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Digital
YouTube invests in original content
By CMU Editorial | Published on Monday 31 October 2011
YouTube has announced it will launch over 100 new channels all containing professionally produced original content as the Google-owned video site aims to become a content generator as well as a site that hosts user-generated nonsense and licences (and often inadvertently steals) other people’s professional output.
YouTube bosses indicated they would invest over $100 million in commissioning new content earlier this year. Partners set to spend that money range from celebrities like Madonna, Jay-Z and Ashton Kutcher, to sports organisations like WWE, to more traditional media, including Thomson Reuters, The Onion and the Wall Street Journal. Google’s deals with its new content partners will work a little like traditional record deals, in that the web firm will keep all ad revenue generated by any one channel until its original investment is recouped, and will then share profits with the channel’s operator. It’s not clear who holds the copyright.
The new channels will start to appear this month, though most won’t go live until 2012. The web firm says it expects the channels to collectively generate about 25 hours of new content daily.
