A New Company Wants to Pay Big Money for Influencers Private Videos to Train Artificial Intelligence (AI). This comes at a time when the influencer marketing industry has experienced explosive growth in recent years, becoming one of the most powerful and profitable strategies in the world of digital advertising. Brands, from small startups to global giants, are investing billions of dollars in partnerships with content creators to reach specific audiences and maximize their impact. This phenomenon has transformed not only traditional forms of advertising but also the way consumers interact with brands.
According to the Influencer Marketing Hub, the influencer market is expected to reach a value of $21.1 billion in 2023, a significant increase from the $9.7 billion recorded in 2020. This growth has not only been remarkable in terms of investment volume but also in the diversification of platforms and types of influencers participating in campaigns.
The New Way for Influencers to Make Money
Now that AI companies have scoured nearly every corner of the internet for content their models can learn from, Austin-based Troveo is buying “dark content” that’s been left on the cutting room floor. Since its launch a year ago, the company has invested about $5 million for a million hours of content.
“If you have public content, it’s already being used to train models, so the question is: do you want to participate and extract that value?” explained CEO Marty Pesis. “The more you get involved, the more you can really control how AI companies use your content.”
More than 1,200 approved people upload videos to Troveo, including filmmakers, talent agencies, YouTubers, and vloggers, who tend to have a treasure trove of unused video clips.
Users give Troveo exclusive rights to use their recordings for AI training purposes in exchange for passive income. The recordings are typically sold between $0.75 and $3 per minute.
The value of the content depends on its visual diversity (a video of a YouTuber talking to the camera can only teach AI so much) or its suitability for a specific need.
A Troveo client was looking for 50,000 hours of dog videos because dogs generated with their model always had cat bodies.
In response, a creative who decided to take the risk is YouTuber and a cappella singer Peter Hollens. When Hollens records a video for his 3 million subscribers, he ends up discarding 50 minutes of footage for every minute he uploads, meaning that a 3-minute music video results in 150 minutes of dark footage.
“I always thought this was worthless, and then I realized: wow! All these terabytes are worth hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of dollars, depending on who you talk to,” said Hollens.
His first paycheck from Troveo was $13,000. But first, he had to weigh the question that many creators face: Is this about feeding the same beast that will replace them, or simply profiting from an inevitable innovation?
Similarly, Jared Brick, CEO of Brick House Media, produces informative videos with interviews for industry leaders and decided to hand over thousands of hours of content to Troveo that had accumulated on hard drives over 13 years of activity.
“There has always been modernization in our industry, whether it’s from recording to digitization or from virtualization to streaming,” Brick told The Post. “Every time you resist technology, you lose.”
So far, he’s been able to monetize 900 hours of video, valued between $0.80 and $0.90 per minute, meaning he has earned over $40,000 from material that would otherwise have gone to waste.
While it’s an easy target for content creators, there’s also potential for a broader audience. After all, most people have hundreds of private videos stored in the cloud.
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