The partnership allows studios, Movieclips and YouTube to share advertising revenue from the two- to three-minute clips. Although there were plenty of pirated movie scenes on YouTube before the deal, there was no good way to monetize them.
Working with content creators -- in this case, six major studios -- to put legal, high-quality videos on YouTube is a business model that Vevo and Machinima have already put in place for music and games.
"We consider ourselves a network," co-founder Zach James explains. "We consider YouTube the new cable, and we consider ourselves the movie network. Vevo, they probably consider themselves the music network or the MTV of the Internet."
The new relationship does mean that you're likely to see more advertising on YouTube movie clips, but it also means that the quality of the experience will improve. Movieclips has a full-time team that manually creates and meticulously tags each of its video clips to make it easy to find in search.
The database this team is creating has been public on what James calls a "silent beta site" since December 2009. Movieclips recently raised $7 million that it will use to push the database to not just YouTube, but also mobile and Facebook apps.
"This is really our coming out party," James says.
