South African users will be able to join YouTube's official partner programme (YPP) from today, and reap financial rewards from adverts placed with their uploaded original videos.
The move makes SA the 16th country to join the YPP programme.
Ben Novick, Google advertising communications and public affairs manager, EMEA, explains that any South African can apply to become a partner, but will need to meet three key requirements.
The terms of use require a developer to create original videos suitable for online streaming, they cannot use copyright protected material and will need to commit to upload videos regularly - a minimum of once a week.
According to Novick, partners receive a portion of the revenue generated from advertisements that run next to their videos. Each click on the video earns revenue for the partner. He adds that through the programme, advertisers can reach a more targeted audience, by selecting from a list of categories the type of videos they would like their adverts to appear next to.
Novick explains how the initiative works: “The advertiser decides how much they will pay the YPP partner per 1 000 impressions, depending on how many views they get on any given day, week and month.”
According to Novick, YPP is not designed to provide revenue for professional broadcasters such as BBC and CBS only, but hopes to encourage every day Internet users to improve the quality of their videos.
Novick says Google's decision to roll out YPP in SA is an indication that the search engine giant is taking the South African market seriously. However, he could not comment further on Google's plans for its local branch.
Google says a couple of South African developers within the YouTube community have already been accepted into the programme.
The country's first political satire channel, ZANews joined the YouTube community at the end of last year. Pierre Cassuto, PR and marketing manager at ZANews, says this is a big step for South African video content creators because for the first time they can earn revenue from uploading videos to the Internet.
Cassuto says that from a content developer point of view, today's media industry is restricted, meaning there aren't many cost-effective platforms for local content developers to broadcast their videos.
He believes it will be some time before partners can generate enough revenue to live on, but says the programme encourages content creators to make better videos. “Hopefully, as the market grows, a sustainable revenue stream will be generated.”
The timing is right for the roll-out of YPP to the local market, according to Cassuto, because high-speed bandwidth coming into the country will make the watching of online videos faster and easier.
YouTube introduced its partner programme in the US in December 2007. The partnership programme has been made available to people living in the US, Canada, UK, France, Germany, Netherlands, and now SA. Those interested can apply to become a partner at http://www.youtube.com/partners.
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