Recognising YouTube users for their creativity and their role in building YouTube is of the utmost importance to our team. That's why earlier this year we launched a pilot of the YouTube Partner Programme, our way of enabling some of the most popular and prolific original content creators within the YouTube community to earn money from their videos. These partners decide which of their videos they would like to generate revenue on YouTube, and in turn, they receive a portion of the revenue generated from ads that run next to those videos. Even in this limited release, the programme has been an amazing success – already, millions of video views each week are earning revenue for our partners.



But we're just getting warmed up. Today we're announcing that we are expanding the YouTube Partner Programme. Now, anyone living in the United States or Canada can apply to become a partner at www.youtube.com/partners. (We're looking forward to rolling out the program to additional international markets soon.)



We feel it's important to reward our most dedicated community members: those who are regularly uploading original content to YouTube. In evaluating applications, we will focus on the users who have built a significant audience on YouTube (as measured by video views, subscribers, etc.) and who consistently comply with the YouTube Terms of Use.



We previewed this new application process to a select group of users who previously expressed interest in becoming partners -- over 100 of these users have already been added to the program, such as tayzonday, hotforwords, apauledtv, and peteandbrian.







As always, our goal is to provide a forum for people to connect, inform and inspire others across the globe. We hope that by expanding the YouTube Partner Programme, more content creators will reap rewards from their work and be able to produce even more of the original videos that have made YouTube so successful.



The YouTube Team