About two years ago, I made a simple video tutorial explaining how to remove the background of a photo in Paint.NET. I submitted it to Digg, and some of the other usual social bookmarking sites, and saw the views climbing nicely. Yesterday, YouTube contacted me and said that they were giving me an opportunity to make some revenue from ads placed beside my video since it “has become popular on YouTube”.
They are giving me 55% of the ad revenue, which is a nice surprise. I didn’t realize this was a possibility when I uploaded the video. I’ve been thinking about making some more tutorials, and seeing that I have this opportunity, I think it would be a good idea. Not only does it get exposure for my website, but also I can make a bit of money on the side.
I will be the first to admit that it is my fault for not adding credits to the end of one of my tutorial videos on YouTube. YouTube was one site, like Flickr, that I realized could be good for naturally promoting my business while providing value. I had created a simple tutorial video showing how to remove the background of a photo in Paint .NET. Yesterday, I checked on my video and found that it was being embedded on a website. The language on the site seemed to me like they were taking credit for the video. I left a comment thanking them for using my video, and found today that they had deleted the comment. This made it clear to me that they were not going to give me any credit for it. My first inclination was to delete the video, but it has over 6000 views, and I have the right to keep it. YouTube has a feature to add annotations to videos, so you can add notes that will show up, even in videos embedded on sites. You can see below what I have done with this one to claim credit for it.
