YouTube Now Monetized With Affiliate Links To Amazon & iTunes

The Google Blog and the Ben’s Brother – Let Me Out music video on YouTube sports these two graphic buttons under the video, both seem to link to the respective sites using an affiliate link, which clearly shows Google is now monetizing YouTube as an affiliate (which they may have been doing before in some other type of way).

Here is a picture of the links:

My first thought was the same as ReadWriteWeb, that Google may be linking future videos that contain pirated music to Amazon and iTunes, thus monetizing pirated music. But right now, it appears Google is only linking these videos to Amazon and iTunes when the publisher of the video is the copyright holder of the video itself.

Google said the claim video method is the easiest way to get those iTunes and Amazon links. I assume the publishers share the revenue with Google, on some level. Google seems to be eager to expand this feature to other videos, possibly through music matching technology, similar to maybe the popular Shazam application. But right now, it is only available to U.S. users and specific publishers.

For more details, check out Techmeme.