wanting to build their brand-they are-but once you've enjoyed a degree of success, as Gambito has with her show "HappySlip," posting your work on YouTube "can work against you," says Ze Frank, former host of the video blog "The Show with Ze Frank." In some cases, producers are finding that "the crappiest situation is to be popular on these massive platforms," because the most value lies in attracting a big audience to a site you control and can sell ads against.

At a certain point, Frank says content providers have to ask whether they want to see their work spread across the Web by video ad networks, or do they want to have more control over where their content goes, who they sell ads to, and for how much.

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