This generated a lot of links and stories since Thursday….Chad Hurley, co-founder of YouTube, speaking at Davos, flippantly mentioned the site will start sharing revenue with its millions of users sometime in the coming months, and the world goes stir-crazy.
This is even more tenuous as announcements go than the promise of an anti-piracy YouTube was supposed to have launched by the end of last year.  The caveats about this vaporshare “news” from Hurley: if and when it happens, the offer would apply only to people who own the full copyright of the videos that they are uploading to the YouTube website, Hurley added in an interview with the BBC, but of course that is an obvious thing to say. It will be an ad-share, with very short pre-rolls…a clip of three seconds length was one of the options, although the details had not been worked out yet.
Hurley acknowledged the fact that YouTube had not had a revenue sharing model was one of the reasons for its success, as that had allowed the website to focus on its key strength, making it easy to share videos with others (read: it made it easier for them to not worry about anything else, while ignoring the hard business of developing the site into a business). Oh wait, but Chad doesn’t have to worry about that…