YouTube Elevates Most Popular Users to Partners from the YouTube blog covers how YouTube is now starting a "user-partner" program on an invite-only basis, to allow those producing content on YouTube and growing a large audience to share in revenues that YouTube earns. From the post:

Participating user-partners will be treated as other content partners and will have the ability to control the monetization of the videos they create. Once they’ve selected a video to be monetized, we’ll place advertising adjacent to their content so participating user-partners can reap the rewards from their work.

So now that you’ve read this, you’re probably wondering, “How can I get in on the action?” This is only available to the initial participants. But if you create original content, have built and maintained an audience on YouTube, and think you might qualify for this program based on what’s above, you can express interest on our partnership lead form.

YouTube Starts Paying Star Users at NewTeeVee has some background on the move, and there’s discussion happening at Techmeme.

Related Topics: Google: YouTube & Video

About The Author: Danny Sullivan is editor-in-chief of Search Engine Land. He’s a widely cited authority on search engines and search marketing issues who has covered the space since 1996. Danny also oversees Search Engine Land’s SMX: Search Marketing Expo conference series. He maintains a personal blog called Daggle (and maintains his disclosures page there). He can be found on Facebook, Google + and microblogs on Twitter as @dannysullivan. See more articles by Danny Sullivan