Using social video websites is a great way to promote your music and uploading music videos to YouTube has become somewhat a standard procedure among indie artists and mainstream artists alike. Some of the video sharing websites also offer an affiliate program for video publishers, which means that you can get a percentage of ad revenues or get paid by the number of video views. I haven’t seen so many indie artists trying to leverage this kind of revenue model yet, so why not give it a try?

Integrated ads in user generated videos are becoming more and more common way for social video websites to generate revenue. Even YouTube is doing this now, but unfortunately they don’t offer an affiliate program for everyone, yet. Some video sharing websites have realized that by rewarding the content owners, and possibly even content sharers, with a share of the ad revenue might actually lead to better quality videos. If you have music videos, studio diaries, interviews, live concert footage or any other interesting video material, I recommend checking out Metacafe and Revver for starters.

• Metacafe has a Producers Rewards program, which pays you $5 for every thousand views. Payment starts after reaching 20,000 views and your video has to have a ranking of 3.00 (out of 5) or higher.
• Revver adds targeted ads in the end of your video and shares 50% of the ad revenue with you. As for an example I uploaded a video on Revver and after 110 views it had earned $0,74, which means that 1000 views would earn around $6,7.

Both of these services allow you to embed your videos also to other websites, which means that you can extend your reach outside the services’ own network. Most likely you won’t make any solid income with these services, but the chances are that you will generate at least some income. I recommend using all of the services, because in the end you won’t lose anything. It’s all publicity and possibly you get a bit of revenue too. In the beginning find out which service generates most income and then use that service’s embedding option to place the videos on your own website, blog and social network profiles (if possible). A word of warning though, your fans might not like seeing ads on your music videos or on other promotional videos, so think carefully before signing up for the ad programs.