Google announced an initiative that involves a click-to-buy service for its popular YouTube video-sharing Web site. Customers will be able to buy many of the songs, videos and games presented on the site's pages.

“If you like the song, you don’t need to leave Google or leave the site to buy it,” explained Bakari Brock, business affairs counsel at YouTube.

The links will direct users to several online stores such as Apple’s iTunes and Amazon.com. Google plans to extend the offer to many other pages and partners in order to provide users with a wide variety of options. Over the next several months, the service is expected to include partners from all sorts of industries such as film, music, TV and publishing. At this point the offer is limited to the songs owned by EMI and Universal Music Group that can be found on the online stores mentioned above. Another addition to the offer is the recently released video game Spore.

"YouTube content partners now have the ability to promote and monetize their content in a new and exciting way and create a deeper distribution channel for their content online," said Chad Hurley, co-founder and CEO, YouTube. "Our goal is to improve the overall YouTube experience by connecting consumers with relevant information and entertaining content. The addition of retail links will enhance the viewing experience and allow people to engage more deeply with the content they want to consume."

Scott Merlino, Senior Manager of Amazon's affiliate marketing program, explained that everyone involved with the company is extremely excited about collaborating with YouTube and that the partnership will enable users to discover many of Amazon’s products, relevant to their viewed content.

For now the service will only be available in the United States but if everything goes as it should, the company is likely to include other markets, because in the end it all comes down to making a profit.

Google was probably seeking for quite some time for a good way of cashing in even more on YouTube’s massive success, which until now only included the adverts placed alongside the video clips. The company acquired YouTube two years ago for $1.65 billion.

A few months ago, Eric E. Schmidt, Google’s chief executive, talked about the acquisition, saying that it took longer than expected to find the right advertising models for YouTube but added that he was pleased with its progress. “You Tube is a huge end-user success and we are awaiting the monetization that goes with that, and we believe it will come,” Mr. Schmidt explained. “We are where we should be.”

Considering the fact that YouTube had more than 330 million visitors in August, the company’s efforts for finding new ways of turning the popularity to greater profit is explainable and everyone involved in the project looks optimistic to the future. "There'll be lots of different solutions for lots of different problems," explained Shishir Mehrotra, YouTube director of product management, who added that there have been many different things tested and many more will follow.