ARE YOU "BETTER THAN MAINSTREAM"?

If you're a video creator, please take the time to read the following, including the links at the end, so you'll fully understand the Betterness that you can expect from BetterStream.com. If you're not interested in being promoted, skip over to the right side to Revenue Options.

If you want to be promoted by BetterStream (which means you will be listed on our homepage and in our browse categories, in our standard promoted search, and/or in our featured categories and possibly even on tv), then send us some of your work or a link to review it -- or your username if your content is here.

Additionally, we do buy creative content from time to time, so if you're interested in selling your content to us, same deal, send us some of your work to look at. And we'll go from there.

WHO DO WE PROMOTE?

We're not snobby about what users or content we choose to promote or anything like that. We fully understand and practice the most obvious principle of entertainment: that quality is subjective. So we don't just promote the stuff that we personally enjoy; rather, we try to promote that which is unique, as opposed to that which is mainstream. Even if we don't personally like it.

And we do this because we want to prevent ending up like a youtube-type site loaded to the brim with all sorts of junk (like the "lady farts on a train" and "dog barks twice at neighbors" videos) that you have to sift through in order to never find what you're really looking for.

Don't get us wrong, we want all users to have total control over their content, so we still allow users to upload anything** that they want on their user homepage, we just may not decide to additionally promote your material as well. And the plan is for "we" to ultimately mean an objective independent panel which will review content submitted for promotion.

Try not to forget, other sites rarely promote their users or partner their users. We partner all new users, and we try to promote as many people as we can. However, if we were to promote everyone on our site, then promotion itself would lose its meaning.

Promotion is not based on how many views your material gets or what newspapers write about you, or who you know at BetterStream, or even who you're sleeping with at BetterStream.com, it's based on the following:

THE CRITERIA FOR PROMOTION

If we find your material funny, insightful, creative, original, musically-inclined, or otherwise "Better Than Mainstream", you will become a BetterStream-promoted creator. However, the highest promotion and ranking (in the BetterStream categories) is reserved for those who parody mainstream entertainment and media. For example, someone who makes a parody of some gay mainstream music video (like "Ur So Gay" by Katy Perry) is going to be in our highest promotional graces. And their material would most likely be featured, in addition to being generally promoted. Music, parody, and activism are also favored. In fact, as of this writing, all activism and mainstream parody has been promoted. Though we're quite a small site as of this writing.

Whatever videos of yours we may feature, you would retain control over which ads and banners would display alongside it, and you would retain 100% of the revenue from those ads. Unless you opt for another revenue option.

And whether or not we decide to promote your work, ALL users are partners here and, as partners, you are able to upload videos along with text or banner ads which will appear on your user homepage as well as on each page displaying your video(s). You can also upload a series of ads to alternate randomly and/or insert ads in your videos or shows. In addition to all of this, BetterStream.com will be paying to promote BetterStream.com and the videos here.

REVENUE OPTIONS

[ Read about our belief and policy that Artists Have To Get Paid ]

We will be implementing more and more revenue options for entertainers to choose from in the future. For example:

The option to have us place all of the ads on your pages here (or in your videos), and return to you the majority percentage of what is made on those ads;

The option to have exclusive ad space on your pages. You would even be able to change our logo (BetterStream Entertainment) at the top to your own page heading or logo. And also make it so that the search bar only searches your material and no one elses. For this, you would pay us a monthly fee.

And then there is the option to share ad space with BetterStream.com (the default option for all users). We control our ad space and you control your ad space and you retain 100% of the revenue from your ads, which will display on all of your webpages here as well as on each of your video pages. We will place our banner ad (or textual ads) somewhere else on the page, maybe on the bottom or incorporated into the heading. Your ad will display closest to your video(s).

SUBSCRIPTION BASED REVENUE ALTERNATIVE

Right now, our revenue options are advertisement-based. If we hit a certain threshold that makes it feasible to do so, we would like to become subscription based. Viewers would pay for access to our site, like cable, and there would be few to no ads. We would take a small percentage off of the top and the rest of that subscription fee would go to the creators on our site, divided amongst them based on the size of their show or audience.

We would like to make this an opt-in alternative. We want to give you the choice on how your work is monetized and displayed.

Please read About The Founder of BetterStream to see how his personal experience with the mainstream entertainment industry led to the creation of BetterStream and its highly principled treatment of artists.

IMPORTANT LINKS:

Our Better Terms of Use

About BetterStream

Artists Have To Get Paid

Our Declaration of Independence

If you have any questions or want us to further explain anything we've written in these sections, or if you just want to say hi, please contact us.