Canada on Strike

In this week's South Park episode titled Canada on Strike , the kids set off to make money on the internet . They dress up Butters and make him sing a sexual suggestive song (to say the least) and they post it on YouTube. They get over 10 Million hits and go to collect their profits. Sadly they discover that they need to wait in line behind the Star Wars Kid, Tay Zonday - Chocolate Rain, Lounging Baby, and all the other popular silly web clips to hit YouTube. The Idea is that non of them ever made a dime for their popularity. They eventually get paid 10 Million "potential dollars" for their hard work. This leads Kyle to proclaim in the kids' famous "I learned something today" speech that:

" Yeah, but you know, I learned something today. We thought we could make money on the Internet. But, while the Internet is new and exciting for creative people, it hasn't matured as a distribution mechanism to the extent that one should trade real and immediate opportunities for income for the promise of future online revenue. It will be a few years before digital distribution of media on the Internet can be monetized to the extent that necessitates content producers to forego their fair value in more traditional media."

This may be true, but there has started to be some change. We see sites such as Revver.com and Eefoof.com plan to split 50% of their adverting revenue with the producers of the independent content. This way a person can make money off the amount of times people clocked through on adds while viewing the producer's video. The question is whether this will mean that YouTube will eventually have to do something of the sorts to maintain its market leader position?