Well”¦ maybe that’s a little optimistic, but for someone who is creating amateur music clips or something genuinely funny, there are actually ways you can make money online from your videos.

Read on to find out about some websites that give you the ability to monetize your clips.

MetaCafe

MetaCafe is a video sharing website which claims approximately 25 million unique viewers a month and over a million registered users. It isn’t a website like YouTube for hosting any dubious video that you want to upload, in Metacafe’s words the site hosts videos which are:

Short-form, an average of 90 seconds across the site

Entertaining, no personal or webcam videos here thank you

Audience-driven, Videos are voted upon and benefit from the community deciding which are good and which are not.

MetaCafe benefits you by providing a revenue sharing service in which you can monetize your videos. It’s not huge but for successful videos it’s not bad either. You can expect $5 for every 1000 views of your video, receivable after 20,000.

So no, this isn’t a way you can make money from that blurry footage you took last Christmas which was totally hilarious (you just had to be there!), but for beginner home directors it’s a way you can begin to gauge your skills and hopefully make a little money out of it. The community determines the good videos, the submitter gets paid.

Revver

It has an oh-so web 2.0 name, and a revenue sharing model of 50-50, split between number of views and ad clicks.

Videos are apparently paired with targeted ads and tracked across the web. The greatest feature of Revver is that videos posted here are tracked to Myspace, Facebook and any other major video sharing website (excluding YouTube I presume) and including WordPress support via a plugin.

They have some great widgets, developer tools and video hosting services, although that probably doesn’t interest you as much as the monetization. Payment isn’t clear cut like MetaCafe, but reports are that it’s actually fairly generous, some people reporting CPM (Costs Per Impression) of around $4.

However from this TechCrunch report things may not be so rosy with the site, but then again, TC do love Dead-Pooling people.

Crackle

For those who really want to hit the big time Crackle provides opportunities for the talented to get noticed by people who matter.

Run by Sony Pictures, Crackle is a multi-platform network which is aimed at exposing local talent and rewarding it with prizes such as meetings with studio executives. This site was new to me and having a look through it I found some very entertaining stuff.

Competitions involve things like uploading a short video explaining why you would want to date Brad Garrett (watch it). A 100mb limit is imposed on uploads so keep it short, but for reaching the non-YouTube crowd this site is a good bet.

Veoh

Veoh is yet another non revenue sharing video hosting site, but before you dismiss it as pointless compared to YouTube, Veoh has a couple of very good cards up its sleeve.

There are no size limits on video uploads, a feature that I don’t think any other video hosting site shares. For this reason videos can be much higher resolution and quality than the other sites, although going to extremes will only annoy users with lower connection speeds.

Veoh also has the feature of being able to automatically post your videos to YouTube, MySpace and Google Video (Yes I know, who uses Google Video these days?). So for less video restrictions and great playback tools Veoh is definitely an option, you’ll just have to work out your own way to monetize!

What tips do you have to monetize your videos online? Do you use any of these services? Fire away in the comments”¦

(By) Laurence John was born naked, screaming and utterly helpless at some point in the last century. He currently blogs about heroic failures and the development of Windows 7.

Tagged: make money • social media • videos • Youtube