An excerpt on user-submitted videos from the article How consumers hijacked the media model.

Viacom Inc.’s (VIA) VH-1 just launched Acceptable.tv to find talented undiscovered filmmakers and producers. On the new site, amateurs can upload their 2-minute short comedy clip and submit them for a vote. One winner will have the chance of getting his or her production aired on national television.

According to Michael Hirschhorn, executive vice president of programming at VH-1, some of the user-submitted videos are “surprisingly good.” (Go to my blog to watch my interview with Hirschhorn.) Though VH-1 has no plans to hire any of these would-be filmmakers, it might have to consider this option down the road, since talent that attracts an audience will always go where the money is.

So what appears to have changed in the economics (at least for now) is the winnowing process of finding talent. Perhaps it’s cheaper than hiring an agent? Still, there are new costs. The costs are the burden of exposing talent for free for someone else to capitalize on. Will one talented filmmaker go to Google Inc.’s (GOOG) YouTube or other sites, such as Metacafe, to get paid and be in front of a larger audience?

The economics for freelancers in media also appears to be changing. Google just introduced a “pay per action” advertising model, requiring a potential customer to do more than click on a page for the publisher of the advertisement to get paid. This pay-for-performance model is also finding its way to the content-generating process. On Metacafe, video producers only get paid after their content is viewed above a certain threshold.