New video site will pay content creators

July 6, 2006

As YouTube, Google Video and other video Web sites continue to explode in popularity, a lot of content production is being asked of users with nothing in return. Enter Kevin Flynn.

Best known as the creator of the famous "Peanut Butter Jelly Time" viral video, Flynn understood that online content creators were not happy with a system where they reap no rewards for their creations.

"My idea was conceived when I watched my movie get ripped off on dozens of sites," Flynn said. "The movie was getting millions of hits, and I received absolutely no revenue. The sites that took my material were the ones getting rich."

His idea, to create a model where content creators receive some of the ad revenue that their content is bringing in, now has an online home at eefoof.com.

The first line of eefoof's online mission statement reads, "eefoof.com is a community driven Web site built around one principal rule: the authors of Internet content should be paid for their work and not have it exploited for others' gain."

The site lives up to that, by offering half of all ad revenue to content creators.

"The payment format is simple," Flynn said. "Fifty percent of income is to be divided among the users of the site based on what percentage of hits they generated. So if the site made $100,000 in a month, and one video had 50 percent of traffic, that author would receive $25,000."

Flynn said that each time a user reaches $25, he or she will get paid via PayPal transaction. He added that eefoof hopes to change to a check system as it grows.

Though payment complications arise when it comes to copyrighted material, Flynn said eefoof has a plan for how to handle it.

"We allow copyrighted material to be posted, as do most video sites such as YouTube and Google," he said. However, eefoof will not compensate users who post copyrighted material.

"There is an agreement people must click on every time they post stating if they are the author or not," he said. "If they claim to be the author, but it's copyrighted material, we will either delete the video, ban the user if it keeps happening, or change it to 'no author' status."

Flynn added that eefoof is exploring the possibility of moving to a system where only user-authored content is accepted.

Though he promised that eefoof will never have pop-up ads, Flynn said that normal Web page ads on eefoof pages, and possibly short video ads at the start or end of user-submitted videos, will be necessary for eefoof's business model to stand up.

"Basically, it's in our users' best interest to have as many high-paying ads as possible, without going over the top, because it directly affects their income," he said.

News of eefoof's business plan comes on the heels of comments from some industry analysts that eefoof's main competitor YouTube will have trouble turning profits because users are too accustomed to the site being free of charge and free of ads.

The largest site in the online video market by far, YouTube brings in about 13 million viewers per day.

Flynn said he thinks that as eefoof becomes a bigger name, the best content creators will put their material on eefoof in order to get compensated, and viewers will begin to learn to come to eefoof to find the best new content.

"We feel that going forward there will be little or no reason to visit YouTube -- eefoof will do all the things they do, but compensate people, which makes everyone happy," he said.

Copyright 2006 by United Press International