One of the criticism of the leading media sharing sites like YouTube, Yahoo Video, Google Video, and AOL Uncut is that they are capitalizing on user contributed material to profit and not sharing any of that profit with the contributor. Into the fray comes eefoof, a media sharing site that gives a cut of the advertising revenue to the person that uploads the video, image, or audio.
Eefoof describes it best in their mission statement. “eefoof.com is a community driven website built around one principal rule: the authors of Internet content should be paid for their work and not have it exploited for others’ gain. With other sites, signing a sponsorship contract means you lose the ownership of your content. Not here. We will send you a percentage of our site revenue via an electronic transfer each month, depending on how well your content has performed. For every unique view your work gets, you will earn money. eefoof will never redistribute your work for profit. We’re also artists, and we want what’s best for our users.”
Sounds good, but controlling intellectual property rights will most surely be a huge challenge for eefoof. I would expect the site to be quickly saturated with copyrighted material uploaded by those who don’t own the rights, paying royalties to opportunists. It will be interesting to see how Eefoof handles this challenge.
The founders also have an uphill battle with the name they have selected and the current state of the web site in terms of usability and functionality. Based on the level of development of the customer facing site, one has to wonder if the service will have the technical infrastructure in place to handle submissions and content streaming on a large scale. There is a lot of work to be done to make this a viable service.
Update: I reader as written to let me know that there is at least one other service attempting to monitize video for content owners. Revver is doing something similar to eefoof. They are embedding advertising in the video itself. I written a short review of Revver
Tags: audio, eefoof, images, internet, music, photos, profit, revenue, video, video sharing web** Download the Best Videos on the Web for your iPod - Free! **
Eefoof is better than Revver in one aspect: it let’s you upload more stuff than just video. But I have to agree with you, the “beta” in eefoof is almost “alpha”… Which is kind of sad.
I agree. I like the fact that you can upload more than just video with eefoof. I hope they really make some improvements and make a go at it.
This is from www.forums.revver.com posted: Sat Aug 26, 2006 2:14 am by ,the_invisible_man:
Does anyone else get thousands of views and no payoff? I even did a test a week ago and yesterday where I emailed a couple of friends and had them watch a few videos each… They said they clicked the ads at the end but I got nothing at all. I’ve managed to get around 3000 views since 3 days ago and earned no cash from that either.It’s frustrating and makes me wonder if Revver really works? *Posted: Sat Aug 26, 2006 2:14 am by xandertorino:In the past I had a video with approximately 50.000 views in 7 days and no cash!