One Million Dollars

Social video site Revver has paid its users and affiliates in excess of $1m over the past year. It's the first time that users of such a site have reaped financial rewards from participating in Internet culture by way of uploading personal videos. The company makes profits mostly through advertising. According to TechCrunch, "Revver splits revenue 50/50 with video creators after paying 20% off the top for video distributors (sites that embed the video become distributors). [...] Metacafe currently has a producer rewards program where they pay $100 per 20,000 views."

That same TechCruch article puts forward the idea that Dailymotion and other such sites — YouTube being the obvious one — will soon follow suit and reward their users for making popular videos which attract viewers to the site. Being as it is owned by Google, I would assume that YouTube would use a payout model similar to how AdWords works.