[gabemart]

>These are things I put together in a day and edited in windows movie maker. When youtube offered adding ads I ignored them thinking it would never amount to anything. At $8.7 ECPM I feel absurd having skipped the chance!

Presumably, you would not be able to show ads on those videos because they use IP you don't have the rights to. They're popular (again, presumably) because people search for footage of those copyright games and enjoy the first copyright music track. It's fairly easy to put something together "in a day" that becomes popular when you're not constricted by the rules of copyright and can piggyback on the popularity of existing content. I'm not criticizing - I have a viral video on youtube that's within spitting distance of a million views, but I would never be able to show ads on it because I don't have permission to use the footage or the music.

And yes, it seems that presently most video games companies generally turn a blind eye to people posting footage from their games. But you'd be foolhardy indeed to start to rely on advertising revenue that was built entirely on the goodwill of a diverse group of for-profit companies. There are a host of semi- and fully-professional video game personalities whose livelihood could be shut down overnight if a few companies decided to enforce their copyrights.