YouTube To Share Revenues With Popular Users

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.