In March this year YouTube, after failing to reach any agreement over how music artists would be compensated for views of their music videos on YouTube, acted to block access to many music videos to UK audiences.

Now however Google and YouTube have reached an agreement with PRS (the songwriters’ group) to compensate artists for views of their videos. Details of exactly how much is to be paid by Google for each view have not been revealed, but the good news is that UK users of YouTube can now view videos of all music performers from Lady GaGa to the late Michael Jackson, to local group the Ting Tings from Salford, Manchester. SEO for videos on YouTube is of great importance to websites looking to gain that extra edge, so this agreement between Google and PRS is good for websites who use music videos and YouTube in their search marketing.

As part of the agreement, Google is paying royalties for music videos until 2012, and the payments are being backdated to the beginning of this year.

Adam Shaw, part of the PRS for Music stated how pleased he was about the agreement:

We have 60,000 song-writer and composer members and many of them don’t earn very much money at all – 90% of them earn less than £5,000 a year.

The money we receive is really their living.

According to YouTube, there were tens of thousands of videos removed which will all become available again over the coming week.

Patrick Walker, from Google owned YouTube, added:

The music videos are an extremely popular part of YouTube and this deal doesn’t only cover the music videos but also music included in TV programmes like the X Factor and also for the inclusion of music in user videos as well.

Despite all of this, YouTube is still struggling to turn a profit; something that Google will need to address sooner rather than later.

Yahoo paid a cool $160 million for Maven Networks last year, and now that money seems to be wasted as Yahoo is winding down the company.

This strange retreat from Yahoo is just a month after the battle cry from Carol Bartz, the Yahoo chief executive, that Yahoo would be moving into video technology in a big way by acquiring more businesses.

Despite the move to close down Maven Networks, Yahoo is putting a brave face on it by declaring they’re still dedicated to video technology, they’re just scaling back investment in some areas.

Maven had some very big clients for video content, including CBS Sports, but Yahoo will be winding down the contracts. There will also be redundancies as Maven employees are laid off to save costs.

Yahoo has also closed two other video sites this year, Y!Live and Jumpcut.

The message to Google seems to be, help yourself, the battlefield is yours.

Whatever your opinion on Wikipedia, whether you believe it to be a useless website filled with half truths and lies, or whether you consider it to be a useful resource online, contributed to by intelligent and informative individuals, you can’t argue with Wikipedia’s undoubted SEO value. The website has billions of pages and ranks at the top of Google for pretty much every conceivable search, making it a thorn in the side of some SEOs and a powerful ally for others (depending on whether you can use Wikipedia for your own benefit or not).

Now Wikipedia is going down the route of video and looks to potentially challenge Google’s YouTube, at least for education, fact based videos.

According to the latest news, Wikipedia will be featuring videos (user submitted and edited) on its pages towards the end of the summer. The use of video on Wikipedia is being backed by Mozilla (who make the web browser Firefox) and comes just months after Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia, ditched his attempt at beating Google in the search engine game when ‘Wikia Search’ died a death.

Wikipedia has partnered with three sources for videos, the Internet Archive, the Wikimedia Commons and Metavid. Between them they have almost 5 million videos.

Did we just hear YouTube draw breath?

However, it seems that we may be wrong with our first impressions for according to a new report YouTube isn’t costing Google quite as much as we might believe.

While a report released in April by Credit Suisse claimed that YouTube could be costing half a billion dollars per year due to the bandwidth used by the videos and the failure by Google to effectively monetise the website, another report contradicts the findings.

A second report by RampRate, from San Francisco, say that Google has managed to reduce overheads at Google with superior infrastructure, which has led to losses from the video sharing website to be significantly lower than first believed.

Furthermore, because of the sheer volume of bandwidth required by YouTube, and of course the buying power of Google, its costs for bandwidth would be greatly reduced because of the bulk ordered. Also, nearly 75% of the bandwidth required by YouTube comes with no cost because the peering arrangements that Google has created.

RampRate believes Google has lost just $174 million this year, compared with the $470 million that Credit Suisse claimed.

But what is the best way of hosting your videos online? Video files can be very large, so hosting them on your own website uses up your server space, uses up your bandwidth when people watch it, and that can slow your website down.

No, the best way to host your videos online is by using the Google owned YouTube, as everyone from home video fans to major Hollywood studios use YouTube to showcase their videos.

Some reasons YouTube is the best way to host videos are:

• The hosting is free, you don’t have to pay a penny for it
• The videos can be embedded directly onto your website
• The videos can be in high definition if you want them to be
• YouTube videos can have comments, meaning people can give you feedback

Of course none of these reasons really touch on the most important reason for using YouTube for your videos, and that’s because YouTube already has millions of users, users that can find your website through your videos.

By hosting the videos yourself you’re relying on people finding your website in order to watch them. By using YouTube your videos will show up in YouTube searches, and in Google searches, for the relevant phrases. YouTube videos also show up in Google News now too. This means that potentially hundreds of thousands more people will see your video than they would if it were hosted on your server. Then by optimising the video title and description, and the links within the description, you can ensure your video is seen by more people, who then see your website.

YouTube isn’t just a free video hosting platform, it’s a TV channel with millions of viewers where you can run your videos and adverts for free. Make use of it!

If there is a video report available, supplied via YouTube, a small YouTube icon is displayed in the search results. You can then click on the link and watch a news report about the news item.

Video now appears in roughly 5% of news queries, making this a fairly quick roll out of the idea from Google.

Google could use the system to increase its revenue by making deals with news corporations to display their news content. However Google makes it work, having news videos play inside Google News results is another great addition to the Google News service.