THE SILHOUETTE • C7
THURSDAY, MARCH 31, 2011
BUSINESS SANTINO MARINUCCI BUSINESS EDITOR
Ever since 2006, YouTube has been pumping useless videos into our heads and increasing procrastination everywhere from students at university to 30-somethings confined to cubicles. When you think about it, where would your life truly be without YouTube? It benefits so many people, including large businesses and musicians who choose to create viral media. It has now gotten to such an extent, where people are quitting their day jobs and relying solely off revenue collected from their video hits. That’s right, people like RayWilliamJohnson, Fred, and Keyboard Cat all make thousands of dollars a day, just for being popular. However there is a large component to this popular video sharing site that has been growing in popularity ever since it was created, and that is people getting rich and famous through it. Believe it or not, there is an entire structure behind how one can make money through advertising revenue on YouTube. The first thing that you have to do when you upload a video and it is getting popular is to join the YouTube partner program, which is an account where the revenue is shared between you and the company based on how many views you get on each of your videos. That’s not all, if you really want to make some money, signing up for Google’s Ad-Sense will increase your chances for payment as it will redirect viewers to partner sites that YouTube and Google advertises for and will increase traffic to those sites. With that said, is making money for something so trivial really worth it? Morally I definitely think that this is questionable, however financially can you really argue with thousands of extra dollars in your bank account for singing about the days of the
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week? To give you a dumbed-down version of how the ad-revenue works revenue only comes from banner ads served near your content. However, YouTube is not stupid, and estimates a 2.59 per cent rate of people who click away before the video loads. This is added into the page views and divided into how much ad-money you make per page view. Well, take some famous examples from popular culture that will surely have you wishing you had come up with possibly the worst song of the decade. Yes I’m talking about Rebecca Black and her nails on a black board song “Friday.” With some help from her iTunes sales, Black is currently raking in $27,000 a week in revenue for this atrocity. Granted she has made considerable donations to Japan, I’ll give her that. But it just goes to show how little talent you need to make some extra money. This is not even the tip of the iceberg, Yahoo finance has compiled a list of the top YouTube earners of 2010 and the results were confounding. Shane Dawson, who was listed at number one on the list of earners, raked in $315,000 last year. Those of you who do not know who this man is, he does comedy skits and parodies online and got around 431,787,450 views to earn this much. Number two on the list goes to The Annoying Orange, who banked $288,000. Now, I’m all for a good orange now and then, but it blows my mind that people are actually entertained by this waste of time. Seriously guys, a talking fruit? This annoying piece of fruit got 349,753,047 views and re-enforced my lack of faith in mankind. Whether you are a hater, trolling on videos or legitimately surfing to find a good video to watch, keep in mind that they are making money off of you. So next time you are wondering which seat Rebecca Black will take; it is probably the driver seat to that Porsche she just bought.
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