Cold Cash for Your Web Videos: From the NY Times

The Times has a piece I wrote on the "Circuits" page today, headlined, 'All the World’s a Stage (That Includes the Internet)'. The opening:

AT lunchtime, or when he is walking the halls of his workplace, Roy Raphaeli’s colleagues often beseech him to do a magic trick. Usually, he obliges. “I take the opportunity to show people my new stuff and see how they react,” said Mr. Raphaeli, 23, a Brooklynite who works for a mail-order camera retailer.

While Mr. Raphaeli, known professionally as Magic Roy, has been entertaining people with card tricks and sleight-of-hand since he was 5, he does not perform at birthday parties or casino showrooms.

Instead, Mr. Raphaeli’s stage of choice is the Internet, where he has posted 30 short video clips to Metacafe, a Web site that pays video creators based on how many viewers their work attracts. So far, Mr. Raphaeli has earned more than $13,000 from the site, where his most popular card trick has been seen 1.4 million times.

As video sites look for ways to attract higher-quality content, they are dangling cash, usually offering to cut creators in on the advertising revenue their work generates.

The story is accompanied online by a list of 10 Sites That Pay for Your Video,' an abridged version of my more comprehensive chart, 'Getting Paid.'

Of course, I can never resist the shameless plug for The Future of Web Video, which covers all this Internet video stuff in depth.