BlogTV's YouTube Stars Making Real Money, Company Isn't

Live video-streaming site BlogTV is looking for more funding, CEO Guy Eliav tells us.

Eliav has a degree in accounting from Tel Aviv University, but you don't need one of those to figure out why BlogTV might need more cash soon.

According to a source involved in the negotiations, BlogTV spends around $234,000 a year paying popular YouTube users including Michael Buckley of "What the Buck?," Phil DeFranco of "The Phil DeFranco Show," and KevJumba to broadcast streaming shows on BlogTV. BlogTV pays Buckley $10,000 per month alone, this source says.

Reached by phone, Eliav denied those figures, saying BlogTV doesn't pay any of its stars half as much as the $130,000 the live-streaming site Stickam is rumored to pay personality Leo Laporte.

No matter. To us, anything close to $65,000 a year still seems like a lot to pay a YouTube personality to use a chat room in front of a camera once or twice a week. But Eliav is unrepentent.

He told us he wouldn't mind paying the YouTube stars as much as our source says he does "because, why not, it's a revenue share. They are paid based on revenue-sharing deals." He told us that DeFranco pulls 20,000 unique visitors for each of his twice-weekly shows and that BlogTV can charge $12 CPMs against that traffic.

Asked if it's true that BlogTV pays DeFranco $1,500 a week for his shows, as our source suggests, Eliav said: "We like him a lot. But this is not the number. I cannot give the number. But we like Sxephil [as DeFranco is known on YouTube]. I think that we will make a lot of money off this platform together. "