Last week YouTube announced its new Partner Grant Program:

The goal of YouTube Partner Grants is to act as a catalyst by infusing additional funds into the production budgets of a small group of YouTube partners who are at the forefront of innovation. Funds from YouTube Partner Grants will serve as an advance against the partner’s future YouTube revenue share.

Any partners are eligible – including news organisations – and some of the features on offer, such as tracking user engagement and subscriptions, would be particularly attractive to news channels on the site.

Parent company Google has long maintained that it is not a publisher, but could investment via partnerships with publishers and producers of video be a step away from this defence?

A spokesperson for Google gave Journalism.co.uk a short, definitive answer – no.

Our specialty is certainly not creating the content. We leave that to the experts. But we’ve seen some amazing content creators rise up over the years to get audiences that rival network television. Our goal with Partner Grants is to give these folks who are often doing 360 degrees of the content creation, production and marketing process, additional funds that they can use to buy better cameras, invest in more talent, or beef up their marketing. We look at this as a small first step in the broader evolution of partners on YouTube, but a giant leap forward in the evolution of online video.