The video-sharing website has extended its YouTube Partnership (YPP), which is intended to help channels on the site make money from their clips, to individual users.
The importance of this is perhaps best summed up by the announcement post’s title: ‘In the future, everyone will monetise their 15 minutes’.
If individual, ‘prolific’ users of the site can make revenue from what they share this once more cuts out the middleman – they no longer need mainstream media for distribution and the MSM may be less able to cash in from viral successes. If savvy users realise they can monetise it, will they be less likely to share their postings with commercial outlets?