The "bedroom broadcasters" who relay their messages to millions via YouTube will now have a chance to become rich as well as famous.

The video-sharing website, which was bought by Google last year, has said it will start placing ads alongside its most popular clips and allow their creators to share in the revenues.

Initially the program will extend only to 20 or 30 of the site's most popular contributors but YouTube's founders have indicated that it may be broadened in the future, reflecting a shift among video-sharing websites towards financially recognising producers.

“In the marketplace, you often hear people talking about user-generated content in a disparaging way,” Jamie Byrne, head of product marketing at YouTube, told the New York Times. “This is content that really has merit and is of equal value to the professional content that is contributed by some of our partners.”

Another video-sharing site, Metacafe, pays producers $5 for every thousand times a clip is watched once it has passed a threshold of 20,000 views.

Revver, which places ads at the starts and ends of clips, has been passing on half of the advertising revenues generated by clips to producers for about 18 months.

YouTube has been expected to develop a revenue-sharing program since the idea was first aired by one of the site's founders, Chad Hurley, in January.

A message posted on the site's blog last week read: "Over the past year and a half we've been excited and amazed by all of the original content that’s been created by members of the YouTube community.

"Up until now there’s been a distinction between the content you create and the content created by YouTube's professional content partners. We want to start changing some of the perception here."

Among the first new partners will be LonelyGirl15, the video diary of a fictitious home-schooled teenager whose which has had more than 10 million views since it was started a year ago, and 'Renetto', whose 130 plus videos - with titles such as 'Do Chinese Farts Smell Like Cats or Dogs' - have also proven popular.

YouTube has not said how much either will be paid.

The decision to reward contributors financially is understood to be a reaction against the efforts of several of YouTube's competitors to lure away those responsible for the site's most popular posts.

LonelyGirl15 recently began putting her videos on Revver as well as YouTube, and Smosh, a comedy duo whose skits are regularly watched by 100,000 YouTube subcribers now have an arrangement with LiveVideo.com, where their videos begin and end with branding messages.

YouTube is the world's most popular video-sharing website, with about 26 million visitors in December, according to comScore, an internet research firm.

Clips by amateur directors are often more frequently viewed than those made by commercial partners, such as CBS.

Five of the best

LonelyGirl15 became famous for portaying life as a home-schooled teenager in the US. The protagonist, 'Bree', was later revealed to be the creation of two Californian film-makers, and the actor who plays her a New Zealander, Jessica Rose, but that did not diminish her popularity. Her videos have had more than 10 million views to date.

Smosh are a comedy duo whose 31 videos, with titles such as 'How Not To Act On A First Date' and 'Anthony Gets A Hair Cut', are regularly beamed out to just under 100,000 viewers, making theirs the most subscribed channel on YouTube. The stars - Anthony Padilla and Ian Hecox - are both 19.

Renetto - real name Paul Robinett - released his first short film on YouTube "after a trip to the country," and has now uploaded more than 130 videos, with titles such as 'Do Chinese Farts Smell Like Cats of Dogs'. His bald, bespectacled appearance is now so widely known on the site as to have spawned several mock 'Renettos'.

HappySlip, the creation of Christine, an Asian American actress from Virginia, was designed as a collection of "cheerful fun moments to just laugh and enjoy." Since being added in August last year, her videos - a mixture of TV soap-style episodes, video blogs and songs - have been watched more than 1.5 million times.

LisaNova makes a mixture of edgy political satire, video blogs and skits, including one in which she does a strained imitation of Keira Knightly on the set of Pirates of the Caribbean. Since it debuted less than a year ago, her channel has received more than 1.5 million views.

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