Yep,Partnership is officially useless.
The main benefit of the partnership is the money, not the banner! Can you imagine the new channel look without a banner? It will look like staring at a Word document with few thumbnails.
No if they use the whole banner, straight when people click on machinima`s channel they`re going to see a big ad, it will most likely make them more...
Yes it will make them more, simply because machinima is one of the top channels (by subscribers count) and with the new design the top channels (currently: smosh, rwj, rihanna, machinima...) will be shown on every single channel under "Related Channels". So basically they are getting free advertising by all of us. This is extremely unfair but what can we do? YouTube's policies...
p.s. This is my first post btw. Sorry for not introducing myself but I'm not really fond of official introductions
However, I'm happy to find this place. It looks really cool and useful.