The new tool will allow news organizations to screen video uploads as they come in, and use the best clips for their broadcasts and on their websites. Of course, news organizations will still be responsible for actually curating the content to ensure that it’s accurate, which is a task that will require additional manpower for the more popular news sites. All video content uploaded through these tools will be available on YouTube proper as well.

My biggest concern with this kind of reporting is always credibility — oftentimes you’ll come across videos on YouTube that seem like they’re relevant to breaking news, but are unable to determine who uploaded the clip. Fortunately, as an open source tool YouTube Direct allows organizations to customize their submission process. Hopefully the more credible ones will require (or at least encourage) uploaders to leave their contact information, so that fact checkers can follow up on their video reports to ensure their validity.

News organizations aren’t the only sites looking to accept user generated videos, either — YouTube Direct will work that any site that wants to upload video content, so we should probably expect to see some more creative uses in the future.

The feature is not live quite yet, but should be up by tomorrow morning.

Update: You can see an example implementation at 7NEWS of Boston (scroll towards the bottom of the page).
Image by quinn.anya

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Videos will be drawn from the Univision network, TeleFutura, and Galavision, and will also include footage from special events. Content will be rolled out over the course of the next few months. This is the first time Univision content will be available on the web outside of the network’s own properties, though this is a nonexclusive deal (don’t be surprised if we see similar content pop up on Hulu, TV.com, or other media portals soon).

Univison says that while the US Hispanic audience online is growing faster than the total market, it has been underserved so far despite the boom in online video over the last few years. YouTube says that Latino viewership has increased by around 80% in the last year.

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Last January Warner Music Group forced YouTube to remove all of its music from the site, citing disputes over royalty payments. This led to an outcry from users, who created protest videos once YouTube started muting or pulling down any user-generated content that contained WMG songs as background music. Today, those songs are starting to make their way back to the world’s largest video portal: music videos for Madonna, Green Day, and Bee Gees, among others, are now live on YouTube for the first time in nearly a year.

That’s great news. But the new videos will look a bit odd to anyone who has used YouTube before — they’re all decked out with extensive branding, including colorful backgrounds and large links to the artist’s products. Warner alone has the ability to do this, because of a deal it negotiated that gives it far more control over its pages than other content partners have. Warner is allowed to control its own branding, and can sell its own ads against both its own music videos and the user generated content that features its songs, with the majority of the revenue from these ads going to WMG (YouTube will take a cut as well).

At this point the branding isn’t awful, but it’s a concession YouTube surely wasn’t eager to make. After all, now that Warner has the ability to brand their clips however they want, other content owners will want to do it themselves. If YouTube agrees to that, we’ll lose the relatively uniform layout on the site in favor of something that’s more reminiscent of (the old) MySpace. And there’s always the risk that Warner won’t be happy with its initial results and may try some more aggressive branding, which could get even more annoying.

At this point it looks like only a fraction on Warner’s content has been reintroduced to the site, though we can likely expect more of it to come online in the next few weeks.

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YouTube PM Brian Glick describes YouTube’s social trends with three F’s: Find, Follow, and Feed. The first two are fairly self explanatory. Find refers to the process by which you find people on the site that you may already know or are interested in, whose activity you can then Follow through the site’s subscriptions (you can granularly control which items you’d like to be alerted to, like Subscriptions, Favorited items, or new video uploads). Finally there’s Feed, which should really be called Share. The idea is that after you’ve been presented with content by YouTube’s Find and Follow features, you in turn are going to share that content yourself, which lets the cycle begin anew with everyone that is following you.

Glick, along with YouTube’s Director of Product Management Hunter Walk, then outlined some of the things the site is doing to actually faciliate the circular chart above. Most of the features they told me about have already been rolled out, albeit with little fanfare, so you may not realize they were there. In June the site started allowing users to syndicate their video uploads directly to Twitter, Facebook, and Google Reader. That may not sound like a huge deal since just about every other media sharing site has let you do it for awhile, but it has had a big impact: YouTube says that every AutoShared tweet yields an average of seven new YouTube sessions. There are over 1 million people who are currently using the auto-sharing, and you can expect that number to rise, especially if YouTube starts pushing it more (and they probably will given its impact on traffic). One other interesting stat: YouTube is the second most tweeted about brand, after Twitter itself.

The site is also starting a push to get people to start subscribing and following their friends on YouTube (up until now YouTube’s account structure has been oddly set up and failed to tap into the social graph established by Gmail). That changed last month, when the site started rolling out a Friend Suggest feature that prompts you to start following your Gmail friends who are on YouTube. Since October, 1 million different people have made at least 1 subscription via the Friend Finder suggestions.

Aside from the site’s sharing features, Glick and Walk also talked about the the challenge of helping curate compelling content for users. Walk says that the average YouTube user spends around 15 minutes per day on the site, while they spend multiple hours watching their TV. Part of that discrepancy lies in the fact that YouTube involves some work on the user’s part — you can’t really just sit in front of the site and let it show you stuff (though there are a few startups trying to do that). Now YouTube is trying to leverage the site’s increasingly emphasized social features to curate this content, first through widgets on the homepage like the Feed and eventually through other means. Walk talked about a feature that might show you “things you missed in the last 24 hours”, which sounds a bit like Facebook’s News Feed for video.

The curation problem may also lead to YouTube deploying some sort of reward system for users who stumble across content early on its lifespan and help it become a viral hit. Whether this would take the form of a badge system or something else entirely seems up in the air — at this point it sounds like such a system is still early on its its development, but it’s clearly an idea that’s being floated around the YouTube offices.

Walk and Glick also pointed out that YouTube doesn’t have to rely exclusively on actions that take place on YouTube itself to find interesting content, as its video embeds can be found on countless sites across the web. Because YouTube knows where a given video is embedded, and, thanks to Google data, what kind of site that is, it can do this quite efficiently. For example, if a video that was embedded on ESPN’s website is receiving a high number of views, there’s a good chance that it will appeal to sports fans on YouTube. YouTube is actually looking to reward some of the more prominent content sharers with a new “As Seen On” widget — if your site is responsible for driving a high number of views to a certain video, YouTube may highlight it on one of its topic pages (the screenshot below appeared in YouTube’s ‘News’ section). The sites shown in the widget are determined by an algorithm.

YouTube still has a long ways to go on both the social and curation fronts — I can honestly say that I’ve never really interacted with many of my friends on YouTube through subscriptions, and I know many people who are the same way. But there is still a lot of low hanging fruit for YouTube to take advantage of. Along with its Gmail integration, YouTube may consider letting people tap into Facebook Connect to identify Facebook friends who are also on YouTube (given the Google/Facebook semi-rivalry that may be a long shot, but YouTube has already implemented a more limited version of Connect).

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The ads are destroying YouTube. At least this one is. It is a video ad for sustainable energy company from Spain called Acciona. Yeah, I had never heard of them either.

The video starts with this Euro-dude in a suit starting to blow up and crack apart like he’s made from plaster. Halfway through, the actual video player crack in half, and all of the surrounding parts of the site shake and fall away, while an annoying voiceover is saying something about rebirth. I don’t know, maybe it makes more sense in Spanish.

The visual effect is interesting, but feels like a gimmick since it’s already been done before to much better effect by Nintendo. A year ago, they used the same collapsing webpage motif in a video ad for Wario Land: Shake It. At least that made sense.

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A source just tipped us on some interesting changes Google-owned YouTube has made that give its partners more control over the blocking of video content they upload to the service.

Basically, there are two new buttons in the interface for partners. One says ‘Block by Country’ and provides content partners with the ability to geo-block a single video rather than an entire account, an oft-requested feature that allows partners to restrict the geographical rights for specific videos. This can be helpful for blocking a clip in a region where it might be culturally offensive or where rights issues prevent an account for having distribution rights in a handful of countries.

The second button reads ‘Enable Auto Block outside Ownership’ (yes, that’s a confusing name). The purpose of the button is similar to the first button, but is for content owners who only have rights to a video in a single region. Using this feature they can quickly claim rights to that one region, while automatically blocking access everywhere else.

We reached out to YouTube, who says that the new features “are another way that the site is looking to give partners more control over where their videos are viewed”.

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“YouTube is down for maintenance and will be back shortly,” says the site. The site first went down at around 9:30 California time. Or possibly earlier, we’re sorting through the Twitter barrage – “is down” is a trending topic right now.

Most companies plan maintenance for short periods in the middle of the night, so our guess is this is maintenance of the unplanned sort. 2+ hours and counting isn’t a trivial amount of downtime. We’ve asked Google for a statement on when it might be back up, and what caused the outage.

Update: Erictric says this may be part of a YouTube store rollout. I’m dubious.

Update 2: A YouTube spokesperson says: “We are aware that some users are having difficulty accessing videos on YouTube. We are working hard to fix the issue and will have the site back to normal as soon as possible.”

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Videos include one called “Autumn on the Blue Ridge”:

And here’s one of a local pumpkin patch:

Image by Micky

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Today it looks like Vevo decided to peek out from under the covers, though its appearance was short lived. Our tipster noticed a number of artists who had apparently been given Vevo-linked YouTube accounts, with names like EminemVEVO and DonnaSummerVEVO. Videos from these users look nearly identical to the music videos scattered throughout YouTube, but with one key difference: there’s VEVO branding on the bottom right hand side of the player. Clicking the VEVO logo attempts to kick you to a page hosted on VEVO.com, though the links are all broken. At least, they were. As I wrote this post, YouTube has apparently noticed the videos and taken them down.

So does this mean that the VEVO launch is imminent? Probably not. A source we’ve spoken to says that this probably isn’t part of a large roll-out or launch, but that’s it’s more likely that someone stumbled across a video they weren’t supposed to see. The site is reportedly shooting for a December launch.

And of course, this doesn’t really give an idea of what VEVO proper will look like, but it may give us some idea of what VEVO content will look like when it’s watched on YouTube. So far, the branding seems to be pretty minimal, though we may well see more skinning and ads on these clips once VEVO actually goes live.

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That’s massive, and it’s obviously the biggest live streaming event YouTube has ever done. But even more impressive is just how smoothly it went. I watched about half of the two and a half hour show, and if there were any interruptions, I didn’t see any. I didn’t even see any hiccups, it was that good. I had the show running full screen on my desktop computer, and it was pretty great picture quality for live streaming video.

Though YouTube hasn’t officially commented on it, it’s widely believed that Akamai [update below], and not Google, were the ones actually handling the streaming capabilities. They’re the group that also handled it for YouTube Live, this past summer. That event saw some 700,000 concurrent views during its peak, undoubtedly, this had way more.

Of course, even 10 million is nothing compared to some of the most popular television shows, but we’re starting to see audience of comprable sizes (though on a worldwide level whereas TV ratings are generally cited for the U.S.).

The recorded version of the full 2 and a half hour concert is now officially being served up by YouTube and it already has over a million views in 3 days.

Update: As Stephen Donner points out in the comments, he was able to trace the stream as it was happening, sure enough, back to Akamai.

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U2 is streaming their concert tonight from the Rose Bowl in Pasadena, California live to YouTube. As the site announced earlier this week, some 16 countries will be able to view the show live: Australia, Brazil, Canada, France, India, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Japan, Mexico, Netherlands, New Zealand, South Korea, Spain, U.K., U.S. (other countries were presumably excluded due to streaming rights). The show will start at 8:30 PM PT tonight, and you can find it here.

During the show, YouTube will also feature a Twitter widget below the video player that will be displaying tweets from people who use the #U2webcast hashtag.

If you miss it live, YouTube will also put up the entire recording tomorrow on its U2 page.

U2 and technology have long gone hand in hand. Their ZooTV tour to support their albums Achtung Baby and Zooropa famously featured a massive amount of television monitors and live streaming video from all around the world. Later, U2 of course got chummy with Apple, and released their own branded iPod. But when the private equity firm Elevation Partners (which U2 lead singer Bono is a partner in) purchased a huge stake in Palm, the U2/Apple love affair seemed to sour. And since then, U2 has now seen their most recent tour sponsored by Palm and Apple rival BlackBerry.

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VEVO has just announced a ’strategic’ investment was made by Abu Dhabi Media Company (ADMC), a giant of a media company with headquarters in Abu Dhabi, capital of the United Arab Emirates, reports MediaMemo. The specifics of the deal remain under cover, but the rumor mill suggests the company is being valued at around $300 million.

Slated for launch in the U.S. and Canada next December, VEVO is going to attempt to leverage YouTube’s massive audience to build a destination and syndication network for “the very best in top-notch music video content”. The three founding shareholders will be sharing the revenue from the music video site with YouTube as it will be using Google’s video sharing site as its main distribution platform.

Question is: how attractive will the service turn out to be considering the fact two other majors, Warner Music and EMI, are still holding out? And how did Abu Dhabi Media Company come into play?

ADMC was created in June 2007 as a joint stock company (wholly owned by the government of Abu Dhabi) from the assets of Emirates Media Incorporated. The company owns a host of television and radio networks and multiple newspaper and magazine businesses.

The company boasts dozens of partnership and distribution agreements with media companies from around the globe, including Bertelsmann, Warner Bros., Participant Media and National Geographic. Its CEO is veteran media pro Edward Borgerding, who was Executive Vice-President of Walt Disney International in Hong Kong before joining ADMC in 2007.

ADMC Chairman H.E. Mohamed Khalaf Al Mazroui in a statement said the deal will help the company establish a leading position in the digital media industry, and added that taking a stake in the joint venture is part of an integrated approach to expand its global presence and brand portfolio.

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One is that YouTube is now monetizing over a billion video views a week. Last week, YouTube announced that it was serving over 1 billion video views a day, so if you do the math there, it means that YouTube is monetizing one every seven video views.

The company also noted that 90% of the top 50 advertisers according to AdAge have now run ads on YouTube. And of its homepage ad inventory, 90% of it sold out for the quarter in the U.S., with lower, but still impressive sale rates for the rest of the world. Google also noted that YouTube was just starting to unleash its pre-roll inventory and let its salesforce have a go at selling that to advertisers, which should bring in more money.

And with Warner Music Group back in the mix, they now have the four major music labels playing ball again. As a one-stop shop for many music videos, YouTube will also be able to sell ads against those, as well as make some money off of affiliate sales from iTunes and Amazon’s MP3 store.

Earlier this month, CNET uncovered that Google CEO Eric Schmidt admitted under oath that the company paid a $1 billion premium when it bought YouTube in 2006 (for $1.65 billion). The thought was always that the site was growing so quickly that they would scoop it up and figure out how to monetize it later. It would appear that they’re getting close to doing just that — albeit three years later.

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Truth be told, all press is now banned from the event, we were told this evening. And that sucks because just yesterday we were confirmed as attendees and had planned to report on what we saw and heard. But then PC World and The Next Web spilled the beans on the event, and Google decided to ban the press.

However, before they banned us and closed down registrations, we did manage to get the confirmation email about the event.

The event, dubbed Front End Engineering Open House will feature “presentations on Google Maps and Chrome OS, YouTube will be unveiling their new look and showcasing YouTube 3-D.”

While the presentation on Chrome OS is obviously the thing that first caught our eye, the “new look” for YouTube certainly sounds interesting. As does the showcase of YouTube 3D, something we covered a bit of this summer.

Here are the other key details:

When: Thursday, October 15th, 2009

6:00pm-9:00pm

Where: Google Headquarters

Program

6-7pm | Registration & Networking
7-8 pm | Presentations

Welcome by Adam Sah
Maps – Dan Barcay
Chrome OS – Ben Goodger
YouTube – Chris Zacharias & Igor Kofman
Panel Q&A

8:05-9pm | Networking & Demos

Should be interesting, too bad we can’t go. Anyone who does, feel free to film it and send us the video. tips [at] techcrunch.com.

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AdWords is Google’s bread-and-butter ad platform that plenty of brands and businesses already use to place their ads outside of YouTube, so this will help streamline the purchase process. It’s not all about convenience either — advertisers will also be able to use AdWords campaign tools, which are more robust than what YouTube offers.

YouTube is also announcing that it’s extending Promoted Videos to Canada, France, the UK, Italy, Germany, Spain, and the Netherlands.

The news comes soon after a number of other significant improvements to the Promoted Videos program, which has seen a 500% increase in clicks since the beginning of the year. In August, YouTube began integrating ads for Promoted Video directly into the site’s ‘Watch’ page (before that they would appear in search results, but not where users actually viewed content). And earlier this month the site began allowing the sponsored videos to appear in AdSense units across the web, where they compete in standard ad auctions. All of this is part of YouTube’s push to monetize the site, and to make it more appealing to its growing list of premium content providers.

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Enjoy Hannah Montana star Miley Cyrus’ rap about the reasons for her quitting Twitter, which caused quite a ruckus earlier this week, for reasons known only to some people other than myself.

So, why did she quit Twitter?

Not because her friends told her to, Cyrus raps, but because she started ‘living for moments’ and wanted to start ‘living for people’ instead. Basically, she wants to tell her fans she’s ‘too busy’ for Twitter and also didn’t like the fact that her public updates were well, public, and that gossip sites used her tweets to publish headlines about her life.

If only Twitter allowed for people to protect their tweets. Oh, wait.

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So why the spiffy new banner now? Turns out, it was three years ago to the day that Google acquired YouTube for a whopping $1.65 billion.

One other fun note: check out the name of the logo’s image file. It’s “logo_holy_crap_1bn_a_day”. Holy crap, indeed. (Good eyes Coweybear).

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Buma/Stemra has commissioned a local startup called Teezir to build an Audio Detection Solution which the company claims is capable of automatically detecting copyrighted audio on Dutch websites. Should the association use the crawler to find out you embedded a YouTube video featuring material from a composer or performer who is registered with Buma/Stemra, then they aim to charge you their new annual license fees for embedded content (calculate them here).

Update (9 October 2009): this article in Dutch reveals Buma/Stemra has put its foot in its mouth and decided to withdraw from trying to impose fines on individuals who embed music videos, stating they’ll only target ‘commercial’ users after all. Caveat: The association says every website that has ads on it is a commercial venture, which means if your Blogger blog has Google ads on it, you could still be on their radar.

These fees, which will become effective 1 January 2010, were laid out in this brochure (PDF in Dutch) and are, according to the director of Buma/Stemra, calculated based on the fees they currently charge for offline music playback such as copyrighted background music in bakeries and the likes. The fees amount up to €130 ($191) for up to six embedded files, €260 ($383) for up to twelve, and if you embed over thirty files you will be liable for €650 ($957) per thirty or part thereof (i.e. 31 embedded files on your site will set you back €1300 or roughly $1914).

Because God forbid you might want to provide their right holders with a bigger audience for their music and potential new fans who would buy their albums and pay to attend their live performances. The horror!

The association did say that they do not intend to ‘chase’ individual bloggers, but also added that they will not be excluding them from eventual fines either. In an extraordinary act of compassion, they intend to give naughty embedders the chance to take the material down before going after their wallets. Buma/Stemra is currently also trying to start conversations with Google (YouTube, Blogger) and local blogging platform providers like Hyves to try and get financial compensation for them for the distribution of copyrighted material by their users, but so far hasn’t reached any agreements with either party.

Fortunately, several political parties in The Netherlands have already stated that they are concerned about Buma/Stemra’s intentions, posing questions about the juridical grounds for the new licensing fees and publicly wondering if it’s actually a smart idea to refrain music fans from spreading the work of their favorite artists.

Let’s hope common sense prevails.

So we can all keep enjoying this video clip of Dutch rock band Golden Earring, with ‘When the lady smiles’.

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To help gauge the Watch page’s ideal layout, YouTube invited in a number of users and gave them magnets that represented different elements from YouTube and other popular video sites. The results were not surprising, but they present an interesting challenge to YouTube: the vast majority of users chose to streamline their page as much as possible, featuring a large video player, a search box, and a strip of related videos. But the site’s heavy uploaders, who are obviously key to YouTube’s success, tended to favor a more complex site with a greater emphasis on analytics, sharing, and social interaction.

YouTube’s task is to figure out a way to appeal to both sets of users. And to do that, it sounds like there’s going to be a new set of customization options coming our way, which would allow users to tweak their watch pages with the features they want. YouTube wouldn’t confirm that this feature is definitely coming (the company is still doing extensive testing so it may not be sure itself), but don’t be surprised if you get the option to build your perfect ‘Watch’ page six months down the line.

Last month YouTube gave us a peek at another one of its recent research revelations: its five star rating system doesn’t work, because people tend to either rate videos as 5’s or 1’s.

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The deal could prove to be a sign of things to come for YouTube’s premium content, especially since the site has left the door open to special branding on Warner’s music pages that would make it clear who the content owner is. YouTube says that it’s working with WMG to define the optimal experience for the user and the artist, and this may well wind up looking significantly different from YouTube’s standard viewing page.

That may be bad news to VEVO, the satellite “Hulu for music videos” site that’s currently being built by Universal Music Group in partnership with YouTube. Sony has signed on to distribute its content through the site, but EMI and Warner are hold-outs. VEVO is supposed to give users a more fleshed out music video experience, while giving the labels a better controlled and more appealing place to sell advertising against their videos. But given the new abilities being granted to Warner with today’s deal — including the right to customize the page layout and sell its own advertising — Warner now seems to have even less of an incentive to join the VEVO initiative than it did before.

That may spell trouble for VEVO, because the site will really only be appealing if it can get all four labels on-board. Even if VEVO turns out to have a great viewing experience, that’s really only half the battle — users are more likely to go to a site that has the music video they want every time than they are to one that’s hit-or-miss. Of course, the site most people will turn to will be YouTube itself, which does feature videos from all four labels (MySpace Music does as well).

Update: A source with knowledge of VEVO negotiations says that Warner is currently in talks with VEVO over partnering with the music portal, so obviously today’s deal hasn’t ruled that out. Warner may have gotten some new perks today, but there are a few advantages it could see on VEVO regardless. For one, it could help attract new advertisers: UMG and Sony collectively have seen over 15 billion views on YouTube, but Warner is only at around 1 billion views overall — if Warner were to join VEVO it could be able to attract advertisers who are holding out for a larger online audience. VEVO’s portal may also be able to engage viewers more than YouTube (which would also be attractive for advertisers) though we won’t know that until the site actually launches.

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YouTube is trying to create more incentives for media partners to keep content on the video-hosting site. Today, YouTube announced the integration of Content ID, which is an advanced set of copyright policies and content management tools, with YouTube Insight, a free tool that enables anyone with a YouTube account to view detailed statistics about the videos that they upload. One way to look at this is that YouTube is trying to offer this extra data and analytics to keep partners on board.

According to YouTube, over 1,000 partners are using Content ID to reveal user-uploaded versions of their videos on YouTube. The partners can then determine whether they to want block, track or make money from them. YouTube Insight shows stats, video rankings, demographics, discovery sources and other metrics for videos, giving partners a broader picture of how viral the content is. For example, YouTube says Sony Music learned that the JK Wedding Entrance Dance video is the music label’s 8th most popular video on YouTube via the Content ID and YouTube mashup.

While the integration may not seem like a huge deal, the underlying reasons why YouTube is offering this package to media partners is significant. YouTube is trying to show media partners the benefits of keeping related content on YouTube by showering them with data. With YouTube Insight, it is showing them detailed analytics of how vast a video’s reach actually is (or isn’t). It’s unclear if media partners, such as Sony, will buy into this, but if YouTube can prove the benefits of the Content ID program in new ways, it should continue to grow and help YouTube turn a liability (copyright infringing videos) into an asset.

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The graph above is hilarious. It represents the way in which people rate videos on YouTube. As you can see, there are some 1-stars and a huge amount of 5-stars, and then basically no 2, 3, or 4 stars. As such, YouTube has a blog post today admitting that maybe its star system isn’t the best way to vote on videos.

Of course, anyone who has used YouTube for an extended period of time will already know this. And really, the same seems to be true of basically all 1 to 5 star crowd rating systems. It’s easy to know if a video (or anything) is good or bad, but how on Earth do you determine if it’s 2 star, 3 star, or 4 star-worthy? Everyone likely has their own opinions about what would constitute those ratings, and naturally, they’re all completely subjective.

Apple’s App Store faces a similar problem. And it also shares another issue that YouTube faces, most people are probably only going to vote if they absolutely love or hate an app (or a video). Hence, the 1 and 5 star usage.

YouTube asks in its post, “Would a thumbs up/thumbs down be more effective, or does favoriting do the trick of declaring your love for a video?” Yes, the two vote option (thumbs up/thumbs down) or the one vote option (favoriting) are both better methods because they’re more defined.

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While there are no shortage of video search engines out there, Clicker believes its offering is superior because it creates a structured database of programming, organizing shows by things like network, genre, and show name. This type of data not only allows for better search results, but it allows you to browse content without having to do text-based searches, which you probably won’t be doing when television and future web-enabled tablets start to serve up this content. Clicker already has a deal with Boxee.

The goal is really to be the best search engine for video content. Clicker will point you in the direction of whatever you are looking for (and will do embeds if they’re available), but won’t serve up the videos themselves. They will also delve into surfacing content not explicitly produced for television, but is still high quality web video content. But they don’t want to be YouTube, which is cluttered with user-generated content. Clicker is going for a different market.

Clicker will also allow users to edit and submit information about shows wiki-style.

As a search engine, the business model will obviously be search and display advertising. But eventually, there is a plan for Clicker Pro premium accounts, which the company envisions might be used for storing you favorite videos online, kind of like a DVR of sorts.

CEO Jim Lanzone (former CEO of Ask.com) and COO Paul Wehrley presented Clicker today on stage at TechCrunch50.

Expert Panel Q&A (paraphrased)

The experts: Don Dodge, Yossi Vardi, Ron Conway, George Zachary, and Jason Hirschhorn.

Q: Is this automated?

JL: Where content resides is always changing, a lot of it is automated, but we have to find stuff too.

Q: How do you monetize.

JL: We’re looking at the IMDb model. And eventually we’ll have a Pro version. And there’s a downstream model since we’ll be sending a lot of traffic.

Q: What do you think about Bing?

JL: That’s not fair. I think it’s fantastic for pushing beyond 10 blue links. A lot of it looks familiar though.

Q: How do you get the market penetration?

JL: Part of it is branding, some of it is distribution deals. We’ll also be very heavily SEO’d.

Q: What’s the business model?

JL: It’s mostly advertising, and we’ll get into Pro later, again. But IMDb makes $75 to $100 million in just what they do.

Q: Is this funded?

JL: Yes, earlier this year Benchmark and Redpoint – $8 million.

Q: Would you invest?

JH: This is a big problem for web video.
RC: Great product.
YV: I can never predict if products will succeed so I bet on people. Jim is a good one to bet on.

Video:

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Prior to Facebook, Yu has held positions at Yahoo (SVP Finance), YouTube (CFO) and, most recently, a short stint as a partner at Sequoia Capital. He is credited with being one of the main architects of the landmark $1.65 billion Google acquisition of YouTube in 2006.

Khosla Ventures has been in the news recently – they are raising another $1 billion to fund investments in a wide variety of startups (Internet, cleantech, mobile, fundamental science, etc.). A list of their investments is on their Crunchbase profile.

This is the second former Sequoia partner to join Khosla Ventures. Pierre Lamond joined the firm in March 2009.

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Here’s how it works: YouTube will be monitoring its site for videos that quickly go viral, and will then reach out to the content uploader with an Email invitation to “Enable Revenue Sharing” on that video. If you choose to enable the feature, then YouTube will place ads against the video and will give you a cut, which gets paid into your Google AdSense account. YouTube’s criteria for joining the program are vague — the site plans to look at the number of views a video gets, its virality, and compliance with the site’s Terms of Service, but it has offered no concrete numbers.

YouTube says that participants in the new program won’t get all the benefits of the normal Partner Program (you won’t be able to choose other videos you’d like to monetize, for example), so it encourages users to apply for the program here.

Tom Pickett, Director of Online Sales and Operations at YouTube, said on a conference call today that the move is meant to help expand the reach of the site’s partner program. The company will address not just new viral videos, but also videos on the site that have never been monetized but are extremely popular (Pickett says that many viral videos have quite lengthly lifespans — once you’re popular, you can stay popular for years). Pickett says that the company expects to “increase the number of partners dramatically” up into the tens of thousands of partners (up from “thousands). The revenue share will be the same as what applies to the general Partnership Program, with the majority of the revenue going to the content contributor.

YouTube spokesman Aaron Zamost says that advertisers have actually been requesting a feature like this for a while, as there have been a number of user-uploaded videos that were not being monetized at all, and in turn couldn’t have ads placed against them. Now, provided the content unloader decides to join the program, these advertisers will be able to take advantage of these viral videos.

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