YouTube for the masses -- will share revenues with users

One of the stars at the exclusive World Economic Forum (in Davos) is Chad Hurley, the co-founder of Google Inc,'s (NASDAQ:GOOG) YouTube. And, in his speech there, he definitely made some news.

That is, YouTube plans to share revenues with its users.

What will the split be? Well, that's a secret for now. However, the company will provide more details in the next couple of months.

Yes, that's smart PR. This kind of announcement will certainly build buzz.

It is also further bad news for the many other videos sites, such as Revver, which was the pioneer of the revenue-sharing model. Keep in mind that there are are more than 200 video sharing sites in the U.S. alone.

However, it looks like YouTube will need to screen videos so as to avoid copyright infringement. No doubt, this does seem like an extremely tough problem to solve. But, then again, YouTube's new owner, Google, always liked a big challenge.

Tom Taulli is the author of various books, including the Complete M&A Handbook and the EDGAR-Online Guide to Decoding Financial Statements.