From Mashable contributor Stan Schroeder
The news is out: YouTube has started sharing revenues with a number of its top users today. Now, it's time to dig deep inside this potential gold mine and figure out ways to get rich by producing your video content and becoming a YouTube star.
Fortunately, YouTube maintains a list of most popular videos of all time, so it shouldn't be that hard to find out what works and what doesn't on the biggest video sharing service. Here's a quick list to get you started.
1. Learn to dance very, very well – for some reason, the YouTube crowd loves dancing. Dancing babies, dancing hamsters, dancing robots; it all works, as long as it's moving to some kind of tune. The crown evidence is the most viewed YouTube video of all time: Evolution of Dance (below). Unfortunately, that guy can really dance quite well, so I don't think that a couple of after work dancing lessons will do here, but you can always try.
2. Be pretty. As can be seen from the LisaNova, Lonelygirl15, and many other examples, a sure way to be popular on the Internet is to be an eye-pleasing female. As far as actual content of the video goes, a script and a good idea helps, but in many cases just talking nonsense into the camera will be fine. If you're a burly dude, this might present a small problem, and I don't recommend going this route.
3. Act stupid in front of the camera – this is a hit or miss affair, as no exact formula has yet been developed that can predict if your little stunt will be successful or not. But, examples such as Pokemon Theme Music Video show that a catchy song is absolutely necessary for this to be a success. Figuring out what exactly you should do in the clip is no easy task. It's a complex blend of nerdiness, bad dancing moves, showing your belly button and complete stupidity.
4. Learn to play the guitar really well – this goes in the same vein as learning to dance: it's quite hard, and therefore it's a bad option for everyone who doesn't like to work hard for money, which is basically everyone who produces content for YouTube. It's quite a conundrum, but if you already kick ass on the guitar you might as well film it and try to make an extra buck out of your skill.