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Charging YouTube Users for Uploads Won't Work

YouTube may be our "national trove of free video," says Fast Company's Chris Dannen, but the video-sharing giant still costs Google an unsustainable amount of money each year, as advertising revenues remain paltry. Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster has an interesting suggestion for the growing problem: charge uploaders a small fee for videos that aren't monetizable through advertising. As Dannen says, this would add significant value to YouTube's bottom line, but it might also tarnish the company's brand.

First of all, is such a system technically feasible? According to Munster, it is, and the charge could be directly related to the average lifeftime cost of streaming for a given video. However, as Dannen points out, Google's content identification system will undergo a new level of stress once its users' money is at stake. People will want to know what they're being judged on, exactly, and why, because it's costing them money. Accusations of one kind of bias or another will fly, Dannen says.

Moreover, a system like this could undoubtedly be gamed. "YouTube would then be stuck with a bunch of ad-interlopers it'd need to weed out at great expense," says Dannen. "As users, we'd be stuck with a random frame of a commercial product or incomprehensible descriptions in every video, just because the user was trying to avoid charges." Another problem, he says, would be setting up a payment system to handle and process the batches of micropayments.

Read the whole story at Fast Company »

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