YouTube Partners Score Crack at E-Commerce Revenue

Written by Steve Donohue

Wednesday, October 8. 2008 at 05:25 PM EDT Post a comment

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Amateur and professional Web video producers that upload videos to YouTube Inc. 's portal may soon be able to get a cut of revenue from songs and other products marketed by iTunes and Amazon.com Inc. (Nasdaq: AMZN) on the site.

Under the e-commerce strategy, YouTube says it'll add "non-obtrusive" links on the video pages from companies such as EMI Group plc (NYSE: EMI). Web surfers will be able to click on buttons from iTunes and Amazon's MP3 store to download the music.

YouTube says its partners -- Web video producers that mostly generate several thousand views for each video they upload to the site -- will be able to enable retail links on their videos by using YouTube's content identification and management system.

It's not clear now how many YouTube users will choose to pay to download songs from iTunes or Amazon.com, considering most of the songs those online retailers will pitch are already available for free via streaming video on YouTube.

YouTube is calling its plan to embed links from iTunes and Amazon.com below videos from YouTube partners "a first step to building a broader e-commerce platform" for millions of YouTube users and several thousand content partners.

YouTube didn't disclose how it will share e-commerce revenue with its content partners. The company also shares advertising revenue with video producers that are part of its partner program.