According to online analytics company comScore, Americans watched 37 billion online videos on sites like YouTube, Yahoo and Facebook in April. In total, 181 million U.S. Internet users watched an average of 1,307 minutes of online videos last month. Those numbers are virtually unchanged from last month, but one area that has seen pretty spectacular growth over the last few month is online video advertising. According to comScore, U.S. Internet users watched almost 9.5 billion video ads last month. That’s about 60 ads per viewer. What makes this number even more astonishing is that it was only in March of this year that the number of video ads topped 8 billion for the first time.

Overall, the number of overall video views and the number of minutes they watch online video has remained pretty stable. There are some small changes at the bottom of comScore’s top 10, with Amazon making a reappearance in seventh position with 30 million viewers and Turner Digital dropping out of the list. Google’s sites, of course, continue to dominate the charts with 158 billion viewers, followed by Yahoo (53 billion) and VEVO (49 billion).

Facebook, which is obviously having its day in the sun today, saw the number of video viewers on its site drop a bit from 45 million to 44 million, but in return, those viewers stuck around for 27 minutes now instead of just 21.3 minutes last month and also watched more videos per viewer than the month before (264 million).

As for video ads, Hulu leads the pack here with 1.6 billion ads streamed last month (though that’s down quite a bit from 1.75 billion the month before). Google is a close second with 1.3 billion ads delivered, followed by BrightRoll and video ad exchange Adap.tv.

With 48.6 ads per viewer, Hulu, also delivered a higher frequency of ads than any other service. YouTube, for example, only showed its average viewer 17.7 ads.

In total, video ads reached almost 52% of U.S. Internet users.

Last year, YouTube announced the ability for its music partners to begin selling merchandise, digital downloads and event tickets through a new YouTube feature called the Merch Store. Today, the company is expanding that effort and is making the option available to all YouTube partners, not just musicians.

Also rolling out today, is a new merchandise provider, which will help beef up YouTube video producers’ Merch Store offerings: CafePress.

With the initial rollout of the Merch Store in October 2011, YouTube announced partnerships with a number of companies, including Topspin for merchandise sales, concert tickets and experiences, Songkick for concert tickets, plus iTunes and Amazon for music downloads. Google Play is also now involved, of course.

The Merch Store feature was gradually rolled out to YouTube music partners following the announcement, and YouTube then began taking a small, undisclosed cut of merchandise sales. Artists, however, see the same revenue no matter if they went through the Merch Store or through the affiliate on other channels, YouTube said. That same deal holds true today.

Starting now, and again, gradually rolling out over the next few months, the same Merch Store feature will arrive on YouTube partners’ channel pages under a new tab called “Store.” This will become available to partners in good standing, YouTube says – meaning those whose AdSense accounts are properly linked to their YouTube accounts.

You can see the Merch Store live now on the following channels:  Pomplamoose, Geek & Sundry and DeStorm.

Google TV, the company’s first serious foray into the living room, hasn’t exactly set the world on fire. That doesn’t mean Google has given up, though. Far from it. While there hasn’t been much news about Google TV itself lately, the YouTube app for Google TV is getting an update today. Google says that its developers have “been working like it’s a 24/7 hackathon over here to bring all of YouTube to your Google TV.” With this update, the developers have added recommendations, a Google+ button and the ability to search for channels. The new version now also handles suddenly drops in bandwidth more gracefully.

For users who previously had to suffer from constantly buffering video, this update should be a welcome relief. YouTube for Google TV now automatically detects when there is suddenly less bandwidth available for it and switched to a lower resolution instead of rebuffing.

Given that Google is building Google+ into each one of its products, it doesn’t come as a surprise that this app is getting some Google+ love, too. You can now +1 videos from the app, though it doesn’t look like you can actually share videos from the app (+1′s appear on your profile and in search results, but not in your main Google+ stream).

Adding recommendations and channel search to the app is a logical next step for Google. YouTube put a very strong emphasis on channels in the latest version of its desktop service, so making these channels easier to find on the TV makes sense.

YouTube Live, Google’s live streaming platform, celebrated its first birthday over the weekend. To mark this event, YouTube is adding a number of new features to Live today. Most of these (new production software, improved publishing flows and real-time analytics) are mostly of interest to video producers. The most important new feature, though, is the addition of pay-per-view as a monetization option for all publishers. Until now, pay-per-view was only an option for select publishers who worked directly with Google.

Now, YouTube publishers in the U.S., Canada, France, Japan and Great Britain who have access to YouTube Live can set up this service in a few minutes and start monetizing their events this way. Publishers, of course, can also chooseto display Google ads as well. Publishers will now also be able to see how many users are watching a live stream in real time.

It’s worth noting that Ustream and a number of other live streaming services have offered pay-per-view as an option for a while now.

Google today also announced that it will make a special YouTube Live version of Wirecast, a professional webcasting solution that generally retails for around $449, available to all of its partners. With this, YouTube’s partners should be able to produce more live events and make them look more professional. Wirecast for YouTube Live will enable producers to easily capture and switch between different sources and add live effects and overlays to their videos.

Sadly, though, this first anniversary doesn’t mark the full rollout of YouTube Live to all publishers. As YouTube’s partner product manager Varun Talwar notes, the team “developed these features with the expectation many more of you will eventually use YouTube Live, and like we said last year, this process takes time to roll out broadly.”

Last September, YouTube began offering new tools that allowed users to convert their uploaded 2D videos into 3D videos with just a click. That feature, which has been in beta testing, was available only to YouTube creators at the time. Today, YouTube is rolling out the beta to all of YouTube’s users – creators and viewers alike – by offering the option to automatically convert short-form videos that were uploaded in 1080p to 3D.

In other words, viewers no longer have to wait on YouTube creators to convert their videos into 3D – you can now do it yourself.

The new 3D option will be available in the “Quality” settings of the uploaded video (look for the gear icon).

YouTube’s system doesn’t involve traditional 3D video capturing techniques using two simultaneously captured videos, of course. It’s a software hack that’s meant to convert regular 2D video into 3D using a number of techniques, which are described in more detail on YouTube’s blog.

For example, the technology uses a combination of video characteristics like color, spatial layout, and motion to estimate depth. It then uses machine learning processes to improve depth estimations as the number of 3D videos on YouTube increase.

The end result is a 3D video, which, while not as good as a video that was shot in true 3D, is still good enough to work…if you feel like popping silly glasses on your face and loading up some YouTube, that is.

The work needed on the backend to make something like this is possible is impressive – YouTube talks of the cloud computing scalability involved here – but the project was initially kicked off in the hopes that the 3D would become the next big video trend for casual video viewing. Whether that’s actually the case remains to be seen. It’s one thing to watch an award-winning movie like “Avatar,” it’s quite another to think, “wow, I really need to see that kitten in 3D.”

Well, maybe I’m wrong. Maybe 3D kitten videos are the future.

We’ll know more after the feature has been live across YouTube for some time. Adoption statistics, assuming they’re ever revealed, won’t lie.

One-hundred million views, 100 thousand subscribers, and many of the world’s biggest brands still don’t have a suite of tools for customizing their YouTube channels. That changes today as social marketing platform Buddy Media begins letting its big brand clients deck out their YouTube channels with stylized video players and interactive apps. Twitter feeds, e-commerce storefronts, quizzes, linked banners, photo galleries and more can all be hosted on a channel.

The same way brands doubled down on Facebook Page marketing once they could host apps, I think we’re about to see a major uptick in the time and money they spend manicuring their YouTube channels. Too many captive eyeballs are going to waste.

[Update:  Several other social marketing platforms also have YouTube customization capabilities. thismoment provides media galleries, flash, conversation display, user generated content uploads, commerce, language localization, and a full-blown API layer. Meanwhile, Wildfire last week began to offer custom contests. While Buddy Media is not the first to enter the space, its massive client base and funding make it a trendsetter. Its heavier YouTube integrations alongside those of other platforms will spur more brands to prioritize YouTube marketing.]

The recent increase in marketing platform interest in YouTube comes from the video site’s astounding growth in popularity. As of January it powered 4 billion video views a day, up from 3 billion per day in May 2011. Highly desired younger demographics are frequent viewers, wider broadband access is making online video easier to consume, and time that used to be spent watching television commercials is moving online. Brands must be spending at least $50,000 on YouTube advertising to add a customizable tab to their channels (or sometimes as much as $250,000 or even $400,000 for advanced functionality). And Smart brands don’t want to just have a YouTube channel, they want the best one.

Buddy Media aims to give it to them. It already handles marketing on Facebook and other platforms for 600 of the world’s biggest brands, and now is building out its YouTube integration. Previously, clients could publish and manage videos and playlists, but until now their YouTube channels couldn’t host apps.

Now they can pimp out their video player with custom wrappers, buttons, and carousels of videos to play next. They can display RSS feeds of Twitter or other content, show product galleries that populate offsite shopping carts, and let users vote and see the results instantly. Eventually I expect full-fledged branded games to appear on YouTube channels, and Buddy Media to offer contests like its competitors.

Brands still need their in-house teams or agencies to create custom backgrounds for their channels. I think Buddy Media would be wise to add drag-and-drop background templates to its suite of services. Buddy Media may be the one of the first to offer a suite of YouTube channel apps beyond contests, but I bet competitors will quickly move deeper into the space. Meanwhile, Twitter and Google+ pages still don’t support apps, and are going to start looking static to compared to those on YouTube and Facebook.

By allowing brands more customization flexibility, YouTube will encourage those brands to advertise for and send traffic to their channels. This meshes well with yesterday’s news that YouTube is now letting brands sponsor entire channels with display, overlay, and pre-roll ads. Brand marketing’s not about broadcasting a message anymore, it’s about engagement, and YouTube’s about to get a lot more engaging.

It’s a bit surprising to hear Jonathan Klein talk about photo sharing on the Internet. As co-founder and CEO of stock photo agency Getty Images, he is focused on protecting the photographs that belong to his company — and making sure that Getty and its affiliated photographers get paid.

But he hasn’t eliminated the ability to right-click on a Getty photo and save it to your computer. Anyone with the most basic of Photoshop skills could easily get rid of the Getty watermark within minutes. That’s because he’s not concerned about people playing with Getty photos, teenagers using them for school projects, and folks putting them up on their personal blogs — or, at the moment, even Pinterest.

So when does Getty snap into action? The moment that a website starts running ads alongside those images. As Klein told me in the interview embedded above:

“We’re comfortable with people using our images to build traffic. The point in time when they have a business model, they have to have some sort of license.”

That is why Pinterest has a big problem on its hands at the moment. The site has certainly built immense traffic by allowing people to share and collect as many photos as they want — many of which inevitably don’t belong to them, in the legal sense. And as Fortune’s Jessi Hempel reported today, each week the site has to write a big check to keep its servers running to handle its ever-increasing visitor load. This, of course, means that making its own money is an increasingly big priority for Pinterest — and the company has just hired Tim Kendall, a big-name monetization executive, to that end.

But: The second that Pinterest starts making money of its own, intellectual property owners such as Getty Images will have the right to ask that Pinterest pay up — or start deleting pinboards.

It’s not a completely unprecedented problem, but it is a very expensive one. Some people say it’s why Tumblr has still not started to make real money yet. It took YouTube years to even come close to making self-sustaining revenue — and that is in the arms of a ridiculously profitable parent company, Google. When you are a popular online repository for user-generated content, policing what media belongs to whom can literally be a full-time job for entire teams of people. That does not come cheap.

And, perhaps most importantly, your users really don’t like it when you take down the content they’ve shared. Pinterest has built up a ton of goodwill with its community, but nowadays on the web even the most enthusiastic of users can be very fickle.

Now, this is certainly a problem that Pinterest is aware of. And with $37.5 million in funding from some of the Valley’s savviest investors, they are no doubt working on a smart solution. If they come up with one, it will be great news for Pinterest and scores of other innovative sharing-based web companies that would be born in its wake. But for right now, all those question marks surrounding Pinterest’s copyright situation are poised to turn into very big problems — once dollar signs enter the equation.

Remember that big redesign YouTube launched in December? Granted, you’ve probably seen it several times today already, but in case not, YouTube redesigned its homepage so that its overall look would reflect the design changes that have been rolled out across Google products. More specifically, the update brought tighter integration with Google+, more personalized video discovery and viewing, and a whole mess of updates to channels.

The redesign focused on filtering channels in a way that would enable users to watch sets of related videos in one sitting, starting with a random video that they happen to love, and going on to discover and follow content from that particular curator, and video jockeys like them. The idea was to be able to easily aggregate all those followed channels on a personalized homepage that constantly updates with videos that you’ll actually want to watch.

Based on the results YouTube shared today, it thinks the redesign is having the desired effect, as daily unique visits to channels have increased by 60 percent and daily net subscriptions are up 50 percent since December.

With channel engagement and subscribing on the up and up, YouTube says that its ready to take the next step in the redesign process it began in December. This means that all channels, across the site, are going to be updated to the new layout, or one of four templates customized to their creators.

As you may remember, those four templates include:

• The Blogger template: A featured video, a reverse chronological list of videos from 1 playlist of your choosing, playlists, and other Channels.
• The Creator template: A featured video, featured playlists, and other Channels.
• The Network template: A featured video and featured Channels
• The Everything template: A featured video, featured playlists, and featured Channels

YouTube is also adding some new features that it believes will help users stay more engaged with channels, including the “Channel Feed,” which will display all videos uploaded to a particular channel, as well as “playlists and Liked videos across YouTube.”

The goal, the company says, is to “make it clear what you’ll get if you subscribe,” because, once you do subscribe, the feed will be published to your homepage so that you can stay on top of all the new content coming out of your favorite channels.

YouTube also said that it has incorporated a number of feature requests from users, including the ability to feature content more prominently, resulting in a “Featured Tab” with updated templates and search; making Favorites more accessible, which the team has made a customizable part of each channel; and a simple way to add Google+ profiles to channels.

YouTube creators can check out tips on sprucing up channels here, and YouTube’s blog post on the announcement here.

Updating…

Last month, Google began showing the new versions of Google TV at CES, giving the press a taste of what was in store. One particular panel discussing Google TV’s new capabilities led Rupert Murdoch to take to Twitter, bemoaning the pirating ways of the search behemoth. Forbes has the backstory here. Google TV posted on its Facebook page yesterday, saying that it has some big announcements in store for Monday.

Today, it announced that it is upgrading the YouTube experience on Google TV with a new, revamped app. The YouTube app for Google TV is available for download on the Android Marketplace. The initial drive behind Google TV was to create a user experience that seamlessly blends web video with the boob tube, to change the way consumers interact with TV, but the first Google TV fell flat. Matt Burns reviewed the version, saying that, while it’s getting closer, it still has a long, long way to go.

In its announcement today, Google is promising some “big improvements” to its new YouTube app, among them that navigation is smoother and faster, along with some much-needed additions to its UX, like the new “Discover” feature, which basically just brings YouTube channel categories to Google TV, enhancing their browse-ability within the app. They’ve also brought its new channel pages, enabling users to navigate playlists and videos and subscribe to favorites.

Google says that users can also now view related videos from the same user by pressing the up and down arrows on their remote controls, or to find the “Info screen” to leave a thumbs up, add to your playlists, or to leave a comment.

The new app looks good, and this certainly stands to improve the YouTube experience on Google TV, though it’s certainly not the “big announcement” that many were hoping for. We’ll be keeping our ears out in the event that there’s more Google TV news in store for Monday.

Google’s video-sharing property YouTube now sees 4 billion video views per day. That’s a 25% increase over the past eight months, the company told Reuters in a report released this morning. There’s now approximately 60 hours of video uploaded to the site every minute, compared with roughly 48 hours uploaded in May.

The last time YouTube released this data was in May 2011, when the company was celebrating its sixth birthday. At the time, YouTube was seeing 3 billion views per day, an increase of 50% over the past 12 months. That’s the equivalent of every U.S. resident watching at least nine videos per day, the company explained at the time to give the figure some impact.

Previously, YouTube hit the 2 billion views per day mark in May 2010, which the company noted was “nearly double the prime-time audience of all three major U.S. television networks combined.” And the site had passed 1 billion views a day in October 2009. However, as Jason Kincaid noted then, that number was likely a bit lower than the actual figure. It had previously been reported that the site had reached 1.2 billion views a day the previous June.

So it could be that YouTube reached this latest milestone of 4 billion views per day several weeks (or even months) earlier, but has just now chosen to share the information publicly.

Reuters notes that most of the 4 billion videos viewed on YouTube today don’t make money. Only 3 billion YouTube videos a week are being monetized, the company says. YouTube is also now focusing on content deals with media partners as of late. It just added Reuters TV (which is likely how they got to this data first) as one of what’s now 100 original programming deals.

Update: Google confirmed the statistics which it gave to (new media partner) Reuters this morning, via a company blog post. As always, YouTube is having fun with the numbers, noting “you’re uploading one hour of video every second!” (Whoa).

YouTube also launched a fun site called onehourpersecond.com, which shows an interactive collection of what happens in a YouTube second. A sample is below:

YouTube may be best known for its viral sensations, lawn gnomes, and feline shenanigans, but the site’s massive collection of content has given rise to plenty of more benevolent — and, some might say important — trends.

Like helping non-profits including charity:water harness the power of video to connect to millions of viewers. And serving up lectures from major universities, opening the doors of learning to remote villages hundreds of miles away from the nearest school. In short, YouTube has done a lot of good so far. And it’s hoping to do a lot more.

Hunter Walk, a long-time Director of Product Management at Google who has steered YouTube’s product side for years, recently decided that he wanted to spearhead YouTube’s social good efforts. Granted, the role he wanted didn’t exactly exist yet, but he managed to convince YouTube chief Salar Kamangar to let him create it.

Walks’s new, self-appointed mission: Bake ‘good’ into any part of YouTube he can.

He explains that plenty of YouTubers have worked on projects to support social good efforts in the past, but there’s never been any consolidated effort to do so. So these days he wanders the company’s halls, asking people if they’d be interested in launching an expedited support queue for non-profits, or a new white-list feature for schools. He says he rarely gets turned down — adding that YouTubers tend to view it as pro bono work, and they’re generally happy to help.

Walk says that he views YouTube’s relationship with ‘good’ as supported by three main pillars: Causes & Non Profits; Education; and, finally, Activisim and Free Expression.

YouTube’s special relationship with non-profits goes back to 2007, when the site began giving them free access to features typically reserved for premium content partners. These include videos that are longer than fifteen minutes in length and the ability to include a special Donate button that lets users contribute money. Non-profits also have the unique ability to include links to external sites using YouTube’s annotations feature (which they can use to drive people to a petition or ‘further information’ page, for example) — no other partners are allowed to use annotations to link off-site.

And today, as one of the first fruits since Walk took on his new role, YouTube is launching a ‘Playbook’ of best practices that non-profits can use to effectively produce and distribute their YouTube videos (YouTube first launched a broader-ranging Playbook last July, and it plans to launch more vertical-specific guides in the future). Walk says that non-profits have more features coming soon as well, including the ability to live-stream video, which is currently in testing with a handful of partners.

Walk’s second pillar — Education — is also fairly well established on the site. YouTube’s Edu Portal features thousands of videos from the likes of Harvard, Yale, and online schools like the incredible Khan Academy. This educational content has been watched a whopping 22 billion times on the site already.

Walk says that up until now YouTube has been primarily focused on acquiring all of this content to build up its library. Now, it’s beginning to focus on the second, and equally-important step: curation. Teachers and scholarly institutions will increasingly be able to build out and share lists of their favorite videos, drawn from any of the site’s EDU channels.

And YouTube is also focusing on making the site more school-friendly. Historically some students have had issues watching YouTube because their school’s firewall blocks the site (apparently it’s easy to waste time on YouTube). To help remedy this, YouTube is testing a ‘YouTube for Schools’ domain that will schools will be able to whitelist. This would enable students to watch videos as they please, but only content that appears as part of the Edu part of the site.

With these additions and others, Walk says he’s hoping to make teachers’ livers easier, and to give people who don’t have classrooms the power to listen and learn about anything.

Which brings us to Walk’s third pillar, which he dubs Activism and Free Expression. This pillar has more to do with how people are using YouTube, than it does with any particular improvement the site can make.

Walk recalls an experience he had during a trip to Baghdad two years ago, when he asked a 17 year-old girl what she used YouTube for. “It allows me to understand what the world cares about”, she said. And the ability to watch a variety of camera-phone footage and news reports from various media outlets helped her arrive at her “version of the truth”.

Walk also points to 2011′s Arab Spring, when social media services helped Egyptians spread news with each other — and around the world. Despite the fact that Egypt blocked the Internet for 5 days during a two-week period, Walk says that the number of video uploads in that region actually shot up 72 percent to 100,000 videos.

Another interesting stat: the highest usage of YouTube per capita/Internet user is in Saudi Arabia. The reason? Walk says the less diverse the media sources available to a user through traditional routes like television and print, the more important it becomes to them to find other content. Which is why Walk says YouTube is committed to providing its entire corpus of content to all of its users.

Walk didn’t have any upcoming features to discuss around this third pillar, but based on my conversation with him, it’s the one he’s most passionate about.

He made it clear that, despite plenty of forthcoming hurdles around government censorship, YouTube is committed to hosting and freely distributing footage of the demonstrations, the speeches, the atrocities, and the joyous celebrations that will shape the world in the years ahead.

The move to bring original programming to the web continues to heat up this week, with today’s announcement of Reuters TV, a new YouTube channel featuring ten new commentary and analysis shows from the news and media division of Thomson Reuters.

The new channel joins nearly 100 other media partners on YouTube who are delivering original content, including a few big names like eHow, Motor Trend, Pitchfork TV, TED, The Onion, WSJ, WWE and more.

Reuters, however, is arguably the biggest news provider among the 100 being featured on YouTube’s partner page. And plans for its newly arrived TV news channel are no small effort.

According to the company’s announcement, the YouTube channel won’t mimic traditional TV, but will use an editing style that’s “suited for Internet programming.” Reuters global exec producer Barclay Palmer developed the shows, which will be “high energy” (oh, so that’s what they mean by “Internet programming,” hmm?) and will include reports and commentary from the outlet’s nearly 3,000 journalists worldwide.

The 10 new shows include the following:

• Reuters Investigates, featuring investigative journalism and special reports from around the world, in coordination with Reuters award-winning Enterprise unit;
• The Trail, with Reuters political reporters covering the presidential candidates on the campaign trail;
• Felix TV, with Reuters finance blogger Felix Salmon, named by Time magazine one of the Top 25 financial bloggers;
• Media Bite, featuring Peter Lauria, editor of technology, media & telecommunications, and his team of reporters covering a media world experiencing massive change;
• Tech Tonic, with Anthony De Rosa, Reuters Digital’s social media editor, dubbed by The New York Times “the undisputed king of Tumblr”;
• Freeland File, with Reuters Digital editor Chrystia Freeland interviewing top newsmakers;
• Fast Forward, hosted by Chrystia Freeland and featuring Reuters’ top commentators and journalists, including David Rohde, Reuters columnist, author and two-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize; Rob Cox, US editor of Breakingviews; Bethany McLean, Reuters columnist, Vanity Fair contributor and author; David Cay Johnston, tax expert, author and Pulitzer Prize winner; Geraldine Fabrikant, Reuters columnist, senior writer for The New York Times and winner of the Loeb Award; Steven Brill, Reuters columnist, author and founder of the Yale Journalism Initiative; Ian Bremmer, President of the Eurasia Group; James Ledbetter, Reuters Op-ed editor and author;
• Money Clip, with Lauren Young, personal finance editor and former editor at BusinessWeek and SmartMoney;
• Rough Cuts, with Jen Rogers, showcasing the remarkable news video that Reuters video journalists shoot around the world, allowing viewers to see and hear that video in greater depth than most television networks can offer;
• Decoder, explaining in succinct and surprising ways the key topics in the news, ranging from the debt ceiling to the Strait of Hormuz.

Reuters is kicking off the launch with an exclusive interview from Chrystia Freeland with Mikhail Prokhorov, the Russian billionaire and sportsman who has made the controversial announcement that he is running for president in Russia, challenging Vladimir Putin.

YouTube is spending $100 million on original programming, and is attempting to line up big media partners, including distributors, studios and other content producers.

It’s only one of many companies competing in the newly hot Internet TV space in recent months. Just yesterday, for example, we covered Hulu’s move into original programming with its plans to launch Battleground, a new scripted show. Netflix also has plans for original shows including Lilyhammer, House of Cards starring Kevin Spacey, and it’s resurrecting Arrested Development. Tom Hanks is making a cartoon TV series for Yahoo. MTV Networks’ NextMovie site just snagged vlogger Sarah Austin today for scripted content. MTVN’s Comedy Central property also moved to bulk up web show production this past spring.

Looks like Pseduo’s dream is now, in 2012, finally coming true.

Say what you will about YouTube’s affinity for cats or their audience’s collective inability to write insightful comments, but there’s one thing that YouTube really just doesn’t get enough credit for: saving the music video. As MTV losts its original love in favor of Nick Cannon Presents: Whacky Garbage Nonsense and re-runs of America’s Next Quickly Forgotten Reality Show Person, music videos went without a proper home for nearly a decade. Then came YouTube.

The only bad part about watching music videos on YouTube? Everything else on YouTube. The soul-crushing comments; the gawdy artist backgrounds; the endless recommendations. That’s where Tubalr comes in. It’s YouTube’s glorious music video collection, minus all of that darn YouTube.

Looking past the fact that Tubalr has a downright ridiculous name (is that supposed to be tubular? Tuba Lore? Two-baller? No idea), it’s quite great. You punch in an artist name, then pick either “only” (to play only that artist’s videos) or “similar” (to play videos from similar artists.) It queues up a big playlist, and you can go about your business as the tunes play on. Think Pandora’s concept, mashed up with Youtube’s music video archive.

The search algorithm still needs a bit of tuning (a search for “Reel Big Fish” built a playlist of nineteen music videos… and one clip called “Jessica the Hippo”, which was three minutes of an older gentleman talking to a hippo at a zoo.) but this is definitely something I expect to have running on one of my monitors throughout the day. Check it out here.

Bored? Yeah, me too. Which is why I just killed nearly 30 minutes doing mindless web surfing on Facebook, Reddit and Amazon. But it looks like YouTube would like a little of my holiday downtime clicks – and yours, too. The company just blogged about YouTube Slam, a game that involves pairing up two videos and voting for your favorites.

I guess you could call YouTube Slam a “Hot or Not” for videos. Except in this case, you’re not picking the hottest/sexiest face, you’re picking the funniest clip (Comedy Slam), the best dancer (Dance Slam), the cutest kitten (Cute Slam), best music (Music Slam) or weirdest video (Bizarre Slam).

Here’s how it works:

Click on the category of videos you want to watch. View them both and vote for your favorites.

Wow, that was hard.

The top-rated videos are then featured on the “slam leaderboard,” which is great, but nothing like getting onto the YouTube homepage, of course.

The site was cooked up by YouTube with folks from Google Research, and has actually been around since this fall, when Google Research used it as the output destination of a machine ranking project. The project analyzed “singing at home” videos and attempted to surface those that belonged to truly talented musicians. The results were then spit out to YouTube Slam to help crowdsource the discovery of the “hidden gems.”

So there you go: mindless web surfing. For science! Slam away.

This winter is looking to be a mild one (it’s something like 60 degrees here in New Jersey), but no worries: YouTube is bringing the snow to you, even if Mother Nature won’t.

It looks like most of YouTube’s videos are now outfitted with a special snow button, which as you may expect, turns the video into a winter wonderland.

Alright, so maybe that’s a stretch. It’s not so much a blizzard as it is a handful of snowflakes that trickle down from the top of the video and pile up at the bottom. There’s no word yet on how long the snow effect will stay live, but here’s hoping it sticks around for a while — it’s bound to be the only snow I get to see all winter.

I’m already looking forward to playing with the snow button on some really inappropriate videos — how about making Tatooine look more like Hoth? Or how about this CrunchGear classic, which thanks to YouTube’s new flair, combines some hot pancakes with some cold weather?

YouTube is launching what the company calls the biggest redesign in its history today, including sweeping changes to its homepage and channel pages. The goal is better personalized video discovery and viewing, with a notable emphasis on social features. Think of the changes as the latest example of Google’s campaign to create a unified social layer for all of its products.

The new homepage looks a lot like Facebook, or Google+ for that matter. An activity feed view dominates the middle of the page, while a left-hand navigation bar provides a set of filters for what you see in the feed.

The default Subscriptions feed appears to include algorithmically determined video uploads and activities determined by information like what videos you’ve watched and which channels you’ve subscribed to, although YouTube group product manager Noam Lovinsky wouldn’t tell me exactly how it worked. The previous version of the homepage feed, which launched early this year, doesn’t appear to be algorithmically tuned to the same degree.

G+ and Facebook also get prime-time spots in the navigation bar, listed right beneath the first feed. Click on either and you’ll be able to view videos shared by friends on those networks. G+ videos are automatically in there since YouTube accounts are linked to users Google identities. Facebook requires an opt-in login.

Google is playing up the already social aspects of YouTube to help it bolster Google’s cross-product G+ push. The Facebook integration is a bit more surprising considering that it’s the main social competitor out there. But Lovinksy downplayed that point when I brought it up, noting that only around 10% of YouTube’s views are from embeds, meaning that Facebook is just a part of that percentage.

He went on to explain that the prominent locations for G+ and Facebook are to help with onboarding for newer users. Instead of looking through the entire site for interesting channels, or trying to see what YouTube’s general recommendations tell them, they can get started by seeing what their current friends are already sharing.

The rest of the left-hand bar includes other options for filtering the feed. You can pin any subscribed channel to the top section as well. Click on any of those subscriptions and you’ll see a reverse-chronological feed of all the activity in that channel.

Further down, the bar includes a YouTube-curated section showing Trending, Popular and Music channels, and another section showing recommended channels.

The new homepage has a lot in common with Facebook’s left-hand navigation lists, its algorithmic feed, and its right-hand side recommendations and ads. But that’s a reflection of the design paradigm for all social products, as Lovinksy tells me. Users need a homepage that can help them consume new and interesting content as easily as possible, paired with landing pages that let you add subscriptions. In YouTube’s case, the homepage emphasis on filtering channels is based on users’ desires to watch sets of videos in a single sitting. Like, you know, television, channels.

To that end, YouTube is also adding some new templates for channel pages. Here’s what they include, according to the company:

• The Blogger template: A featured video, a reverse chronological list of videos from 1 playlist of your choosing, playlists, and other Channels.
• The Creator template: A featured video, featured playlists, and other Channels.
• The Network template: A featured video and featured Channels
• The Everything template: A featured video, featured playlists, and featured Channels

These additions, which are more analogous to template options in Tumblr or MySpace rather than Facebook’s one-size-fits-all style, let producers promote their works in the most natural style for what they offer. These templates come with a Feed tab showing any of the following actions from the channel owner:

• Liking a video
• Commenting on a video
• Subscribing to a Channel
• Favoriting a video
• Uploading a video, and
• Adding a video to a playlist

Importantly, any of these social actions can also potentially appear in users homepages, similar to how activity on a Facebook page appears in users news feeds. The Feed tab includes a section for users to post their comments, another section for the owner to feature other channels, and an About form.

The homepage and channel changes are the two biggest updates today, but the company is also introducing a site-wide design upgrade to all the elements — typography, iconography, etc (like the new logo at the top of this article). It’s separately adding new versions of its Xbox and Google TV applications, that feature magazine-style tile interfaces showing various channels. Finally, the company is touting the success of its advertising platform, saying that it’s seeing strong demand for its new cost-per-click style of video ads.

Going forward, look for YouTube to introduce more social features, Lovinsky said. While he didn’t get into specifics, my impression was there’s going to more fine-tuned discovery options coming, like channels on the homepage that show you content on topics related to videos you like. A “hip hop” video channel for instance. And, of course, look for YouTube to add tighter G+ integrations across the site.

YouTube has upgraded its viewer demographics and video tracking tools and changed the name from Insight to Analytics. The changes should be rolling out to “everyone with a modern browser” today, though you can still access Insight if you want to do a little comparison of capabilities.

The changes are non-destructive; some existing features have been tweaked and expanded, and there are a few new tools that could help the struggling YouTube-jockey pull in more views and better understand their viewers.

The look has been overhauled to give the stats a little more space around them, and the amount of simple clickable text is removed. The layout has been mixed up somewhat and some crucial social stats (likes, comments, net subscriber change) are front and center. Search has also been made more obvious and some drilldown controls are placed prominently.

All the usual reports supposedly now have more detailed information, perhaps only of interest to stat hounds, but appreciated nonetheless. The audience retention measure looks like a handy tool:

Comparing to other videos of the same length seems ridiculous (this was the retention tool from Insight), but seeing the points of the video at which people stopped watching, or had their attention grabbed, is certainly handy. Is the intro sequence too long? Did that lull in the conversation kill viewship? Good info here for people looking to tweak their content.

A few more details and links are available at the YouTube blog, and if you’re logged in this link should take you to the new stats page.

The U.S. comScore Video Metrix stats are out now for October, revealing that 184 million U.S. Internet users watched online videos last month, with an average of 21.1 hours per viewers. The total U.S. audience viewed 42.6 billion videos, an all-time high, says the measurement firm. Meanwhile, “Google sites,” led by YouTube, retained its number one ranking. However, in October, Facebook staged a comeback by moving up into the number two slot from its previous position of fifth place.

Facebook had been the number three property in August, but dropped down to the fifth slot in September, losing out to VEVO, Microsoft Sites and Viacom Digital. This month, Facebook saw 59.8 million viewers, second only to the ever-dominant “Google Sites” (mainly YouTube) and its record-high of 161 million views and 20.9 billion videos viewed.

VEVO is still going strong, with 57 million viewers, followed by Microsoft Sites with 49.1 million and Viacom Digital with 48.2 million. As noted above, there were more than 42 billion videos viewed this past month, which meant a lot of ads were viewed too. 7.5 billion video ads were shown in October, the most of which were on Hulu where over 1.3 billion impressions were served. Hulu also had the high frequency of ads, with an average of 46.5 ads per viewer.

Time spent viewing ads totaled over 3.2 billion minutes during the month, with Tremor Video delivering the highest duration of ads at 614 million minutes. Tremor Video ranked second overall in ad impressions, too, and highest among video ad exchanges/networks, as it crossed the 1 billion mark for the first time. BrightRoll Video Network ranked third with 756 million, followed by Specific Media with 512 million and CBS Interactive with 415 million.

53% of the U.S. population watched video ads in October, at an average of 47 times per month. (Makes you want that part of your life back, doesn’t it?)

ComScore also ranked the top YouTube partner channels this month, with the top being VEVO (54.2 million viewers), Warner Music (30.4 million viewers), gaming channel Machinima, Schmooru, Maker Studios, Demand Media, FullScreen, Warner Bros, IGN and Big Frame.

Pro Tip: If your new business plan entails buying a bunch of domains that are clearly just one letter off from that of a major brand, you’re probably doing it wrong.

Such is the case for one gent from Illinois, who snatched up not one, not two, but six domains meant to look nearly identical to YouTube.com, filling them dubious surveys. As you’d expect, Google has now moved to seize the domains.

First noted by the super domain-sleuths at Fusible, Google has officially filed a complaint with the National Arbitration Forum (you can find it with case number 1416796). If successful (and it almost certainly will be), Google will be given full control of the domains.

The list of domains:

• Youtbe.com
• Youtub.com
• Youtue.com
• Youube.com
• Yutube.com

Given that the three primary criterion are “identical or confusingly similar to a trademark” (check), “owner has no rights or legitimate interests in respect of the domain name” (check), and “domain name has been registered and is being used in bad faith” (check! I mean, just look at that screenshot below), this one probably won’t take too long to clear up.

Walt Disney Studios and YouTube have struck deal which will bring hundreds of Disney movies to YouTube, starting today. The new partnership between the two companies includes movies from Disney, Disney-Pixar and DreamWorks Studios. The films, some of which have already arrived on YouTube, are available to rent starting at $1.99.

Some of today’s new releases include Alice in Wonderland, the new Winnie the Pooh, Cars,  Cars 2 and Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides. The older titles are less expensive, it seems. For example, Alice in Wonderland is $1.99 while Pirates is $4.99. The rental allows users up to 30 days to begin watching, but after the video starts, you only have 48 hours of viewing time.

Rentals can be watched online, via your Android phone or tablet, or on Google TV.(U.S. and Canada only).

Disney is the fourth major studio to partner with YouTube, following Sony, Universal and Warner Brothers. The deal is also the first significant partnership since the rental store’s relaunch in May of this year.

Disney and YouTube also announced another partnership earlier this month which aims to bring “family-friendly” original series to a co-branded YouTube channel. The content, according to reports, will include “video drawn from relevant family-friendly content currently available across YouTube, original video produced by Disney, as well as a blend of current Disney Interactive original series, select Disney Channel programming and Disney user created content.”

The first series, which launches in February, will be based on a Disney mobile game (“Where’s My Water”) and its main character Swampy.