The “gotcha mongers” are having a field day with this: a little over four months after opening up its ad revenue sharing “partner program,” YouTube says that it has paid out $1 million to the program’s participants. The announcement on the site’s blogcomes as the partner program adds users in Japan, Australia and Ireland to those in the U.S., Canada and the UK. The program started last May, offering individuals whose videos reached a certain pageview and subscriber threshold a chance to compete for tapping the revenue from YouTube’s overlay system. By December, the program had about 100 users, which is the same number listed here. YouTube has been reticent about revealing additional details, such as how many users it expects to add in the partner program, what the average payout is and what the largest amount paid to a single partner was.

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Over at NewTeeVee, Liz Gannes checks in on at least one user and does a little math as well. She found that BreakALeg.tv’s Yuri Baranovsky has received $1,600 for attracting over 2 million views on YouTube. If 1 million views net a YouTube partner about $800 (assuming all views for partners are equal), that means the partners accounted for 1.25 billion paid views by this point. It also means a grand net CPM of $0.80 for the overlay video ads…YouTube has said that it shares the majority of ad revenues with its partners, and also, in the same breath, has said that it was planning on charging $20 CPM on these ads. Update: YouTube now says different partners command different audiences, as Liz points out in the comment below.

YouTube’s head of content partnerships Jordan Hoffner will be speaking at the opening panel of our EconSM conference in about two weeks from now, in LA. We will be asking him more about these issues, and more.