Google & Disney Reportedly Sign Deal To Bring Disney Shows To YouTube

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Guess the whole “vault” approach to Disney releasing is starting to get a little threadbare, because another deal has cropped up that will give Disney shows a whole new venue on which to appear. After recent deals with Netflix and Amazon, now YouTube has appeared as another place that will soon be stuffed with Disney content.

Basically, Google and Disney will spend between $10 and $15 million setting up a series of original shorts, to be placed on a co-branded channel of both Disney and YouTube, and will also reportedly feature amateur video related to Disney uploaded to YouTube. Disney will sell the advertising involved and give a percentage of same (an indeterminate percentage, as yet) to Google for the hosting and infrastructure.

What prompted the sudden move for Disney? Well, as I said above, this isn’t the first deal that Disney’s announced to get its content out there. They’ve been very much on a rapid expansionary path of late, adding a whole bunch of new venues to show off their content. But what makes things especially interesting is the report that Disney Interactive, who signed the deal with YouTube, lost fully $300 million in the last four quarters, and comScore traffic says Disney.com dropped from just shy of 18 million down to almost 13 million users between June and September. That’s almost a third down in the space of summer. Plus, as was recently revealed, YouTube is skyrocketing in terms of popularity and users, especially in countries that aren’t speaking English, where the bulk of YouTube traffic is said to come from.

And by itself, this is a pretty good step, but add onto it the growing push to get more original content on YouTube, as well as Google’s recent push to acquire Hulu (even though it didn’t go through), and the path Google’s looking to take becomes reasonably clear, with Google looking to take YouTube into the big time and get their slice of the content production pie.

So what do you guys think here? Can you see turning to YouTube more for your entertainment needs? Are you already neck deep in YouTube videos? Or do you have a better place to land your content fixes? No matter what your stance, we want to hear from you, so head on down to the comments section and tell us what you think!