YouTube founder Chad Hurley has confirmed to BBC NEWS that his team was working on a revenue-sharing mechanism that would “reward creativity”.

The system would be rolled out in a couple of months, he said, and use a mixture of adverts, including short clips shown ahead of the actual film. The offer will only apply to people who own the full copyright of the videos that they are uploading to the YouTube website.

YouTube is working on “audio fingerprinting” technologies to identify copyrighted material, which could be used to identify videos that use copyrighted musc without permission.

YouTube vierwers will not have to put up with overly long “pre-roll” adverts, according to Hurley. Add clips of three seconds length will be one of the options, but the details had not been worked out yet.