Crowdfund Insider by Charles Luzar | August 15, 2013

Subscription-based & pledge-based crowdfunding models could provide a new & exciting means of monetizing video content for YouTubers

YouTube is a disruptive force in the world of video content and has long provided a means by which video content creators can monetize their hard work.

YouTube has a partner program that is core to their value proposition for content creators. They have made it easier to become a partner over time. YouTube has even provided funding for partner projects in the past. Last year thousands of YouTube partners broke $100,000 in revenue. In short, it is the most robust ecosystem for video content creators today.

However, YouTube has come under fire in the past for what some feel are shady practices regarding revenue sharing. YouTube keeps 45% of ad revenue and is expected to pull in revenues of $5 billion in 2013. A recent piece in Variety dives deeper into the ecosystem and some of its biggest content creators. It appears many are seeking better ways to monetize their channels and diversify amongst platforms.

But with more and more online distributors getting into the market, some of the company’s longest-standing content providers are getting restless, maintaining that the site exploits its pole position as the Internet’s No. 1 video destination to extract unfair revenue-sharing terms; that it provides poor marketing; and that it doesn’t effectively sell ads against professionally produced content. - Variety, July 2013

Josef Holm plans to provide YouTube content creators an entirely new way to monetize their work with his platform, TubeStart. The platform takes an innovative approach to crowdfunding, leveraging a subscription-based model in order to provide content creators with a regular flow of revenues.

YouTube is probably the world’s biggest discovery and audience building platform and it’s also the world’s 2nd biggest search engine. It’s monetization options are still limited but where else can you release a video at no cost to global audience of over 1 billion people? It will probably take several years until YouTube’s CPM will be where it should be and TubeStart aims to bridge the gap between current production cost and CPM reality in a way that is non-competitive with Adsense. In other words, instead of hiding your content behind the YouTube subscription wall which would cannibalize your Adsense revenue, you can keep your main channel content accessible to anyone and start a subscription based crowdfunding campaign where you build an off-YouTube paying subscriber base in exchange for exclusive bonus content, early content preview or any other monthly perk you can think of. - Josef Holm, TubeStart CEO

The most interesting aspect of this platform from an industry perspective is the variety of funding models users can select for their campaigns. TubeStart will have four. Fixed and flexible funding will be supported similar to Indiegogo, but two other models – subscription-based and pledge-based – have the potential to be particularly beneficial. We caught up with TubeStart CEO and cofounder Josef Holm to discuss this approach.

Continue to the full article and interview with Josef Holm --> here