Metro MEview UGC video shares revenues with uploaders

Interesting development on the UGC video front at Metro where people uploading video can potentially earn money.

The new service is called MEview and apparently "every time one of your clips gets downloaded to a mobile you earn 20p."

But online views count too apparently:

We'll also ask you if you want to put an advert at the beginning/end of your clip. And every time somebody views your video, you get paid by the advertisers. During the beta phase, you will be paid £1 for every 1,000 unique views from UK IP addresses of any of your video clips. This means that if 100,000 separate people within the UK view your clip, you earn £100.

So far the top video only has just over 1,000 views so I don't think anyone's going to become a millionaire overnight quite yet, but it's an interesting idea.

Also quite open to abuse - one could download Otters Holding Hands (9 million views and counting) from YouTube, upload it to Metro and chance the fact no-one notices.

Of course, someone WOULD notice, but I'm just wondering whether this is going to end up being a moderation nightmare for Metro.

Where I think they've missed a trick is in localising MEview. The paper versions of Metro are distributed in Bath, Birmingham, Bradford, Brighton, Bristol, Cardiff, Coventry, Derby, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Leicester, Liverpool, London, Manchester, Nottingham, Newcastle, Wolverhampton and York. These are "communities" which might encourage people to upload videos of local interest. But there's no such regionalisation on the Metro website.

Anyway. I'll be watching with interest(that and Otters Holding Hands again, obviously).