This week, WMG and YouTube struck a deal that will give WMG a large chunk of the revenue created around their videos – which was the issue when they broke the deal in December 2008. The partnership covers the full Warner catalogue and includes user-generated content containing WMG acts.

This is great news for anyone wanting to publish video on YouTube and use music by artists under contract with WMG: over are the times of heavy WMG policing and removing of audio tracks that were deemed “infringing”. This is also very relevant to ad producers since WMG music is now implicitly licensed for publication on YouTube.

The deal gives WMG special rights: it will sell advertising around its videos on YouTube itself rather than leaving it to YouTube. YouTube will get a share. To that end, WMG will be given a special high-quality video player by YouTube with advertising capabilities that are not available on the standard player. WMG can thus clutter the video with a lot more advertising. I wonder what that will mean for embedding the music videos on other sites?

Also, YouTube’s Content ID technology will allow them to claim and monetise the audio tracks of UCG content. I wonder what effect that will have on the videos – will there be an overlay with a link through to iTunes or Amazon for purchasing the records? That might be the least intrusive. Or will there be large banners of WMG advertisers around them? Not sure how that is going to pan out, but we will certainly experience it.

It is said that it will take until the end of the year for all WMG music videos to return to YouTube, which includes the time it takes YouTube to implement the premium video player and the time to upload the videos in the high quality format.

However, UCG doesn’t have to wait any longer – go and enjoy the new-found freedom to use WMG music again on YouTube!

The complete stats are listed in the YouTube blog post about the YouTube Generation.

One important outcome is that people consider brands that advertise on YouTube to be more current, innovative and dynamic. And 3 in 5 users say YouTube influences their purchase decisions.

All-excited, I went to YouTube to enjoy some shows. However, the first problem I had was that – at least here in Australia – the announced “Shows” tab was not available on the front page and there was no way to find the “Shows” or the “Movies”. Fortunately, the YouTube blog post also provided direct links, so I went there directly.

With new hope, I browsed the available shows and selected some to watch. I was, however, very disappointed. Most of the shows that I clicked on were not available in Australia. After some trial and error, I managed to watch “Astro Boy”, “Do you like Hitchcock”, and “Staffers”. I wasn’t able to access “Alf”, “The young and the restless”,”Star Treck”, “Beverley Hills 90210″, “MacGuyver”, “I dream of Jeannie”, “Dilbert” or “Bewitched”.

I would prefer if YouTube only exposed those videos that were actually available in Australia to us. What’s the point in pretending all this content is available, when it’s not? YouTube is no different in this respect to Hulu, which is virtually useless for an Australian.

YouTube is a large international site. Uploaded videos don’t easily rise above the general noise of the site.

If you are prepared to spend some money, there are ways in which videos can be lifted above the noise within YouTube. Particularly good candidates are the YouTube front page and search results pages, where a video will be exposed to many eyes and get a much better chance of being picked up and shared with friends, aka “going viral”.

YouTube Australia offers three different types of advertising on the front page: a masthead, an expandable video unit, and a video ad, each of which can be booked for a 24 hour period. The YouTube front page is localised, so your ads can be exposed to an Australian audience.

If you would like to target your audience further, you may want to consider advertising on search results pages. You can target age group, gender and interest areas of the searchers, thus reaching more valuable eyeballs.

An example of a campaign that has successfully used such an approach is posted on a recent AdAge article: advertsing pushed Geico’s “Numa Numa” video over 500K veiws on the first day, reaching more than 1.3M overall views by now.

There is a myth out there that a social video marketing campaign on YouTube – or more generally on social networks – can be done for free without spending any money on placement. The myth continues that merely publishing good content will automatically make it go viral. This simply is not true. Just because you don’t pay for the original placement, doesn’t mean your campaign can do without media buy expenditure.

There are strategies for exposing videos to more eyeballs – cheaper and more expensive ones. Advertising your social videos is one way – paying experts to execute a seeding strategy is another.