Why do experts make next-to-nothing from their videos on the most popular web sites?

On YouTube, it’s pretty tough to make non-trivial revenues - unless you’re a smash-hit viral video. On Facebook, your videos never earn anything for you, no matter how many Likes, Shares, or Clicks. iTunes and Amazon are giant stores that give you no access to customer data, and consumers must find their way and make a purchasing decision for each item of interest. Netflix’s and Hulu’s all-you-can-eat model requires complex contract negotiations often involving large guaranteed payments to content owners.

What’s wrong with free?

YouTube and Facebook have created the unrealistic expectation that all content is created equal and should be free. But it turns out that the advertising model fails with the narrower (but enthusiastic) audiences for videos of events and specialized instructional videos.

…but there’s a bigger problem with giving away experts’ work:

There’s an implicit assumption that if something is free, it has no value. Since anyone can upload a video, there’s a massive mixing of junk and amateur material with a smattering of great stuff, with no way for the average user to sift through and find the best.

…YouTube and Facebook can’t solve the money-making problem.

That’s not to say there’s no role for YouTube or Facebook. But for experts, the best use is putting up a very limited amount of good material as a sample to convince users that it’s worth paying for more. If a little bit too much is given away for free, then it cripples the experts ability to sell his valuable content.

Bottom line: If you give it away, you can’t sell it.

...Selling individual event and expert videos is also a losing proposition.

To reach above the noise of the Internet requires a sizeable marketing effort, almost always too large to justify item-by-item sales of expert material.

Publishers can make money if they give customers a better deal.

To be profitable, customers must feel like they are getting great value at a very good price. Most customers prefer all-you-can-eat buffets to a-la-carte dinning. For example, when it comes to Hollywood blockbusters, monthly subscription services like Netflix have trounced the services that are modeled as online stores, such as Apple iTunes, with its item-by-item purchasing.

Our model of video streaming is to combine independently owned videos into affordable, streaming channels. Contributers are guaranteed fair pay - based on actual subscriber usage.

Content Galaxy's publishing service offers a convenient new way for video producers and aggregators to generate income from their web sites, blogs, emails, and social networking posts. Content providers can stream their own content directly to their web audiences without needing an infrastructure to collect payments, track usage, manage subscriptions or protect and serve the videos across multiple devices and network speeds.

Subscribers pay a flat fee for full streaming access to the channel ("all-you-can-eat"), with rapid crediting of micro payments going to the providers, based on actual subscriber usage, as well as subscription sales.

Content providers put their videos into well-edited channels - without giving up ownership rights or needing complex contract negotiations. There are provisions for easy audit and understanding of usage patterns, and revenue for particular videos can be split between multiple parties, again without individually negotiated contracts.