As reported by Information Week, YouTube has launched a new service, called TrueView, which allows users to select an ad-skipping button in the first 5 seconds and then only charges advertisers for viewed ads.

The Google-owned YouTube site added the service last week and aims to reduce the frustration of users who don't want to be disrupted by ads, and to reduce the cost to advertisers to that they only pay for the adverts that are shown. The ad-skipping button has to be pressed within the first 5 seconds to be effective and also the advertiser will choose whether to offer the option. It will also improve the creativity of advertisers to get users to wait beyond the first 5 seconds.

The advertiser will also learn more about who is watching their ads, with access to demographic and other information that YouTube gathers on users. YouTube will charge advertisers only when a viewer has watched the full ad or the first 30 seconds, whichever is shorter. During the beta testing phase, YouTube found view-through rates of 20% to 70% (the measure of how many viewers opt-in to watch an ad, which is a strong indicator of the ads effectiveness).

YouTube is making the TrueView available in the United States and Canada initially but plans to make it available in other countries in the future. For now, advertisers have to contact a YouTube representative to buy the new format. The site plans to eventually offer it as a self-service option.

As widely reported in the media - including by the UK's Independent - YouTube has successfully won a legal battle with Viacom over copyright on the video sharing website. After a long-running case, the US judge threw out the copyright lawsuit filed against YouTube by the US entertainment giant, which marks a significant legal victory for the Google-owned business.

The ruling was made that YouTube was protected against Viacom's claims of copyright infringement by the provisions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. The judge decided that YouTube qualified for the protection of the act against all of Viacom's claims for direct and secondary copyright infringement.

The article quotes Google's general counsel Kent Walker, who said in a blog post: "This is an important victory not just for us, but also for the billions of people around the world who use the Web to communicate and share experiences with each other".

US movie and television giant Viacom had sued Google and YouTube in March 2007, arguing that they condoned pirated video clips at the website to boost its popularity. They claimed that YouTube was a willing accomplice to "massive copyright infringement" and sought more than one billion dollars in damages.

Viacom said it planned to appeal.

As reported widely in the media, such as the BBC, YouTube has reached its fifth anniversary and claims to now receive more than two billion 'hits' a day. This is, according to the owner of the site - Google - nearly double the number of people who tune into the US's 3 prime time TV stations combined.

YouTube co-founder, Chad Hurley, is reported as saying: "Two billion video streams is a large number but on average people are only spending 15 minutes a day on the site compared to five hours a day watching TV. I don't think we could have ever planned or imagined we would get to the scale or the size we are today". The site was bought by Google at the end of 2006 for $1.65bn and it was just seven months ago that it reported reaching one billion downloads a day, so the rapid rate of growth continues.

In March this year it was reported that 24 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute. Of course much of this is painful, time-wasting videos that demand little attention and clog up the site, but there are many entertaining and educational videos as well, with the site also giving the opportunity for new talents to display their creativity. YouTube is also being used by companies and organisations, with 'channels' hosted for everyone from Queen Elizabeth to the Pope and from President Barack Obama to the Iraqi government.

In the early days, YouTube was known for hosting pirated snippets of TV shows or movies. As the BBC report says, even today material gets pulled from the site because of issues over copyright. However, YouTube has been working hard to win over content makers as it modifies its service to stream professional films and cash in on a trend towards Internet television. Analysts have predicted that while the site has struggled to reach profitability since its creation, 2010 could be its year.

The ongoing court case in the US between Google and Viacom over the use of copyright video content on YouTube has taken a notable turn this week as the judge has ruled that Google must reveal the viewing habits of every user on YouTube who has ever viewed a video. As reported by the BBC, the ruling means that Google must hand over the viewing log to Viacom, which contains the log-in ID of users, the computer IP address (online identifier) and video clip details.

This development clearly has major implications for online privacy and Google are now arguing about the format of the data and the need to conceal individual user's details. This depth of information shouldn't be necessary for Viacom, who want to assess the total viewing patterns of their content through YouTube (which includes clips from MTV and Paramount Pictures). They have previously claimed that about 160,000 unauthorised clips of Viacom's programmes were available on YouTube prior to 2007 and that these had been viewed more than 1.5 billion times.

Viacom had also requested access to Google's source code for YouTube, but the court turned down this, since it recognised that it was effectively a "trade secret" and therefore shouldn't be disclosed. However, Google hope that the court will allow them to anonymise the data on individual user habits - nevertheless, this ruling means that Viacom will have access to a huge amount of activity logs in what is becoming an increasingly bitter legal case between these 2 giant US companies.

The eventual ruling in the case is likely to become a landmark case in Internet history and potentially affect the way that online video sites can operate in the future.