Keeping Social Media Going

There are two primary complaints about the long-term viability of social media sites. The first is how to monetize them. The second is how to keep your best content producers from heading off to another site. After all, as goes the content, so go the users. It seems that YouTube has decided to address this issue by not only monetizing popular content with ads, but also by finally putting a revenue share option in place to help keep popular video producers at the site.

YouTube's plan is to take selected content producers and to give them a portion of the revenue that is earned from advertising that appears next to their content. The idea is to keep top talent around so that the top talent's fans will stick around as well.

From MediaPost:

It's a good idea, but with other companies jumping on the revenue share bandwagon already, I do have to wonder if up and coming content producers might not be attracted to more open (and more lucrative) partnerships.

Of course revenue share without traffic doesn't do anyone any good and it can't be argued that YouTube is tops in terms of traffic.

How this impacts social media sites moving forward will be interesting to see. I have to wonder if people will eventually tire of providing free content for sites that make money off of that content. On the other hand, sites like Amazon and Trip Advisor have been doing it since the early days of the web.