Digital Journal — Share the wealth. That’s the motto behind a new video-sharing site that wants to do what many of its competitors haven’t even attempted: offer videographers a slice of the site’s revenue depending on how many viewers a video clip attracts.
Launching Saturday, Eefoof.com and its payment scheme could give it the edge in a market already bustling with 150 other companies allowing people to post homemade movies. The most prominent site, YouTube.com, has yet to announce its revenue model almost a year after it launched. Google Video, however, charges users for some high-profile shows, sports programs and movies.
Eefoof’s innovative strategy goes like this: Once a month the company tallies the number of page views for each upload. It then studies overall traffic and calculates what percentage of the page views was generated by each submission. Ad revenue is divided accordingly.
“Once your account exceeds $25, we will send you a PayPal transfer,” the site says.
Could this be a YouTube killer? If anyone can slay the dragon, it would be this bold upstart. Picture an amateur filmmaker looking to earn some scratch from his short film. Choosing YouTube would allow him to reach a wider audience but uploading on Eefoof could win him some cash. It’s all about weighing publicity versus income, and for a struggling artist you can’t pay rent through word-of-mouth buzz.
Eefoof will succeed if the function lives up to the hype. Servers have to be blazing quick, registration should be hassle-free and payment will need to be prompt. Fit those pieces of the puzzle together and you got a bad-ass underdog looking to claw to the top.
