Over a year and a half ago, YouTube launched a new Partner Program that allowed some of its most prolific and popular content owners to make some money from the content they contributed, inviting them to get a revenue share of ads placed against their videos. This was all well and good for YouTube’s cream of the crop, but let’s be honest — most of us don’t contribute all that regularly, and the vast majority of our videos don’t become popular, which means we couldn’t get into the program. What’s worse, even when one of your videos suddenly did go viral, if you weren’t already in the program there wasn’t anything you could do to reap the benefits. Today, that changes: YouTube is launching a new addition to its Partnership Program that will give anyone the chance to make some money when lightning strikes, even if it’s the first video they’ve ever uploaded.

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.

We recently broke the news that YouTube co-founder and CEO Chad Hurley had invested in the new U.S. Formula 1 Racing team USGPE (previously US F1). Now in a series of articles posted on Autosport.com, Hurley shares more details about the investment.

The most interesting article was this one, in which Hurley is quoted as saying he believes the new grand prix team can “do a YouTube” and become a huge success by doing things differently.

In June, Facebook became the fourth largest site in the world after only Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo sites. But how did it get there? Click through the slideshow above to see the advance of the Facebook Death Star across key markets (the U.S., UK, France, Italy, and Spain).

Each slide shows a snapshot in time, starting with January, 2008 to June or July, 2009. The charts are based on comScore data and show the relative reach (X-axis), usage (y-axis), and time spent (size of bubble) on various popular sites in each market over time. Facebook is represented by the blue sphere. You can see how it moves across the Web universe passing sites such as AOL, MySpace, and YouTube (overseas) and getting a larger and larger as it progresses.

As the most popular video portal in the world, it comes as little surprise that YouTube is also effectively the second most popular search engine, coming after only Google in overall search queries. With that in mind, it’s a bit surprising that the site hasn’t done a better job at featuring this ridiculously popular functionality — instead of placing the search box at the far left or right side of the screen, as most sites do, YouTube has instead tucked it a bit off center, embedded in its somewhat cluttered masthead. In light of this, YouTube has decided to totally revamp the design of the top of its homepage, and will be rolling out a new version today.

The new version has eliminated most of the clutter and color of the old design, in favor of something that’s unquestionably more Googleish. Before now, navigation buttons like “Home” and “Videos” were likely the first thing people looked at — now, there’s no question that the default action on the site is going to be search.

Yesterday I had an informal meeting with Best Buy executives at the Fuse Capital offices in Palo Alto (Fuse is running a new Best Buy venture fund) to discuss the CrunchPad. Best Buy and Fuze have been big supporters of the project, and we had a good discussion of our plans going forward.

I also ran into YouTube founder Chad Hurley at the Fuze offices, who was meeting with the Best Buy team along with the execs from the new U.S. Formula 1 Racing team USGPE (previously US F1).

Hurley is “the big investor” in USGPE said Best Buy Chief Marketing Officer Barry Judge, and it looks like Best Buy is also looking for ways to get involved in the project. There are also rumors that YouTube will sponsor the car.

USPGE, which was founded by Ken Anderson and Peter Windsor, has 20 employees, is slated to make its Grand Prix debut in 2010. The car is being produced in Charlotte, North Carolina and may be finished by October 2009.

Over the last few months, YouTube has made it clear that it’s keen on helping its premium content partners monetize as effectively as possible — and it’s obviously having some success doing it, with the number of monetized views increasing rapidly. Today the site is launching a new feature that will give those monetization rates another boost: YouTube Promoted Video campaigns will now be able to appear on a video’s ‘watch’ page, turning the product into what’s effectively an ‘AdSense for YouTube’.

For those that aren’t famililar with the terminology YouTube uses to identify its pages and advertising products, here’s what that means. Up until now Promoted Video campaigns have been primarily shown on search result pages — I might run a campaign with “guitar” as a keyword, and when someone did a search for that term, my video would show up as a promoted result.

The massive Google billboard campaign underway now to promote Google Apps is the best spoof opportunity since the comic book announcing Google Chrome last year (here was our effort). And the first ones are starting to roll in. Here’s the spoof, followed by the official version. Can you do better? We want to see it.

Spoof:

The conventional wisdom out there on Web video advertising is that most advertisers don’t want to risk being associated with user-generated videos (i.e., the vast bulk of videos on YouTube). It is only the professionally-produced stuff on portions of YouTube and Hulu and Blip.tv where the advertising dollars are going. This is the conventional wisdom because it is mostly true.

But YouTube wants to change advertiser’s minds (because the vast bulk of its videos are audience-produced, did we mention that?). So in a blog post today, YouTube trots out a told-ya-so case study about the “JK Wedding Entrance Video” (embedded below) that has been spreading around like crazy. Since it was posted on July 19, it has been watched more than 12 million times.

Mike Hudack, the founder of Blip.tv, just landed a major set of deals to expand the distribution of his Web video network. The biggest deal is with YouTube, which for the first time will allow Blip.tv to place its own ads in the YouTube player on behalf of the Web video creators who use Blip. Hudack is also announcing distribution deals with NBC Local Media for regular TV starting in New York City, Vimeo, and Roku set-top boxes. It is also expanding existing deals to show Blip videos on Verizon FIOS, Tivos, and Sony TVs with Ethernet jacks.

About 50,000 different shows have been uploaded to Blip, where video creators can then spread them across the Web, iTunes and set-top boxes. According to the company, Blip is doing 72 million video streams a month to a worldwide audience of 22 million people. Only 4 percent of those views are on Blip.tv itself.

Hell hath no fury like a music-artist-who-sees-his-own-music-video-removed-from-YouTube scorned. The video sharing service may be doing its best to keep copyrighted material off its website, but London-based artist Calvin Harris, who saw the music video of his ‘Ready For The Weekend – Original Mix’ being deleted from his own account over copyright claims, is not amused. The artist has been lashing out on his Twitter account this morning, and you’re advised to turn your eyes away if you object to foul language.

Harris’ strong words are directed mostly at the BPI, ‘the representative voice of the UK recorded music business’ according to the organization’s website, who apparently filed the complaint in this case.

YouTube has always given you the chance to show off how well your videos are doing, but only to a limited extent. Aside from a star rating, view count, and of course, the infamous comments section, there hasn’t been an easy way to share more meaningful data with your audience — something that can make it harder for content partners to attract advertisers on the site. Tonight, that changes: you’ll now be able to publicly share select pieces of information from YouTube Insight, the site’s powerful analytics tool.

YouTube is currently down for scheduled maintenance to enable the feature, but some videos are already beginning to display the data (you can see a screenshot below, taken from this video).

You’ll now be able to publicly display information related to your video’s performance in various geographical regions and demographics, as well as more thorough information about which sites are driving traffic to your content. Finally, there’s a nice graph that displays your video’s popularity over time. These new data-points have all been previously available though YouTube Insight to the video’s original uploader, but this is the first time they’ll be publicly shareable.

Yesterday, YouTube posted an update to its Biz Blog in which it detailed and attempted to dispel some of the oft-spoken myths about the world’s most popular video portal. The blogosphere’s reception to the post was generally skeptical, with a number of reporters complaining that it was overly vague and lacking any concrete numbers about YouTube’s monetization efforts. But it seems that everyone missed a few nuggets of gold in that post that actually reveal quite a bit about YouTube’s performance. Like the fact that the site is likely monetizing at least 12% of all videos streamed in the United States — a huge jump over the numbers that had previously been reported.

You see, a little math and some reading between the lines reveals that things actually are going quite well for YouTube, even if the site isn’t willing to explicitly say so. Up until now, YouTube’s standard line about its monetized views has been that it was selling ads against “hundreds of millions of views each month”. But the post yesterday had a subtle change: YouTube is now monetizing “hundreds of millions of views each week“. That one change is very significant, and given that the post was written by two members of YouTube’s PR team, you can be quite sure it was deliberately worded.

Microsoft’s YouTube clone Soapbox is officially shutting its doors, according to reports today. Soapbox, which was launched in 2006 as a hub for downloading and sharing user-generated videos, was never able to be a viable competitor to YouTube.

MSN corporate vice president and chief media and technology officer, Erik Jorgensen, said that Soapbox delivers less than 5 percent of the overall 480 million video streams worldwide on MSN Video each month. In June, MSN Video posted its best month ever, with 250 million streams. But this nothing compared to YouTube’s streams which top around 1.2 billion per day.

Pretty neat: a YouTube engineer is playing around with the addition of 3D viewing capabilities to web videos on the insanely popular video destination site, reports Search Engine Roundtable.

The news site’s Barry Schwartz discovered a recent thread on the YouTube help forum and found out an employee named Pete is experimenting with the 3D viewing feature on his 20% free fiddling time:

I’m the developer working on the stereoscopic player as a 20% project. It’s currently very early, hence the silly bugs like swapping the eyes for the anaglyph modes. A fix for this is in the works.

Judging by this screenshot taken by an IE6 user who was watching some videos on YouTube, it appears the Google company will be phasing out support for the browser shortly. I don’t have Internet Explorer 6 installed on my computer, so I can’t verify this first hand, but illogical it seems not and a simple Twitter search shows multiple people confirming the news. Heck, some are even downright ecstatic over the news.

The online video behemoth is pointing to ‘modern’ browsers like Google Chrome (twice on the same page even, unsurprisingly), Internet Explorer 8 and Firefox 3.5 as alternatives.

Following last weekend’s deadly riots in its western region of Xinjiang, China’s central government has taken all the usual steps to block citizens from accessing foreign web services: aside from crippling Internet service in general, the authorities have blocked Twitter, removed unapproved references to the violence from search engines and has now apparently moved to bar its citizens from accessing Facebook from most parts of Mainland China just now. Two weeks ago, the government had already blocked just about every Google service, including communication tools like Gmail, Google Apps and Google Talk.

Clippz, a fledgling video startup with offices in the UK and Princeton, NJ, offers a platform for mobile videos that eliminates the need for a carrier network. It’s a very basic service: it essentially lets you select your current mobile phone on its website and based on your selection it allows you to download the most fitting version of any mobile video on its platform to your computer. You can then ’sideload’ (transfer the data of) the video with the best quality for your mobile device directly onto the phone via USB, Bluetooth or simply by means of a swappable memory card.

This morning, Clippz dedicated a channel to material from the Obama Administration. Aptly named, ‘The White House’ channel offers mobile-optimized videos from the official White House YouTube channel for download, free of charge.

I don’t recall how the YouTube user Pruane2Forever, aka “Sexman”, came on my radar, but I definitely remember a few of his videos from a couple years ago. (Here’s a old favorite — Not Safe For Work.) Basically, it’s this kid who does movie and new media reviews that are (or at least used to be) unintentionally hilarious. These days, he apparently has quite the following on YouTube, as he has over 150 videos that range in popularity from tens of thousands of views to over a million.

One of his most popular ones was a video from 4 months ago in which he calls out rapper 50 Cent. Sexman wonders how 50 still has “street cred” after doing endorsements for Vitamin Water, makeup and dildos (I’m not kidding). “What else is he gonna do? 50 Cent diapers for your little gangsta?,” Sexman wonders at one point. He concludes that 50 Cent is “just a media whore!”

Well, 50 Cent has responded. Yesterday, the rapper posted a video alongside Sexman, who apparently flew from Canada to New York to meet up at the rapper’s request.

While not every tweak to YouTube’s system deserves a post, this one is pretty significant, though very straightforward as well. First, the 1GB file limit for YouTube videos has been doubled to 2GB; this is a boon to many users who have been uploading high definition content more than a few minutes long. Ten minutes of 1080p footage can easily exceed a gig, especially if you’ve been editing it and weren’t careful about re-encoding. A 2GB limit should soothe that particular pain.

Next, the update now allows for direct linking to HD streams, as well as easy embedding of same. While it wasn’t impossible before now to get an HD video by default on your page, or to link right to one, it required a little work. But now YouTube has apparently decided that they are ready for the bandwidth shock as thousands and thousands of users default to HD instead of SD — increasing the average amount of bits being sent by a huge amount.

It’s sad to see a company that we were all so excited about fade further into oblivion. Today Joost, one of the most anticipated startups in 2006/2007, is just an also ran in a sea of big online video sites like YouTube and Hulu. Today CEO Mike Volpi stepped down, the company is laying off most of staff, and refocusing the business to “white label online video platforms for media companies.”

Om has a good monday morning quarterback overview of why they failed, but to me it comes down to just a few things. They over funded ($45 million before they even launched) and they ignored the fact that users were quite willing to sacrifice quality in online video for the convenience of Flash in the browser. Joost waited until late last year to go all Flash – until then users had to use the downloadable Joost software and allow P2P streaming of shows. In the meantime there was no linking to Joost videos. YouTube and Hulu got all that social media and SEO juice that could have gone to Joost.

Founders Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis, who founded Skype and Kazaa, see the world in terms of P2P and downloadable clients. The joke about how everything looks like a nail if you’re a hammer is very true with Joost. But what worked with Kazaa and Skype a decade ago doesn’t work with online video in today’s world, obviously.