After launching "Goggles", a frivolous Gmail tool to prevent drunk Friday night emailing, the Mountain View giant announced earlier today the launch of a new major feature for the YouTube.com website that will allow users to easily buy songs and other media directly from the iTunes or Amazon store, in their latest effort to monetize what is one of Google's strongest strategic assets.

According to Alexa.com, the video sharing and streaming platform currently holds the third place in the ranking of the most visited websites in the world, only second to Yahoo and Google itself, which acquired it in October 2006 for a record $1.65 billion from its founders Chen, Hurley and Karim, three former PayPal employees who allegedly came up with the idea of a video sharing website completely by chance, after realizing there was no convenient way of sharing videos with friends off the Internet.

Because of its incredible popularity and of the nature of the website itself, the running costs for YouTube have been extremely high since its inception, particularly in terms of bandwidth. According to an article appeared on the British newspaper "The Telegraph", YouTube consumed in 2007 as much bandwidth as the entire Internet combined in the year 2000, with its current running costs being estimated at around $1 million a day.

Considering that only a very small fraction of the videos featured on the site display AdSense advertising and despite the relatively recent layout innovations that now allow advertisers to feature a video in the global homepage for a daily fee of $175,000, with a $200,000 additional fee in exchange for a branded channel, the site is still far from being profitable, Google itself considering it a source of "non material" revenue.

In fact, there was no doubt at the moment of its acquisition that YouTube users would be a priceless resource for Google, enabling the company to understand a great deal about visitor behavior in a Web 2.0 context,

especially given the very large number of visitors that provide statistically very accurate data: but, following the announcement earlier today by CEO Eric Schmidt, it would seem that Google is looking for monetary profit as well from the site — on the other hand, owning the third most visited website on the Internet and not being able to profit from it would seem like a huge missed opportunity.

Under the newly launched program, users will be able to buy digital media related to the video being watched directly from Apple's iTunes or Amazon digital store with a single click. "If you like the song, you don't need to leave Google or leave the site to buy it" explained Bakari Brock, business affairs counsel at YouTube, who later clarified that what was being announced today is just the first of many steps towards making of YouTube a complete e-commerce solution featuring all sorts of digital products.

Glenn Brown, YouTube Strategic Partner Development Manager, further explained this point on his Official Google Blog post by describing what is currently a very common scenario among the site users:

When you view a YouTube video with a great soundtrack, you often see comments from YouTube users asking about the name of the song and where they can download it. Or when users watch the trailer for an upcoming video game, they want to know when it will be released and where they can buy it.

At the time of writing, the program is limited to buying songs from selected partners, totaling some 15 millions items, but over time the program will in all likelihood expand even more to include a wider variety of online stores and various merchandise including concert tickets, according to Brock.

Judging from the popularity of some of the partner videos, including Avril Lavigne's song "Girlfriend", currently the most viewed video of all time on the site with some 104,000,000+ hits, it is clear how the changes YouTube will undertake really have the potential to transform the site into a revenue-generating asset for Google: all that is left to do now is hope that the affiliate links featured in the videos won't be invasive enough to make of what is quite possibly the single best user experience for an Internet website an ad-cluttered platform that might please Google investors but displease the actual YouTube users.