A new company wants to give pay cash for your private videos — to train artificial intelligence.
Now that AI companies have scraped virtually every corner of the internet for content their models can learn from, Austin-based Troveo is buying up “dark content” left on the cutting room floor. Since launching a year ago, the company has doled out some $5 million for 1 million hours of content.
“If you have public content out there, your content is already being used to train models, so the question really is, do you want to opt in and extract that value?” CEO Marty Pesis explained. “The more you lean into it, the more you can actually control the terms of how [AI companies] are using your content.”
More than 1,200 approved individuals are uploading to Troveo — including filmmakers, talent agencies, YouTubers and vloggers who tend to be sitting on a treasure trove of unused video scraps.
Users give Troveo exclusive rights to use their footage for AI training purposes in return for a passive income stream. Footage typically sells for $.75 to $3 a minute.
The value of the content depends on how visually diverse it is — a video of a YouTuber just talking to a camera can only teach AI so much — or how well it fits a particular need.
One Troveo client was in the market for 50,000 hours of dog videos, because the dogs generated with their model kept coming out with the bodies of cats.
One creative who decided to take the bank is YouTuber and a cappella singer Peter Hollens.
When Hollens makes a video for his 3 million subscribers, he ends up scrapping 50 minutes of footage for every one minute he actually uploads — meaning the byproduct of a three-minute music video is 150 minutes of dark footage.
“I’ve always thought that was not worth anything, then I realized, oh holy crap, all of these terabytes are actually worth hundreds of thousands if not millions of dollars depending upon who you’re talking to,” Hollens said.
His first paycheck from Troveo was for $13,000.
But he first had to weigh the question many creators are grappling with: Is this feeding the very beast that will replace them, or just cashing in on an inevitable innovation?
Hollens was convinced to cash in after finding out that 32 of his YouTube videos had already been used to train AI without his consent.
“If Pandora was in the box and we had the ability to keep it closed, I would be on the side of not doing this, but it’s already too late… unless you’re a hermit, you’ve been trained off of,” Hollens explained. “This is an incredible opportunity to at least cash in.”
Jared Brick, the CEO of Brick House Media, produces talking-head informational videos for industry leaders — and decided to hand Troveo thousands of hours of content that had piled up on hard drives over 13 years in business.
“There’s always been modernization in our industry whether it was taped to digital, or virtual to streaming,” Brick told The Post. “Every time you resist technology, you lose.”
He’s been able to monetize 900 hours of video so far, valued at roughly $0.80 to $.90 per minute — meaning he’s made well over $40,000 from footage that would otherwise have wasted away.
While it’s low-hanging fruit for content creators, there’s also potential for a broader audience. Most people do, after all, have hundreds of private videos living in the cloud.
Said Pesis: “iCloud libraries and Google Photos are less valuable than the high quality content, but it would be wrong for me to say that there’s no value there,” Pesis said.
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