To be clear, Muziic does not have any direct agreement, financial or otherwise, with Vevo itself. It gets its Vevo content via an API from YouTube. As such, it does not provide any more video content than YouTube itself does.

SEE ALSO: Vevo Not Global Until 2010, Strains On First Day

YouTube, which developed the back end for Vevo and provides some of its hosting, has been offering a selection of videos co-branded with Vevo, featuring pre-roll and overlay ads from Google (NSDQ: GOOG). When those videos are embedded on other sites, they lose the Vevo watermark and pick up a YouTube mark instead. The video display is smaller on the embedded sites, too.

This YouTube watermark, and the smaller video format, is what you see when you watch the content on Muziic. What you don’t get, though, are any of those Google ads, meaning that not only Vevo is missing out on advertising revenues from the extra traffic, but Google is, too.

David Nelson, the Bettendorf, Iowa-based, 16 year-old developer of Muziic, tells me that on his site, you can also browse content alphabetically and by popularity, as you would on the Vevo site itself (I can’t confirm the Vevo end of the comparison because I live in the U.K.). Unlike Vevo, it also indexes additional music video content from YouTube and videos it hosts itself. The site currently only serves display ads. “Any ads placed on videos in the future will be a revenue stream for the artists, labels and YouTube itself,” he says.

Muziic has launched a Facebook application and is planning to release an iPhone app, too. The site’s desktop player has had 4 million downloads since launching in February, says Nelson.

But even with more users, and more advertising, it looks like monetising music videos online might prove an uphill struggle for all players.

Vevo is a JV between UMG, Sony Music Entertainment and Abu Dhabi Media Company and also features content from EMI and CBS (NYSE: CBS) Radio/Last.fm. Vevo has not given a firm date for when it plans to launch internationally, although reportedly we will see the site coming to a non-North American country near you in 2010.