YouTube has announced that it is going to reward its users for choosing to host videos with them by enabling a revenue share system.

Chad Hurley, co-founder of YouTube, said Saturday that the wildly successful site will start sharing revenue with its millions of users.

Hurley, who along with the site’s co-founders sold YouTube to Google for $1.65 billion in November, said one of the major innovations the site is working on is a way to allow users to be paid for content.

"We are getting an audience large enough where we have an opportunity to support creativity, to foster creativity through sharing revenue with our users," Hurley said at the World Economic Forum. "So in the coming months, we are going to be opening that up." [Source]

My questions… is this just a kudos to the users, or is there a business motive underneath? Of course, it has to be more than just marketing (although making money is a great incentive to promote your content). My guess, all the deals that YouTube has been making (Google, Warner Music, Verizon, NBC, etc) are moving forward and content hosted on YouTube will be syndicated to more places online and on tv, all with no props to the users. This could be a pre-emptive way to pacify users.

A second hypothesis posed is that it could be a way to identify users uploading copyrighted content. Users would not just be a username anymore - they would have to give name, address and other personal information. So, now they can be punished, perhaps, for unoriginal content.

Via digg