The policy just confirms what we always suspected was Google's attitude: Users are losers, and we know best. The Google-owned video site claims that channel partners who regularly produce videos with more than a million pageviews can earn "several thousand dollars per month," but those are few and far between. The real winner is Google, which continues to dominate the Internet video market, and now eliminates the small advantage held by rival upstarts Revver, VuMe, and Metacafe which have been touting their own loser-generated-content reward programs for some time.

Repeat after me: REVENUE IS NOT PROFIT. And Revver is competing in a sea of also-rans. VuMe and Metacafe also have producer reward programs, and DailyMotion and YouTube are about to launch their own programs. Lots of sites are about to start competing for the few uploads that will have money-making potential.

And it turns out that $1 million, impressive as it sounds, is not so great if you're a video producer, either. Since 25,000 producers have received some form of payout — making the average payout $40 total, as onlinevideoinsider points out in the comments — you are not talking about a living wage... more like a thank you for the traffic. Thousands more have not qualified for the minimum $20 payout yet. Success stories like Eepybird, the wacky "scientists" behind the Diet-Pepsi/Mentos videos, and Tim Street, producer of the salacious French maid TV, who are making a living wage from revenue-sharing are few and far between.

Until more producers can make more money from residuals, ad revenue sharing is just a gimmick. And until YouTube enters the game, Revver is just an experiment trying to reverse a year of bad news with a seemingly positive press release.