It’s an early Christmas present for 500 of YouTube’s content partners: $1,000 to buy new video equipment.

YouTube, an arm of Google, said it was giving away the money to help the video-makers “produce even higher quality videos and ultimately drive bigger audiences to their work.” Bigger audiences, of course, mean more advertising revenue for the partners and for YouTube.

A total of $500,000 will be distributed through credits at B&H Photo, which is the Google co-founder Sergey Brin’s favorite camera equipment store. The credits will go to 500 partners “who primarily create and distribute their content online, to purchase new video production equipment,” the Web site said in a blog post. It says it has 15,000 participants in its partner program worldwide.

YouTube has a history of financing the independent producers that it calls partners. In July it announced $5 million in investments for a much smaller group of partners. This month’s investment, while smaller, spreads the money out among a wider array of people.

These investments matter because Google is inching its way toward the media kingdom. Last week, The New York Times reported that YouTube was in talks to buy Next New Networks, a Web video production company.

Apart from acquisitions, paying for better camera equipment for creators, theoretically, means better videos and more viewers, further tightening YouTube’s grip on the online video world. YouTube wants people to watch Web videos the same way they watch multimillion-dollar TV episodes on their living room TV sets — perhaps through its new Google TV product — and that’s going to take even more investment, be it by YouTube or by others.