YouTube announced that they will be offering full-length TV shows online. Of course, Google, the proud owner of YouTube, will certainly place advertisements in the upcoming TV shows. Google said that the advertisements would be slotted just like ads on television with interruptions appearing during, before and after the actual program That’s not so surprising more »

In an effort to bring some sort of revenue to YouTube, Google has added “buy” links to songs on the site. The links point straight to the Apple iTunes Store and Amazon’s MP3 store. As of now, the links are only available for songs from Universal Music and EMI music; there are also links to buy Spore on related pages. Google hopes to expand the service to other labels and products.

The idea behind the links is users don’t even have to leave YouTube to buy the songs (although the links do open up new windows, either with iTunes, or Amazon MP3). The interesting part is that the songs don’t have to be on the labels’ official channels to have the buy buttons. The labels can choose to have the buttons displayed on any instance of the songs with YouTube’s Content ID system identifying images and songs that are uploaded by other users.