here is an interesting idea from an article in the FT:
Korean website generates cash from 'scrap'
By Anna Fifield in Busan, South Korea
Published: November 5 2007 02:00 | Last updated: November 5 2007 02:00
For most people, watching video clips on social networking websites - whether it's schoolboy pranks and wannabe popstars or TV bloopers and newscasts - is an entertaining way to pass the time.
For a small but growing group of Koreans, however, dispersing video clips around the internet is proving lucrative, thanks to a small user-created content (UCC) site that is turning internet business models upside down. UCC Community, a small but rapidly growing Korean video site based in the southern port city of Busan, is paying people who link to clips on its site (
www.uccc.co.kr ).
Unlike, say, YouTube, where users view clips on the site, Korean internet users usually put links on their personal blogs or websites - a process they call "scrapping".
"Users scrap the videos on to their own websites, and then people click through to the videos - the users can earn money that way," says Kim Jong-man, a 31-year-old entrepreneur who started the company with $500,000 of his own money in February.
"The more times users scrap clips, the more they can earn - it becomes a kind of pyramid," says Mr Kim, looking every bit the web entrepreneur with his long hair and open-necked shirt.
The remuneration is small - people who scrap UCC Community clips on to their personal websites earn 10 US cents for 50 clicks. But it all adds up. One UCC uploader earns $5,000 a month by finding news clips and being the first to post them. Mr Kim will reveal only that he is a "professional internet marketer" who is fast becoming the envy of other UCC users.
Last month, UCC Community, which has 15 employees, paid $150,000 in such fees, which are funded by advertising on the site and at the end of the clips.
Mr Kim says the site has been breaking even since it launched, but this month he expects to move into profit.
Korea is a technological trailblazer: it has the highest broadband penetration in the world, people use their mobiles for everything from watching TV to paying their bills. Long before MySpace and Facebook, Koreans were using Cyworld, a virtual world and social networking system that counts 90 per cent of Koreans in their 20s as members.
According to a recent survey of more than 2,100 internet users conducted by the information ministry, Koreans spend an average of 4.7 hours a week on UCC-related activities. Three quarters said they viewed UCC clips more than once a month and just over half had created clips.
This wired culture, combined with a very homogeneous society, means news and trends spread like wildfire, gripping the nation almost immediately.
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The effect can have positive and negative outcomes. In 2005, a Korean woman became known nationwide as "dog poop girl" after being photographed failing to clean up after her puppy in a subway carriage. A fellow passenger posted the photo on the internet, leading to such public humiliation that the woman dropped out of university.
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The most popular clip since UCC Community's launch was uploaded in July, when 23 South Korean missionaries were abducted by the Taliban in Afghanistan. A Christian group in Korea made a video in support of the group's proselytising to Muslim people, which was widely clicked. "It was such a sensitive issue in Korea, so it became the most popular clip," says Mr Kim.
UCC Community, which has 500,000 daily visitors, is only one of several video clip sites in Korea. Pandora TV is Korea's biggest video sharing platform, with more than 1.8m daily visitors, followed by TVPot, the UCC site run by the internet portal Daum Communications. But the payment dimension makes UCC Community stand apart.
Mr Kim is launching Japanese and Chinese sites, and is planning an English-language version.
It will be tough competing with the likes of YouTube, but Mr Kim is confident: "Just look at what we have done in only six months."
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2007
11-11-2007, 06:58 AM
korean website generates cash from 'scrap' 
