Context
Webedia manages a significant number of YouTube CMS on behalf of creators, rights holders, and partners. These CMS cover several hundred channels and thousands of videos, generating significant revenue volumes.
Calculating revenue shares owed to rights holders relied on a combination of costly external tools, partially redundant, and on manual processing to handle complex cases. This situation was becoming unsustainable as volumes and contractual complexity increased.
The Billapest project was launched as a code name to design an internal system capable of replacing these tools, while ensuring accuracy compatible with high financial stakes.
Challenges
- Multiple calculation tools, costly and poorly integrated
- Very high data volumes (video data, revenues, territories)
- Numerous and heterogeneous revenue share rules, negotiated per rights holder
- Need for calculations sometimes at the video level, not just aggregated
- Requirement for cent-level precision
- Difficulty auditing and explaining calculated amounts
Intervention
Design and lead a unified revenue share calculation system, robust and auditable.
My role covered:
- Functional framing of scope and financial constraints
- Modeling complex revenue share rules
- Designing the target data architecture
- Centralizing and normalizing data sources
- Implementing automated monthly calculations
- Delivering results to finance and product teams
The goal was not only to recalculate amounts, but to make the system explainable, maintainable, and industrializable.
System Implemented
- Centralization of YouTube CMS reports and internal contractual data
- Dedicated database for revenue share calculations
- Business rule modeling via data transformations
- Automated monthly calculations, reproducible and auditable
- Results available via:
- a database exploitable by an internal application
- a control and management dashboard
Results
- Progressive elimination of several costly external tools
- Complete automation of monthly revenue share calculation
- Ability to handle complex rules without manual intervention
- Strong improvement in traceability and auditability of amounts
- Reduced error risk on sensitive financial perimeters
The system is now dimensioned to handle high volumes while maintaining fine precision.
What This Project Illustrates
- Design of critical financial systems based on data
- The ability to translate complex contractual rules into exploitable models
- An approach oriented toward reliability, precision, and trust
- The role of a part-time CTO / Head of Systems on high business stakes topics
Next Steps
The foundation laid by Billapest enables confident evolution of revenue share rules, integration of new CMS or partners, and system extension to other internal uses, without questioning the existing architecture.