THE video of Aunty Sheila dancing at your wedding where her false teeth fall out might just make you a million, but Sheila, the wedding band and the copyright owners of the music the band played might just want their cut.

YouTube wants to give you money but be sure to hire a lawyer and a marketing company.

Chad Hurley from Google property YouTube let the world know last week that the video sharing site would soon offer their 70 million users a way of profiting from homemade videos they upload. This will be done via ads embedded or attached to the videos.

This is the first glimpse of how Google will recoup the nearly $2bn it invested in YouTube late last year.

Google is under pressure to make money from its purchase, as well as considerable monetary demands from copyright holders for distributing content without permission. It is in Google's interests to decrease copyrighted content and to increase content from users who will allow them to distribute it in exchange for revenue shares.

Make no mistake, Google is the biggest ad company in the world and just happens to use a great search product to sell these ads. Monetising users' content is an easy thing to do for brainy Google. Whether you have a million visitors a day or just one visitor, Google wants your business and will happily sign you up to display its ads. There is no such thing as too little in the new web economy, the Long Tail proves this.

Coined by Chris Anderson, the premise of the Long Tail is that, given an infinite choice, non-hits can make as much money as hits. This applies to music, films, books and ads on a website. Anderson suggests that slowselling products or products with a low demand, when added together, can exceed the volume generated by the top-selling products. This is why Google wants ads on your MyLittlePony Nostalgia site and why it wants your home movies.

What is very likely to happen now is that everyone will start uploading all their home movies, good and bad, in the hope that, just like the Antiques Roadshow, one of them will be a gem waiting to be found. With infinite disk space and bandwidth, Google will host all those videos for free, and every time they are watched, Google makes a few pennies, as do you. Dozens of videos from millions of users mean those pennies turn into billions of pounds for Google.

Paying users for their content is nothing new. Metacafe. com, an entertainment site, already offers a revenue share with its users. Some users have made up to $25,000 each on ads attached to their videos.

As with all incentives to make money, amateurs may stop doing things for fun and concentrate more on being revenue-generating machines. Already, a semiprofessional team on Metacafe is making videos to make money. So far, only one of the many videos they created became a hit, but they still made $20,000.

Mo' money mo' problems. Where there's money to be made there are aches to be found. Two immediate issues with this YouTube deal will be people loading their submissions with irrelevant but sensational keywords.

The other issue is that content owners will want a cut of your earnings if you use their logos or snippets of their songs in your video.

Even Google's web search results are losing the battle with spam.

Despite the superior maths skills from the Goog, millions of spam pages are sprouting up, annoying people who find hardly any content but lots of ads - Google ads. People are questioning the motivation to clean up search results when those spam pages make Google money.

Google uses quite complex maths to bring you the most accurate (but not spam-free) search results for web pages full of text. They even make it look easy, but video is an entirely different matter, and so far no company has released an accurate video search system. YouTube works on keywords and text descriptions alone which can be prone to rigging.

A search on YouTube for 'hamster crash' gets you a hamster inside a toy dragracer being pushed along, not BBC star Richard 'Hamster' Hammond almost dying in a highspeed crash. In fact, even in Ireland, some political candidates on YouTube are including the names of their competition in the keywords of their videos. Such is the case with Thomas Byrne whose videos can be found by searching for 'Dominic Hannigan' as well as his own name.

To exploit your video and reach a wider audience, you will need to get attention. As sites like Digg. com show, those who write headline-grabbing copy get picked up much more than those who write blander but more descriptive copy. Expect others to take this to the extreme with mundane and boring videos labelled with 'Britney Spears', 'Arctic Monkeys' and 'Paris Hilton' in order to get views.

While YouTube video spam may be very annoying, it is nowhere near as damaging as finding yourself in court for uploading your child's third birthday party. Dr Eoin O'Dell, senior law lecturer in Trinity College, points out that even videos of your kid's birthday party, with everyone singing 'happy birthday to you', may have to pay the copyright piper, since that song itself is copyrighted.

Could we see countless fights over who owns the content in your home movies? O'Dell thinks it is a possibility. "Where there is money, there's potential for a fight anyway.

The best way to keep fights at a minimum is to have contracts about it in advance, which is unlikely (to say the least) in the YouTube context."

Perhaps if you make only a few euros from the video people won't complain. But what if it is viewed by 10 million people?

Of the top 20 most-watched videos on YouTube, half are homemade affairs, but just two use fully original content. Top video 'Evolution of dance', by visual comedian Judson Laipply is a six-minute video tribute to the various dances through the history of pop music. Watched some 40 million times, the video has 30 different song samples in it. That's a lot of different content creators who could take action to be paid for those 40 million views. Even background music, buildings, dance moves and logos might need clearance.

Once you look after those issues, the megariches are just an upload away. It's simply lights, web camera, lawyer, marketing team and action.