Google plans to share YouTube revenues with users: report

Internet giant Google plans to share advertising revenues from YouTube with users of the video-sharing website, the Financial Times reported on Monday.

The newspaper quoted Chad Hurley — the co-founder of YouTube who sold the site to Google for 1.65 billion dollars last year — as saying it would introduce the system within months.

Hurley spoke to the paper at the weekend on the fringes of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.

Hurley told the FT that YouTube had not yet decided how large the payments would be but pointed towards Google’s rapidly growing advertising revenues.

Until now, YouTube had resisted the revenue-sharing business model because “we didn’t feel it was a great way to build a community,” the FT quoted Hurley as saying.

Since last October’s Google takeover, Hurley added that “we are getting an audience large enough where we have an opportunity to support creativity, to foster creativity through sharing revenue with our users.”