14 DAY TRIAL // YouTube is the king of the hill when it comes to online video. It's the biggest video website by a large margin, yet it's not slowing down, quite the contrary. For the past couple of years in particular, it has been ramping up efforts to drive up the quality of its videos and is now rumored to be making another play in this direction by luring Hollywood celebrities into creating videos for the site in exchange for cold, hard cash.
That in itself is not exactly an original idea, where it gets interesting is that the celebs get to retain the rights to all the videos they create and get paid by YouTube at the same time.
New York Magazine is reporting that YouTube is making offers to high-profile celebrities encouraging them to create their own channels with original, three-minute-long shows.
And YouTube is prepared to spend big, it's willing to pay as much as $5 million a head and looking for something around 20 celebrities. That's a huge money commitment any way you look at it, but it's an even bigger gamble since YouTube won't own the content it's paying for.
All of the celebs will get to maintain the rights over the videos, but YouTube will recoup the money from the advertising it sells around those clips. This all sounds very similar to YouTube's existing Partner Grants Program, which also provides creators with up-front cash in exchange for the advertising returns.
It works more like a loan, in a way, YouTube pays for the shows to be created, but then keeps all the money from ads until it recuperates its initial investment, after which the regular ad revenue split applies.
It's interesting that the rumor comes just as YouTube is also rumored to be in the process of buying Next New Networks. The video producer and publisher works in a similar fashion to the Grants Program, creators get to keep the rights over their shows, but the ad revenue is shared.