You Tube is a better for google than adsense, and you don't get paid!

Tampering with their video player or bypassing their player altogether is a violation of their TOS or "fair usage" terms. So yes it is a violation if you make it go to a url of your choosing.

I have noticed that Google is playing a bit unfair now, they recently added YouTube results to the SERP pages meaning that you're now officially competing with YouTube videos (which make Google money). I mean they place the videos high up in the results, so that will surely bump competing sites down a notch - so in certain terms I noticed that some videos are bumping out websites. Fortunately I don't have a site affected by this, but it definitely looks bad for sites that are affected by it since Google is competing and cashing in on certain keywords - and obviously you can't go up head to head with them and expect to win (afterall it's their serps and their going to take an unfair advantage)

 

You actually do get stuff back the more links you give the more you get back and there for more traffic :F