Yesterday we highlighted an interesting report by Gamasutra that suggested around a quarter of YouTubers have been paid for their coverage of games by publishers and developers alike.
Today there's more news on the matter, as it has emerged that popular YouTubers Yogcast have announced a partnership whereby they'll take a "small share" of the revenue made by indie sandbox game Space Engineers in exchange for coverage of said game on their YouTube channel (which, incidentally, has 7 million subscribers).
The report, again from Gamasutra, explains that the new initiative - YogDiscovery - will be the first of these partnerships. Although the Yogcast team insist there will be no editorial influence over their coverage, it does raise new questions over the ethics of such an arrangement (best articulated by fellow YouTuber TotalBiscuit here).
In an open letter on Reddit, Yogcast's Mark Turpin explained that the initiative would allow "smaller companies - who lack the big marketing budgets that the larger publishers have - to reach larger audiences without any risk or loss of earnings."
In theory that's a noble idea, but obviously something like this is open to abuse, where commentators can inadvertently (or purposefully) become salespeople in order to boost sales, and in doing so, their own returns. Let's hope that this isn't the case here.