Making money online used to entail one to have a website, products to sell and some marketing savvy. Yet, did you know that you could now earn money from your YouTube Videos?

Gilbert Ndahayo, a Rwandan film maker has a YouTube account dubbed RWANDATHEMOVIE that displays a total of 12 videos. One of the videos on his YouTube account, ‘Why Women do it?’ a film project still in progress, hit a viewership of 1,000 on November 30th, 2011.

The video was shot on Ndahayo’s iphone in Uganda over the summer of 2010 and earned him international recognition when it featured in "Life in a Day”, a film by legendary producers Ridley Scott (Black Hawk Down and American Gangster) and Kevin MacDonald (The Last King Of Scotland).

”I advise young filmmakers to take advantage of opportunities offered by social networks that are available for free to market their products and reach out to the world. Networks like YouTube receive three billion views per day and there is no better place to feature than this. It is free and any publicity is good,” advised Ndahayo on his YouTube account.

‘Life in a Day’ is a crowd sourced documentary film comprising an arranged series of video clips selected from 80,000 clips submitted to the YouTube videosharing website, showing respective occurrences from around the world on a single day, July 24, 2010. Most importantly, Ndahayo’s video clip went ahead and featured on the poster of the movie.

The film is 94 minutes 57 seconds long and includes scenes selected from 4,500 hours of footage in 80,000 submissions from 192 nations. The completed film debuted at the Sundance Film Festival on January 27, 2011 while the premiere was streamed live on YouTube.

YouTube uses Adobe Flash Video and HTML5 technology to display a wide variety of user-generated video content, including movie and television clips as well as music videos. Unregistered users may watch videos, while those registered may upload an unlimited number of videos.

Global tech giant, Google Inc. acquired YouTube LLC. in November 2006 for US$1.65 billion from a three-partner startup budget of US$11.5 million investment. Google launched monetisation settings to allow its users to make some money as long as all the content in the video clip is self-owned and/or have been licensed.

Ndahayo lives in New York where he is pursuing his masters degree in fine art (film directing) at Columbia University. His film "Rwanda: Beyond The Deadly Pit” received Best Feature Documentary, a Santa Clara County Commendation and US House of Representative Special Congressional Recognition at Silicon Valley African Film Festival in California this year.

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