Music Licensing: It's complicated. Let's face it. But today all of that is beside the point: we are happy to announce that Warner Music Group (WMG)'s artists are returning home to YouTube. Under this new, multi-year global agreement, you will be able to discover, watch and share Warner music on the site. The partnership covers the full Warner catalog and includes user-generated content containing WMG acts.

With Warner on board, we now have artists from all four of the major music labels and publishers together with hundreds of indie labels and publishers on our platform. Warner will also be able to sell their own ad inventory and will use our Content ID technology to claim and monetize user-generated videos uploaded to YouTube by Warner Music fans. The partnership is based on a revenue share generated from the ads on the videos, and this makes good business sense for everyone involved: artists and labels can make money from their videos and the YouTube community gets to enjoy them.

But enough talk...let's get back to the rock. Warner's videos will begin appearing on YouTube in the near future.

Posted by Chris Maxcy, Director of YouTube Partner Development

We announced last week that we now have over 1,000 partners using our content identification and management tools to control how and where their videos are distributed on YouTube. Every major U.S. network broadcaster, movie studio and music label is using Content ID to identify user-uploaded versions of their videos, and decide whether they to want block, track or make money from them. As Content ID is proving to be an effective way for media companies to control, promote and monetize their content on our site, we're always thinking about how we can make these tools even more valuable for content owners of all kinds.

Today, we're excited to integrate Content ID with YouTube Insight. Previously, when you claimed a video with Content ID, we were only able to show you basic information (like view counts and tags) associated with the video you claimed. But now, all the statistics and data we share directly with uploaders in YouTube Insight is available to Content ID partners too, making our content management tools more useful than ever — especially for partners whose claimed user videos generate lots of views for them. For example, using Insight with claimed content, Sony Music learned that the JK Wedding Entrance Dance video is currently the music label's 8th most popular video on YouTube.

In addition to rankings, you can also learn about demographics, discovery sources and other metrics for videos that you've claimed, and then compare them to your own uploads. Do the audience demographics of a claimed video differ from those of the official version? What websites or search terms drive the most traffic to user uploaded versions of your content? We think integrating Content ID and Insight can help answer questions like these and will be very helpful as you think about distributing, marketing and making money from your content online.

If you're a Content ID partner, you can find this new information in the Reporting section of your CMS (Content Management System) account.

Posted by Martin Landers, Insight Software Engineer, and Walter Lee, Content ID Product Manager

A few months ago, we posted about an amazing "website" that fully took advantage of the flexibility in design that video provides marketers. BooneOakley used YouTube features like annotations to build an interactive, video representation of a homepage for their business. Demian Brink, Strategic Director at BooneOakley, shared with us some of the lessons they learned from their website on YouTube.

It performs surprisingly well from an SEO perspective.

We were a bit worried that an all-video site was going to hurt our organic search results. To be fair, on search engines other than Google we’re underperforming. However, our organic search results on Google, which still holds a nearly 80% share of searches, are dramatically better than they used to be.

YouTube offers very good analytics tools.

From an analytics perspective, we basically threw caution into the wind in favor of a great creative idea. It wasn’t until after we launched the site that we discovered the fairly innocuous ‘Insight’ button listed under each video in the ‘My Videos’ section of our YouTube account.

If you’re familiar with Google Analytics, Insight offers many of the same features such as number of views, traffic source and geographic location of views. However, it also offers some extras tailored to video/social media. These extras include things like Community Engagement – a measure based on viewer ratings and comments received – and Hot Spots, which is a second-by-second measure of audience attention for each video. Thanks to Hot Spots, we know that the vast majority of our three minute ‘home page’ video has an audience attention level that is well above average vs. other YouTube videos of similar length. We also know the most engaging part of our video by far comes at 1:29. Check it out and you’ll see why.

Great content + portability + measurability = success.

Our agency was founded on the idea of creative leverage – that great content inspires buzz and creates value far beyond the media and production price tag. Frankly, mainstream adoption of social media has made doing what we’ve always done a lot easier. People love a good story, and if it is good enough, they share it. We created an entertaining story that highlighted a few key points about our company and then put it somewhere it could be found and easily shared with others. From there, the viewers did the rest of the work for us.

Posted by Demian Brink, Strategic Director, BooneOakley

As consumers become more and more technologically savvy, businesses and marketers have worked quickly to keep up. As a result, many companies are left questioning what they aren't doing that they should be, or what they should do next to stay in front of the right people, in the right place, at the right time, in an increasingly digital world.

To address some of these questions, we have partnered with The Wharton School to launch our Fast.Forward. Channel on YouTube, which highlights insightful perspectives from industry experts and academics on how marketers can stay ahead in the changing landscape. (You might have seen a similar site launched by our UK marketing team in partnership with London Business School earlier this year.)

In over 100 short videos on www.youtube.com/fastforward, industry and academic thought leaders — including Jerry Wind, Lauder Professor at The Wharton School; Nancy Hill, CEO of AAAA; and our very own CEO, Eric Schmidt — share their views and insights on how the marketing world has changed. Perhaps more importantly, the videos also take a look at the implications of those changes for marketers and consumers. These experts tackle topics ranging from the importance of innovation and insights, to the new definition of speed. On the flipside, we also have videos from interviews with everyday folks, where we learn about the roles advertising and online content play in their daily lives.

In addition to the library of videos, the brand channel offers a "barometer" gauging consumer confidence levels and links to free tools designed to help marketers understand the online world a little better, as well as information on the Future of Advertising. A Wharton-led, research-based project, the Future of Advertising aims to explore and address a number of the business and marketing challenges in the current "Advertising Reality", while developing new models and empirical generalizations for advertising.

And given that it is Advertising Week in NYC, we will be filming sessions throughout the week's events (as well as getting some behind the scenes footage) and posting the videos to the Events section of www.youtube.com/fastforward. So if you're interested in hearing what others really think about "advertising", if you want to check out what's happening at Advertising Week, or if you have your own opinion that you'd like to voice, check it out.

Posted by Cindy Goodrich, Google Business Marketing

Google Product Search recently began displaying YouTube video reviews in an effort to engage shoppers who increasingly use the web to help them figure out what to buy. With that in mind, we'd like to share some details about how to get your YouTube video reviews included on Product Search pages. While we can't guarantee that your videos will be selected, completing these steps will indicate that you'd like us to consider them during our periodic reviews for new content:

• When uploading a video, use the video's tags to identify the UPC, ISBN, brand and MPN information for the product related to that video. For example, for a Nintendo Wii gaming console, add "UPC: 045496880088", "MPN: RVLSWFSP" and "Brand:Nintendo" tags.

• If you're a Google Base merchant, add the "youtube" attribute to your data feed. For each product that has a related YouTube video review, set the attribute value to that video's YouTube video ID. The video ID appears in the video's YouTube URL as shown below: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ctuUrvReOIQ.

We look forward to seeing your work on Google Product Search!

Posted by Vivek Tata, Product Marketing Manager, Google Product Search

We recently reached an important milestone: we now have over 1,000 content owners using our content identification and management tools, including every major U.S. network broadcaster, movie studio, and record label. With over 1 million reference files (over 100,000 hours of material), our Content ID database is among the most comprehensive in the world. This growth reflects both our innovative approach and our serious commitment to working with rights holders to address some of the most difficult technical and legal problems on the Internet.

While we're excited about our progress, we still have work to do. Global rights management is very complicated. For example, what do you do with a music video that has different owners in different countries? What if a movie studio is OK with mash-up videos that incorporate its content, but only if a small part is used? Our goal is to build a scalable, automated system that understands relationships between rights holders, and gives content owners the ability to track all rights associated with any piece of content on YouTube anywhere on the planet. Believe it or not, matching videos and audio files is actually the easy part. The hard part is figuring out what to do with the video once we've identified a rights holder's content in it.

In the past year, we've launched several features for Content ID that address this challenge and provide our partners even more flexibility in the choices they make:

• Shared ownership: Many times a piece of content is owned by different rights holders in different territories. Content ID allows multiple rights holders to control the same piece of content, but only in territories where they own it. So one rights holder could choose to block a given video in the U.S., while another might monetize it in the U.K. at the exact same time. We can also track partial ownership, so rights holders that own a fractional share of a composition can also use Content ID.

• Length of match: Sometimes rights holders encourage fans to upload clips of their content, so we allow them to set different policies depending on the length of the match. For example, a rights holder might allow and monetize a video that uses less than 3 minutes of its content, while blocking any video that contains more.

• Proportion matched: Rights holders often have different attitudes with respect to creative works that incorporate, rather than merely duplicate, their content. Content ID lets rights holders provide for fair uses of their content by letting them create different policies depending on the proportion of a claimed video that contains their work, or the absolute length of the clip used.

• Audio vs. video match: Content ID also distinguishes between audio and video content. So, for example, the owner of a sound recording can claim only the audio in a user's video, while a movie studio can claim both the audio and visual portions.

Partners can combine these rules to create claiming policies that meet their real-world licensing demands. We'll continue to lead the charge in helping rights holders control their content online, by listening to our partners and developing for them the tools that they need.

Posted by Kyle Harrison, Senior Product Manager

We've been co-hosting a webinar series with Effie Worldwide that explores award-winning campaigns (like Rolling Rock's and Stride's) that used video and social media to generate strong marketplace results. Today we invite to you register for the third installment in this four-part series, which will take place on September 30, 2009 at 11 am PT.

During the webinar, you'll hear from the agencies and marketers who executed three Effie Award-winning campaigns: Frito-Lay's VP of Marketing and the President of Juniper Park will discuss insights from their SunChips "Solar Launch" campaign; The Marketing Arm and AT&T will take us through the "World's Loudest Pep Rally"; and DDB Los Angeles's Director of Online and Digital will share lessons from Activision's "Call of Duty 4 World Leaders" campaign. The presenters for each of the three case studies will share how they came up with their ideas, brought them to life, and achieved results. As always, they'll be happy to take questions from the audience.

The entire series is free and open to the public. (You can register here.) We hope you will find it both educational and useful in thinking about your own clients and brands. You can also check out the Effie World Channel on YouTube, where an on-demand version will be posted. Last month's live broadcast is already available for replay.

Posted by Kristin Kovner, Industry Marketing Manager

As engineers on the YouTube Insight team, we're constantly thinking about how we can better visualize YouTube data for our users, partners, and advertisers. Today we're releasing three new features for our analytics tool that hopefully give you more sophisticated, useful, and cool ways of using Insight so you can better serve and understand your audience.

• Discovery over time. One of the very first features we launched in Insight was the ability to track a video's view count and popularity over time. A few weeks later, we launched a Discovery section that shows you how viewers found your videos. With this update, we've combined these two features into a nifty graph that illustrates how people discovered your video over time. Playing around with dates and sources of views (like external links or YouTube searches) will change the graph, and make it easier for you to see how search, related videos, embeds, and other areas of YouTube drive viewership.
  

• Views from mobile devices. As more and more people use smart phones, the number of views and uploads we get from mobile devices has exploded: we get tens of millions of views every day from mobile phones, and since the beginning of the year YouTube uploads from phones have jumped 1700%. Mobile views are an increasing percentage of total views, so we've added "Mobile Devices" to the Discovery section of Insight to show you views of your videos that come from either mobile phones or platforms that use our APIs.

• Views from subscribers. NigaHiga recently surpassed Fred to become the most-subscribed channel on YouTube (1,466,493 subscribers and counting). But how important are subscriptions in driving viewership? Which subscription modules work best? This new feature lets you drill down into views from the homepage subscriptions module, the subscriptions page, and subscription email sent to users. We've only started including subscription views as of a week ago -- you won't be able to see these stats for views before September 2009 -- but we think this could be one of the more useful Discovery metrics for our community as they explore how early views via subscriptions can help build an audience for new videos.

We'll be releasing more fun features soon so stay tuned.

Posted by Uwe Maurer and Mathijs Vogelzang, Software Engineers

It's the end of the summer, and we're thinking about barbecues and the first day of school... not taxes. But Kathy Collins, H&R Block's Vice President of Marketing Communications and Brand Management and VP of Marketing for Retail Tax, says finances are a business for all seasons. We recently had the opportunity to ask Ms. Collins how she's using social media and video in her campaigns, how she's measuring success, and what it's like to make taxes engaging year-round.

1. How are you thinking about social media and video?

In the past we’ve used video mostly for user-generated contests or promotions. As we continue to evolve our participation in social media, we realize that there is a big opportunity for us to create simple, educational videos that could reach consumers where they are, by providing an explanation for even the most complex tax situations on YouTube. We always remember, however, that it’s a fine line we walk between being entertaining yet informative. After all, it’s peoples’ financial lives we hold in the balance. We present tax and financial information to our YouTube audiences in a ‘human,’ voice, not corporate speak.

2. H&R Block has seasonality built into its marketing cycle. How does this affect how you think about your presence during Tax Time and year round?

Although tax preparation is a seasonal 'event,' life does happen outside of tax season! Think about it - nearly every event in one’s day-to-day life has a tax implication, whether it’s getting married, having a baby, buying a house, or going back to school. Therefore, we need to be available for our clients when – and where - they need us, whether that's in or out of the traditional "season." We will provide consistent and continuous year-round tax expertise through a number of media channels such as Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, and our own community site.

3. The "Don't Miss It" Game used YouTube Annotations, a new feature, in a very innovative way. Where did you come up with the idea?

We work with a number of agencies to develop creative formats from which we can connect with consumers. One of our agency partners actually brought this idea to us. We loved it because it allowed us to provide tax expertise in a fun and interactive way. We are always looking for the most innovative ways to reach our current and potential clients, while at the same time, showcasing our tax expertise.

4. How are you defining "success" for your campaigns?

Success is a long-term strategy, not a one year marketing campaign. We look at longer term measures such as brand awareness and brand attributes, positive word-of-mouth, and increased customer retention. It's all about making a connection with our consumers, interacting and engaging with them. The emotional connection is critical. We continue to learn, and redefine success and move the conversation from a corporate monologue to a customer dialogue. Last year, we did a pilot program where we asked 10 tax pros to answer tax questions on Yahoo Answers, when they weren’t doing their day job. Those 10 tax pros answered nearly 7,000 questions, within a 4 month period. The success of this program showed us that there is huge appetite for answers, we just need to be there to provide the expertise.

5. What's your favorite YouTube video?

Sappy as it is, I still love the PS22 Chorus singing Landslide.

H&R Block's "Don't Miss It" Game used YouTube Annotations to engage the community.

Posted by Kristin Kovner, YouTube Industry Marketing

Catch up on essential news and videos.

1. Healthcare heats up YouTube
The healthcare debate was one of the hottest news topics this summer, and Americans turned to YouTube to voice their discontent or approval with the White House's proposed plan for reform. Watch the videos from healthcare townhalls across the country to get a firsthand dose of the visceral emotion sparked by the debate. For videos and more details, click here and here.

2. Nigahiga in the lead
First, he surpassed Fred for the distinction of having the most subscribers of all time on YouTube; then he uploaded "Ninja Melk," a 25-minute ninja flick that garnered nearly 2 million views. So what's the secret to Nigahiga's uber-popularity? "My strategy is to always change up the type of video, that way my subscribers never know what they're in for," Ryan Higa told us. "I try to upload at least once a week, but some videos take much longer to create than others. [I] get the word out about my videos through Twitter, Myspace, [YouTube] subscriptions, and, best of all, people spreading the word."

3. The Guild's first music video
With the geek-tastic music video "Do You Wanna Date My Avatar?", directed by Jed Whedon, award-winning online series The Guild branched into a new form. This catchy video premiered at Comic Con in July and got the Internet in a tizzy once it hit YouTube: over 3 million people saw it, it became a trending topic on Twitter, and did some damage on the iTunes video chart. So if you didn't already have a crush on Guild writer and actress Felicia Day, you will now. You might even want to date her -- but, alas, her avatar will have to do.

4. Amazing stop-motion LEGO video
This tribute to classic video games by unsigned Swedish act rymdreglage took 1,500 hours to create, but the effort clearly paid off: "8-bit trip" was one of a few viral sensations to dominate YouTube in August.

5. Guy Catches Laptop With His Butt
Another video that will make you rub your eyes in disbelief, this ad for computer manufacturer MSI makes the point that its laptops are so slim, that...well, you can probably guess the rest judging from the video's title. A clever parody of similar viral marketing videos (such as Levi's "Guys backflip into jeans"), this one is essential for watercooler chatter.

Posted by Mia Quagliarello, Community Manager

For the past several months, YouTube users in the UK have been restricted from viewing premium music videos on the site as we worked to negotiate an agreement with the leading music rights collection society in the UK, the PRS for Music. We're happy to announce today that we have reached a deal with the PRS for Music and so premium music is returning to YouTube in the UK. Both the PRS for Music and YouTube have worked hard to produce a deal that is a good for everyone involved, including the YouTube community, music fans, the record labels, YouTube, and the songwriters and composers the PRS for Music represents. In the coming days, premium music videos will begin to come back to our UK users, and our UK site intends to celebrate this with a series of guest editorships from some of the foremost artists and magazine shows on YouTube.

We know it hasn't been easy for our British users who love music, but today we're pleased to say: "Let the music play on!"

Posted by Jamie Dolling, Community Manager, YouTube UK, recently watched "Facebook, Twitter Revolutionizing How Parents Stalk Their College-Aged Kids."

Today, the DoubleClick Rich Media team announced a call for entries to their annual Digital Movie Advertising Creative Showcase awards program. This is the only awards program dedicated to showcasing the best creative in interactive movie advertising.

Movie marketers and creative agencies are invited to submit their work for consideration. New to the awards this year is a "YouTube Creative Award." Any home entertainment or theatrical movie campaign that included YouTube in its execution is eligible. For the campaigns of theatrical or home video releases, whether they included a YouTube homepage ad, brand channel, or an original video that engaged YouTube users, it's all good: the event rewards creativity and innovation in the entire rich media and video space. The deadline for entries is Thursday, September 17th.

In addition to the YouTube Creative Award, the program supports three more categories: Theatrical Release Rich Media Display Ad(s), Home Entertainment Rich Media Display Ad(s), and Multi-Channel Cross Media Campaign.

The winners of each category will receive recognition by their industry peers, the opportunity to present to a live audience at the Director's Guild of America in Los Angeles, inclusion in the event's video reel, two award trophies (one each for the movie studio and creative agency) and two Flip Mino mini digital camcorders!

To learn more, or to submit an entry, please visit the Digital Movie Advertising Creative Showcase website.

Posted by Sally Cole, Industry Marketing Manager