Tech Shout!

Chad Hurley, co-founder and CEO of the San Mateo, California-based video sharing website YouTube, has announced that his immensely well-known site will begin sharing revenue with its millions of users.

Hurley said one of the major proposed advances is a way to enable users to be paid for content. YouTube, which was sold to Google for $1.65 billion in November, has become an Internet phenomenon since it began to catch on in late 2005. YouTube shows over 70 million clips of movies, television, music videos and amateur videos a day

Hurley commented, ”We are getting an audience large enough where we have an opportunity to support creativity, to foster creativity through sharing revenue with our users. So in the coming months we are going to be opening that up.”

However Hurley has not disclosed any details pertaining how much users might receive, or what mechanism would be used.

YouTube is following in the steps of other videos sites such as MetaCafe and Revver who pay their users to post online video content. Revver has said it would split the ad revenue evenly with content creators.

Hurley said that when YouTube started, he and the site’s other co-founders, Steve Chen and Jawed Karim – realized that revenue-sharing would build a community of users induced by making money, rather than their love of videos.

But that as the site has grown, the three, who continue to run the company, have come to see financial remuneration as a way of enhancing content.

Hurley spoke on the last full day of the World Economic Forum, which brings together the world’s political, social and business leaders for a five-day gathering on the problems facing the world.

Chad Hurley, aged 30, was one of the youngest to participate at the meeting. Apart from Hurley, a new face from the company Flickr co-founder Caterina Fake which was bought by Yahoo! attended along with Bill Gates and more where they dicussed the future of the web.