The Video ID system sniffs out unauthorized clips and gives copyright owners several options, the first of which is to have them taken down.  Alternative number two: promote them for the sake of free publicity.  Then there’s option number three, which is proving quite popular and looks to be behind the cessation of hostilities.

On the Official Google Blog, David King writes, "[O]ur partners are . . . monetizing 90% of all claims created through Video ID."

He then continues, "This has led directly to a similarly significant increase in monetizable partner inventory, as our Video ID partners are seeing claimed content more than double their number of views, against which we can run ads.  This means that if a partner has, say, 10,000 views of its content, leaving up videos claimed by our system will lead to an average additional 10,000 views of that same content."

To be fair, these results are based on a limited sample – there are only about 300 partners in the Video ID program.  But that number is liable to grow a lot now that these stats have been made public.