Cashing In on Your Hit YouTube Video - NYTimes.com

Creating a video that attracts millions of viewers and becomes a pop culture phenomenon involves an unpredictable cocktail of luck and timing. Here's some advice from NY Times article: Cashing In on Your Hit YouTube Video - NYTimes.com

Here is reprint of part that deals with youtube posting:

"GET MONEY FROM YOUTUBE ADS. If your video is on the road to viral success, YouTube, a part of Google, is eager to make money from you. It will send you an e-mail asking if you want to become a partner. If you give your permission, the site will run ads alongside your video and share more than half the revenue with you, sending you a check each month.


"Some of the people behind viral videos, like the father of the boy coming down from dental anesthesia in “David After Dentist,” have made more than $100,000 from YouTube ads. Ms. Clem has made $3,000 in three weeks and stands to make much more because Disney wants to use her video in a TV ad.

"Early on, YouTube would sign people up as partners after videos had been watched more than a million times. But it has since developed an algorithm, which it calls reference rank, to predict whether a video will go viral when it has had as few as 10,000 views.

"The most important element is whether influential Web sites post the video. When Reddit posted Mr. McEntee’s video, for instance, its views jumped from 1,000 to six million in three days. YouTube also analyzes other data, like the number of viewers, how many times a video is shared on social networking sites and the rate at which people comment on the video.

"Protect the video with a YouTube program called Content ID, which gives video owners the right to block others from using their videos or to be paid when they do. That helps to prevent people from creating copies that might be watched instead of yours. Parodies, translations or autotuned song versions, however, tend to add to the original’s traffic.

"YouTube does not offer live customer service for viral video creators. YouTube said it would be impossible to talk to millions of video creators but it has help forums for people to ask questions."

FURTHERMORE, Another NYTIMES article discusses how youtube ads generate revenue for the content provider.
Here is that link: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/03/technology/03youtube.html