Getting Paid For Your Videos

The video you just watched has earned its producer $1,928 to date and you watching it has only added to that total. He is one of the many people on Metacafe who are racking in a reasonable amount of cash from their videos. The video is less than two minutes long and he probably didn’t need to do a lot of work to set-up and produce it but it has netted him close to $2000. From my own personal experience though, some of the ways in which he says people count money in various parts of the world is in my point of view completely inaccurate. I won’t go into that but all I can say is that he is still making money from it and all it took was a bit of creativity.

I wrote a post on making money with videos at the end of last year and at the time, Metacafe’s top producer Kipkay had earned $65,113. That amount has since risen to $118,782. If this sounds like a good idea to you and you have that creative edge, you might not make anywhere near as much money as that but your chances of earning something worthwhile are good. Their payment structure has not changed over time and they still pay $5 per 1,000 views with the first payment for $100 being paid after crossing the 20,000 views mark.

There are other sites that work on the same concept as Metcafe. One of them is Atom, a startup owned by MTV networks that focuses on web comedy. They put down their formula as: Find talented people, make them famous across the Web and beyond, and pay them well. Their content is not restricted to the web and Atom videos can be found on mobile phones, ipods and TV which means a much wider audience is reached leading to a higher earning potential for content that has what it takes.

To be eligible to earn money from your content, it has to be identified as a top user video by Atom staff and/or the audience. Once a video has been upgraded to “Pro Video” status the creator if offered a commercial distribution offer where they earn money through a revenue sharing program. Atom is not very clear cut on how much users can earn from their videos. They do however state that payments fluctuate based on their quarterly revenue and that as an example in Q4 2007, creators earned about $8 for every 1000 plays. If that were still the case that means you would earn more on Atom than you would on Metacafe provided your video is funny.

This is just one of the many ways in which you can make money with your videos and they don’t even have to be something that you need to sit down and think about to create. They could very well be of random events occurring or have occured in your life that people would find interesting. For those of you who are really creative and looking for a bit of a challenge, stay tuned for a post on creating ads that could make you $2,500 to $60,000.