YouTube, Others, Pay for Popular Videos

MIAMI – Calling all online video producers: Ever think your videos are so good that you should be paid for them? Well, a number of content creators are getting some decent checks for what they put on sites that compete with YouTube, including one Florida producer who has made nearly $10,000 by posting content on Spymac.com.

You may not have heard of Spymac.com because it’s based in Germany and was created to be a network for Macintosh enthusiasts in 2001, but the site has changed into a social network for users to post multimedia. About 50 percent of its users are from the United States, and it is especially growing in popularity in Latin America since it began paying for content, according to its executives.

With the growth in the number of sites that offer social networking and places to upload user-generated content, companies like Spymac taking full advantage of Web 2.0 are hoping to expand by seducing users with monetary rewards. The hope is that more people will flock to their sites and they will stand out among the powerhouse sites like YouTube, MySpace and Flickr.

Spymac doesn’t pay everyone who contributes, just the ones with the highest ratings and the most visitors. The top content creators split 50 percent of the month’s advertising revenue, according to executives, but they do not reveal exactly how many users get a piece of the paycheck. This month’s estimated payout is more than $50,000, and the top 100 listed on the site are to be paid $2,500 to $20, depending how they rank. But those numbers will go up if advertising revenues increase before the month’s end.

Last month, the top user was paid $5,000; the largest check as of yet was written out for $12,000 to a user in Germany, said Kevin April, Spymac’s chief technology officer.

But Spymac isn’t the only online media outlet signing checks for uploaded content. VuMe.com also pays its top video producers a portion of advertising revenue. And earlier this year YouTube began sharing its ad revenues with select members, although exactly how much and how many users hasn’t been revealed.

YouTube Chief Executive Chad Hurley told an audience in January at the World Economic Forum in Switzerland that the company didn’t pay users from the beginning because they didn’t want to build a system motivated by monetary reward.

"When you start out with giving money to people from day one … the people we do attract will just switch to the next provider that’s paying more," Hurley said. "We feel that we’re at the scale now that we’ll be able to do that and really still have a true community around video."

Spymac says it has more than 1 million members, but it’s not clear how many of those are active. April did say, however, that 70 percent of the site’s visitors are active uploaders and that it gets between 5,000 and 10,000 video uploads each day.

Roshie Jones, an Orlando resident, is one of Spymac’s top American filmmakers, bringing in $9,900 between January and April. He said he was doing it for free as a way to help his career as a professional photographer, but that he became more dedicated to uploading when the paychecks started rolling in.

"The reality is if you can be paid for something you do well, you want to be paid," said Jones, who posts as SOCOM12.

He was so popular, in fact, that Spymac recently gave him a regular paying gig. Last week he began posting videos _ on behalf of Spymac _ that highlight some of the most popular users.

For now at least, the content that is generating paychecks on Spymac is extremely unsophisticated, so being a professional isn’t important _ it’s being popular that matters.