Exciting new things are happening in YouTube-land.

The company has just announced that it has formed a new, jointly-owned site from the YouTube and Universal Music Group called Vevo.

With a launch coming soon, Vevo will work in conjunction with YouTube as a “new VEVO channel through a special VEVO branded embedded player,” says AllThingsD.

Peter Kafka states that this is a clearly a win-win for the two companies:

YouTube, which dominates the market for Web video but can only sell ads against a small portion of the clips it shows, gets to hang on to valuable, advertiser-friendly inventory.

Universal gets its best shot at make money from something other than music sales, which it desperately needs to do. I’m also assuming that it gets a large chunk of cash upfront: The press release says the two companies will share ad revenue, but I’d be shocked if UMG CEO Doug Morris wasn’t able to wrangle a significant advance from Google. . . .

The deal is also an important signal to other content providers YouTube would like to do business with: Give us your best stuff, and we’ll cut you a special deal.

It’s going to be fun to watch this evolve. It could be a juggernaut, or a dud, depending on how the two companies handle it.

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