YouTube to Monetize Viral Videos

Posted on August 25, 2009

YouTube has a post today that says Google is opening up the YouTube Partnership Program to include "individual popular videos." Basically, if a video goes viral YouTube wants to give the creator of the video the opportunity to monetize it. The program being used is Google's Adsense program.

We decided it was time to spread the wealth. Today we're excited to announce that we're extending the YouTube Partnership Program to include individual popular videos on our site. Now, when you upload a video to YouTube that accumulates lots of views, we may invite you to monetize that video and start earning revenue from it. To determine whether a particular video is eligible for monetization, we look at factors like the number of views, the video's virality and compliance with the YouTube Terms of Service. If your video is eligible for monetization, you will receive an email and see an "Enable Revenue Sharing" message next to your video on the watch page, as well as in other places in your account:

If a video uploaded to YouTube accumulates enough views and meets YouTube's terms of service than a "Enable Revenue Sharing" message will appear.

ReadWriteWeb has posted some rules of thumb that people looking to monetize "one-hit wonders" should keep in mind.

It's interesting YouTube did this. It's possible they have some users with some fairly popular videos that have not considered joining the partnership program or are not even aware it exists. By putting the button on the Youtubers page they may get more signups and therefore more ad views and ad revenues.