If you enjoy creatively contributing to web communities and user-content based sites, you can get paid for this. You can be compensated for submitting videos, photos, tips and reviews.
Potential Earnings
Up to £1000 per annum taxable.
Videos
Youtube and Google Video are two giants of user-generated video content. Upload your home-made vid and let the world take a look. Both are experimenting with pretty meagre revenue models for the millions of currently unpaid providers, but look further afield and you can find more generous payment models, available now:
Revver one such free viral video network. How it works: members upload their video to Revver, who then attach a brief ad to the video, as well as tracking software. Every time an ad gets clicked, Revver shares the ad revenue on a 50/50 basis. The video's performance can be tracked through a Revver account - showing how many times a video is watched, and how much money has been earned. Since ads are attached to the video itself, there's no restriction on how videos are distributed. Payments are by Paypal - free to set up an account if you don't have one.
Like Revver, Break is trying to get a piece of the YouTube action, and has upped the ante recently by nearly doubling the amount of money paid for original user-generated content. Prices are up to USD 400 for regular videos and up to USD 2,000 for short film productions, animated films and games. Users can upload as many original videos as they want. If your material is published on Break.com's homepage, exepct to rake in the cash. Payments are by Paypal - free to set up an account if you don't have one.
You are paid 5 USD for every thousand views your video gets on Metacafe. Payment starts when a video reaches 20,000 views and has a rating of 3.00 or higher. Licensing is non-exclusive: makers retain ownership of their video. Video/pics sharing site Eefoof shares a percentage of ad revenue with its members, based on traffic to the content they've uploaded. Video site Flixya shares 50% of advertising revenue generated by a member’s video, but requires that members have a Google Adsense account.
SeeMeTV, a service by 3G telco operator 3, lets users submit a 12 second video clip and get paid every time somebody watches their clip. Submitters are asked to upload anything that is ‘dumb, freaky, or just plain rude'. Some of the most popular downloads so far include pretzel girl -- a real-life office contortionist, and the “world's first” wedding proposal over video mobile. Over 100,000 videos have been posted, leading to more than 12 million downloads since the service launched a year ago.
Photos
If pictures, rather than videos, are your bag, then you can submit media-worthy photos to sites who will sell them on for you to newspapers and magazines. At UK-based Scoopt, photographers receive 50% of the selling price of their pictures, while ScooptWords shares 50% of the first sale and 75% of all subsequent sales with its writers/bloggers. ScoopLive shares 85% of revenues each time they license a contributor’s photo. Payment is by Paypal, BACS or cheque.
Alernatively, newcomer SpyMedia pays an average of 100 USD per picture.
Tips, Comments and Reviews
Daytipper is a tip-sharing site, rewarding consumers with USD 3 for every published piece of advice. Tip categories are broad and varied, ranging from cooking to technology to relationships. Around a quarter or tips submitted are accepted. Payments are by Paypal - free to set up an account if you don't have one. There has been some negative publicity over slow times to publish (around 6 tips are published each day, making for a backlog) and slow payments - which the owner has defended. Let us know your experience on our Contact Us page.
Pigsback is an enjoyable hybrid site of money for clicks, money for sign-ups and money for tips and reviews. Join Pigsback for free. It gives you rewards of gift vouchers, CDs and the like in return for 'piggy points' which are earned by joining up, click-throughs, registering for 3rd party mail-outs, completing quiz questions and surveys, and referring friends - all of which cost nothing to do. You can typically earn 100 points (worth £1) for each tip or review that you submit and is accepted for publishing on the site. Categories are: money-saving tips, restaurant reviews, movie reviews, gig reviews, holiday reviews, beauty tips, healthy recipes, fashion faux pas and top tips for Londoners.
Join Writers:Share and get paid for commenting on a variety of subjects. Choose from the subjects available. Leave 3-4 paragraphs of comment. Subject to editor approval you will be paid £1 per entry, rising to £1.50 per comment once you have done 50. After 500 comments you will receive a bonus of £50.
So, 500 comments = £775:
First 50 comments at £1 a comment = £50
Next 450 comments at £1.50 a comment = £675
£50 bonus = £50
Total: £775
80% of entries receive editor approval. They use the original comments you provide on websites that need content to engage visitors with and market themselves. Writers:Share pay out every Friday by Paypal, with no minimum.
Fancy getting paid to rate new music?
SliceThePie is a website that aims to help bands raise cash to fund recording their first album, and lets 'fans' invest in them to help do that. You can even put some money into a band if you think they might do well, and can earn money from their success. However, what we're interested in here is the 'scouting' part of the site, whereby you get paid for reviewing songs on there.
You begin as a 1 star rated scout, earning 5 pence per rated track. You have to listen to a minimum of 60 seconds of each song before you can rate it. Subject to your mini-reviews being of acceptable quality, you should progress to a 2 star rated Scout after you have reviewed 50-100 tracks. A 2 star rated Scout earns 10 pence for each review, and so it progresses up to a maximum of 25 pence per song for a 5 star rated scout. You can withdraw your earnings by Paypal once you reach a minimum of £5, or you can spend them on the site.
As a fast 1 star scout you can feasibly get through 30 reviews in an hour: £1.50 per hour. As a 5 star scout that's £7.50 per hour. Clearly the rate of pay is fairly low, but if listening to new music, discovering new artists and reviewing songs is something you would enjoy doing anyway, this could be for you. It is free to register and sign up as a scout and you can scout as much or as little as you want.
Blogging
Want to get paid for blogging?
Through PayPerPost, advertisers are willing to pay you for your opinion on various topics. Search through a list of Opportunities, make a blog posting, get your content approved, and get paid.
You have to have an active blog that is more than 6 months old. Most blogging platforms are acceptable, such as Blogspot, however if you have your own domain you will find more opportunities available. UK bloggers are eligible.
You're asked to write blogs on various things, mainly websites, giving a link to the website and sometimes a graphic link. Posts are usually approved within a few days and you get paid by paypal a month later. Amounts vary between $5 a post and upto $200, though opportunities paying more than $20 are rare.
Also watch out for SocialSpark by Izea - the same people behind PayPerPost. SocialSpark is a social network for advertisers and bloggers. Advertisers can browse your blogs and pitch you on advertising their goods/services. They can name a price, and you can decide to accept it or not. Choose between having pop up ads on your blogs or going down the “paid to post” blog entries route similar to PayPerPost.