Online Amateur Video Future

During the superbowl, there were commercials featured made by amateur filmmakers. Fox took it a step further and created a reality show, On The Lot, which features a bunch of filmmakers and gives them a chance to win production money in order to create their own film.

This is great, but why does it have to be on such a large scale? Sites like Youtube and Livevideo (and others) have users which post content on a regular basis and in episode format. If Fox can dump a million dollars for some no-name filmmaker to create a movie, why can't Youtube pay users to generate content?

There are already sites out there that do this (like Revver). A user uploads content onto their personal page, and then gets paid by the amount of traffic the user helped to generate. (edit: check out this blog for more info)This can be taken a step further though. Got a popular user with a somewhat interesting show? Sign him for thirteen weeks. Make it guaranteed that users who like the show will be checking in weekly.

The potential is great. If advertisers know that a certain page is going to get hit on, let's say, a Monday because the user is going to release the next episode of his show, all of a sudden the user's page becomes inventory that serves premium ads. Imagine signing on an advertiser for thirteen weeks, with a guarantee of a certain number of users.

Of course, sites like Youtube aren't doing lead-in and lead-out videos, so where do you place the ads?

That, unfortunately, is a problem I don't have an answer to.