The co-founder of YouTube, Chad Hurley said Saturday that YouTube will start sharing revenue with its millions of users. Hurley said the move is to allow users to be paid for content they upload to YouTube. Hurley didn’t give much detail about how the revenue will be shared with the users but hinted that it will come within few months.

In November, YouTube was sold to Google for $1.65 billion. Google is said to be the place to work for and many people including employees and users love Google for what it is; Google allows employees to spend a certain amount of time every week in their labs to work on anything that they are interested on. Any interesting product that comes out of that lab usually ends up as a product by Google and that employee will also be well off with that venture.

Is this revenue sharing a Google idea?

I would say so. I think it is absolutely right to give users something back for the time they spend on these social networking sites. Users spend countless hours uploading contents or editing news on sites like http://www.digg.com and http://www.techtagg.com/. I predict digg will soon move this direction before any of their competitors begin giving away more incentives. Speaking of that, techtagg.com was the first one to share revenue in this social networks domain. I am very certain that digg.com will soon be looking at this sort of approach as well for the amount of users that spend time on digg, including me. Anyhow, going back to my question, I think this is a decision that would have been made by the Google gurus from the head office. I say Google because Google is very generous and millions of people trust and love Google because of its appreciation for their employees and their users.

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