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"Guba, the video-sharing and downloading site, has announced an affiliate scheme that will pay $25 for every 100 signups.  Visitors can be referred via email, or through video players embedded on social networks, blogs and other websites.  The system uses a cookie to track signups, and payments will be made every 2 weeks - however, only US registrations are counted.\nThis is interesting for a number of reasons.  First off, these systems are extremely vulnerable to cheating.  Affiliate schemes work well when there's a transaction to be made - like paying a percentage commission on a sale - but not so well when signing up is free.  How will Guba tackle affiliates who sign up thousands of fake users?  The company claim that ad revenue (and no doubt premium videos, too) will more than make up for the costs of the program - but it still seems like a big risk.\nGuba ranks 27th among US video sites, according to ComScore, behind YouTube, Grouper, AOL Video, Yahoo Video, MySpace Video, Metacafe and other big names.  Clearly, they wanted to shake things up.  But in some ways it looks like an act of desperation: if the videos are so viral, shouldn't they be spreading on their own? \nMeanwhile, startup Revver has a much more logical model: they insert ads in the videos and share revenue with the content creator and the publisher.  Flixya has made a move in this space, too - they encourage users to embed YouTube videos on Flixya.com, then split the ad revenue 50/50, thus robbing YouTube of their own ad revenue. In fact, it's not a new idea at all: Lulu TV, eefoof and many others are testing out revenue sharing schemes for online video, and only a few have attracted users.  Frankly, it seems that Revver will be the only survivor.  \nIn short, this idea looks shaky at best.  I don't see it panning out too well.\n\n(via)"^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://mashable.com/2006/08/30/guba-one-ups-youtube-pays-users/>