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However, in a climate in which YouTube is jam-packed with free content, your chances of getting people to pay to watch your videos are pretty slim unless you happen to be making new episodes of Lost or 24. Revver (www.revver.com) has an interesting slant on the idea of getting paid for your videos. The site pairs uploaded videos with adverts. As people view your video, you accrue ad revenue. Many web advertisers pay for space based on the number of clicks made on their advert, and Revver shares this revenue with the video-maker and with people who share the video with others by emailing it or embedding it in blogs and websites.

Revver isn't the only site trying this kind of approach. VuMe.com (formerly www.efoof.com) shares ad revenue to the tune of $3 (around £1.50) for every 1,000 hits on content you put up, although you need to make at least $25 (around £12) before you receive your first cheque. In January, YouTube also announced plans to share ad revenue with those whose videos get the most viewings. However, only a handful of the most popular YouTube users have so far been invited into this programme.

Premium video-sharing sites

There are also plenty of video-sharing sites where the money flows in the opposite direction. These sites offer more than just video sharing, though, often adding photo and file sharing to the mix, and even online data backup.

One of the longest-running of these sites is Neptune MediaShare (www.neptune.com).

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You can try Neptune's service free for three days. After that, prices start at $59 (around £30) a year for 150MB of storage, rising to $599 (around £300) a year for 10GB. Bandwidth limits for each type of account also apply. Neptune's service has a simple, functional interface and streams the video files you upload rather than converting them to its own preferred format. It supports video in WMV and QuickTime formats, but the web interface requires Internet Explorer to function.

DropShots (www.dropshots.com) is similar, but it provides both free and premium services. With the free option you can upload up to 500 photos and 10 videos of up to two minutes each. For $4.95 (around £2.50) a month, you can upload an unlimited number of photos and videos. Video can be up to ten minutes long, with a resolution of 600x450. This is much closer to DVD resolution than you get on YouTube. DropShots has a similar browsing front-end to Neptune MediaShare, but adds the ability to leave comments, giving the site a greater sense of community. Supported video formats include MPEG1, 2 and 4 , QuickTime and WMV 7, 8 and 9.

Streamload's MediaMax service (www.mediamax.com) has four levels. The free service limits you to 10MB per file, but you can upload as much as 25GB of video. For $4.95 (around £2.50) a month, the limit on individual files rises to 1GB and storage to 100GB, and there are more expensive and feature-rich options above that. MediaMax is ideal if you want to put a video longer than a few minutes online.

Mydeo (www.mydeo.com) is another service with no free option. For £4.87 a month, the Home User Plan lets you store up to 100 minutes of footage, with a 30-minute cap on each individual video. The Premium User Plan costs £7.47 a month and increases the total to 250 minutes and 90 minutes per video. A one-month free trial of the Home User Plan is available. Mydeo supports only WMV files, and you have to convert video to this format yourself. Your viewers will need Windows Media Player to watch, but there are no limits on the resolution.