Is YouTube Going to Become Your New Box Office?

Here are some facts about YouTube.

• It's nearly 6 1/2 year old.
• It gets 3 billion views a day
• 48 hours of video are uploaded every minute
• It's visited by 800 million users per month

These are some impressive stats for such a young company. It's hoping to be able to add another stat to that list by becoming the first video sharing website to allow partnered artists to monetise their merchandise directly on their channel.

YouTube have announced they're going to launch a feature called the Merch Store that will allow partnered artists to offer a selection of merchandise to fans directly on their channel. Fans will also be able to purchase gig tickets, digital downloads and even unique experiences like meetups.

Merch Store relies on Topspin for merchandise and unique experiences, Songkick for gigs, and Amazon and iTunes for downloadable content. The Merch Store will be activated for music partners over the next few weeks, but below is a sneak peak of what it's going to look like:

YouTube hope this will tempt users to use Merch Store as their go-to-box-office. Hopefully there will be more design work carried out before launch, or at least heavily customisable options. I'm personally not a big fan of the late 90's eBay look with default hyperlink colours.