Promoted Videos is one of the easiest and most effective ways for you to increase views of your videos on YouTube. Two weeks ago, this became an even bigger opportunity for content creators when we expanded the program beyond the United States and launched in seven countries in North America and Europe. Today we're excited to finally make Promoted Videos available in both Japan and Australia.

This is great for content creators in Japan and Australia -- who will now be able to drive views of their videos in-country -- but it also makes it possible for our existing Promoted Videos advertisers to get their content in front of a truly global audience. Anyone who runs a Promoted Videos campaign can choose to have their video promoted in any (or all) of these ten countries. Does your band have a new music video and you're interested in building an international following? Do you want to demo a new product to users in your business' most important markets? Promoted Videos is flexible enough to help you increase views of your videos worldwide in all sorts of useful ways.

For more information on this latest expansion, check out our new videos in both Japanese and, um, Australian, below.





Posted by Hiroto Tokusei, Senior Product Manager, and Eiji Kasutani, Product Specialist

A couple of weeks ago the Google Chrome team launched Artist Themes for Google Chrome, a project where leading designers, artists, illustrators and musicians used the browser as their personal canvas for designing interesting themes. It's been exciting to see how people have responded to these designs and we're even hearing unique and interesting stories about how these themes have resonated with Chrome users around the world.

To continue celebrating this collaboration of engineering and art, the Google Chrome team has launched a new YouTube video (with a surprise ending) that more fully showcases the beauty of these themes. Check it out at youtube.com/googlechromethemes.


To create this experience, they recreated an entire watch page using a Flash gadget and embedded it on their channel homepage. With a couple nifty Flash tricks, the themes not only extend outside of the video, but users can interact with the content in the video to dynamically affect the background of the site.

This isn't the first time a channel owner has used a flash gadget to make a video "pop" -- Nintendo created a similar experience last year at youtube.com/wariolandshakeit2008.

We look forward to seeing more creative uses of the watch page!

Posted by Mark Sabec, Associate Product Marketing Manager

Ever since the first viral videos, the YouTube platform has been one of the best ways to distribute content to a global audience. But for every viral hit that gets a million views, there are countless other videos that never quite reached lift-off.

One efficient media strategy for marketers trying to drive lots of views is to create content so compelling that your audience actually wants to watch it, and -- ideally -- actively seeks it out. That's why we think that there is a lot to learn from Ubisoft's latest campaign to drive awareness of their forthcoming video game: Assasin's Creed II. Ubisoft has produced a series of three short films that will have their global premiere on YouTube on October 27. And this isn't just re-purposed footage from the game either: Ubisoft's visual effects studio (Hybride Technologies) is the brain behind the movies 300 and Sin City, so these films blend live action with animation. The series is calledAssassin’s Creed: Lineage and will act as a prologue to the game itself. These shorts will live in the movies section of YouTube and can be watched by our global audience.

Ubisoft is using several YouTube features and tools to make sure viewers can easily find this content online. They will launch the premiere episode as an expandable masthead ad on the YouTube homepage in eight countries on October 27. And because the ad contains an embedded YouTube player, every view will be included in their total view count, elevating the video's presence in YouTube's daily "most viewed" videos and increasing its discoverability. Ubisoft will also use Promoted Videos to drive even more views of their video among their target audience.

As you plan your next advertising campaign, give some thought to the video content you are creating. You may not have your own visual effects studio, but you should definitely aspire to create content that your audience wants to watch, without feeling constrained by getting your whole message into a 30 second TV spot. Make a five minute video, make a series, make a movie -- make something great.

Posted by Peter Sherman, Product Marketing Manager

More than a year ago we launched our very own YouTube channel www.youtube.com/advertise. At launch, the channel's primary focus was to show brands not only how we were able to manage and communicate our own business brand within the YouTube platform, but also to explore and showcase the tools available for them to plan and create meaningful campaigns on our site.

Over the past year, YouTube's advertising platform has continued to integrate into Google's robust advertising system, AdWords. With ad format innovations such as Promoted Videos and more robust targeting of YouTube through the placement targeting tool, we realized that more and more AdWords customers were successfully advertising on YouTube through a familiar channel and interface.

As our business has evolved and inquiries from potential customers have grown, we recognized that it would be helpful to create a destination where small and medium businesses could learn how to engage their customers within the YouTube environment. For these reasons, we're announcing a new site at www.google.com/ads/youtube.

Here you will learn about the tools available to advertise on YouTube through the AdWords interface and how other AdWords customers are already having success meeting their marketing objectives on YouTube through AdWords. So check it out!

Posted by Michael Rucker, Product Marketing Manager

Over the past few months we've been hard at work redesigning our brand channel layout and many partners and advertisers have already opted into, and taken advantage of, this new design. Today we're beginning the process of converting all remaining partner and advertiser channels still using the older platform to the new one. Note that this migration could take up to two weeks to complete and that the branding options you've selected on the old channel layout will be ported over to the new layout automatically. Here's an example of what the new channel design looks like:


Once again, your comments and feedback have been instrumental in helping the new version evolve and grow (you can see a list of items we addressed here). Now customizing and editing your channel is a lot easier, with plenty of options for organizing videos. The new channel design also refocuses attention on engaging with you and your videos, which, after all, is the centerpiece of any YouTube experience. And we've got a lot of great ideas and input from you on things you'd like to see next.

Posted by the YouTube Team

(Cross-posted from the Official Google Blog)

We first launched Promoted Videos as a search advertising program on YouTube, allowing content creators to drive viewership of their videos by targeting the hundreds of millions of searches that happen on YouTube every day. But in the past year Promoted Videos has evolved into a much broader discovery vehicle, appearing on search, the YouTube homepage, video watch pages and recently across the AdSense network. We've also built better conversion opportunities via Call-to-Action overlays. As a result, Promoted Videos is now driving millions of video views per week, with clicks having increased 500% since January. In a world where 20 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute, Promoted Videos has become a critical way for creators to get their content in front of viewers across the web.

Now that it's easier than ever to drive views of your video, we also wanted to make it easier to run these campaigns in the first place. Starting today you can buy Promoted Videos directly in AdWords. Any AdWords advertiser with video content — from a small business looking to promote a product, to a movie studio premiering a new trailer — can use Promoted Videos to make sure their videos find a larger audience. This integration will provide a single destination for your overall Google ad buy, and will give YouTube advertisers access to campaign tools in AdWords.

AdWords is a global platform, so we're excited to use this integration as a way to start rolling out Promoted Videos internationally. With this launch, Promoted Videos are now available in Canada, the U.K., France, Italy, Germany, Spain and the Netherlands. We hope our international users, partners and advertisers will take full advantage of this new opportunity to ensure their videos are more easily discovered around the world, and we look forward to expanding to other countries in the coming weeks.

Posted by Jonathan Goldman, Software Engineer

(Cross-posted from the YouTube blog)

Three years ago today, Steve and I stood out in front of our offices and jokingly crowned ourselves the burger kings of media. We'd just made headlines by joining with Google in our shared goal of organizing the world's information (in our case, video) and making it easily and quickly accessible to anyone, anywhere. Today, I'm proud to say that we have been serving well over a billion video views a day on YouTube. This is great moment in our short history and we owe it all to you.

Looking back at those early days, we were committed to some basic principles that have since become fundamental tenets in the world of online video:

• Speed matters: Videos should load and play back quickly.
• Clip culture is here to stay: Short clips are voraciously consumed and perfect for watching a wide variety of content.
• Open platforms open up possibility: Content creation isn't our business; it's yours. We wanted to create a place where anyone with a video camera, a computer, and an Internet connection could share their life, art, and voice with the world, and in many cases make a living from doing so.

Three years after the acquisition, our platform and our business continue to grow and evolve. We are still committed to the same principles that informed the site early on, but we know things have changed. As bandwidth has increased, so has our video quality. As we've started to see demand for longer, full-length content, we've brought more shows and movies to the site. There are now more ways than ever to make and consume content, and more of you are looking to turn your hobby into a real business. We're working hard to keep up with the fast pace of technology to bring you everything you would expect from the world's largest video site: better quality; a full spectrum of choices and tools for users, partners and advertisers; and ways to make the YouTube experience your own anywhere, anytime.

Posted by Chad Hurley, CEO and Co-founder

It's been two years since we launched Content ID, and in that time we've made lots of improvements so it works better and faster for content owners of all kinds. Content ID now scans over 100 years of video every day, and the more our partners use Content ID, the more it helps them (and us) make money. In fact, over 33% of our monetized views come from videos that have been claimed by rights holders using Content ID.

As Content ID has matured, we've worked closely with our partners to make content management on YouTube run smoothly, especially for high-profile media events. For example, in 2008, we worked closely with NBC (the broadcaster that held the rights to the Olympics in the U.S.) to quickly block Olympic content uploaded to the site. It worked, but it was difficult, and many media companies have been asking us for an easier, off-the-shelf solution.

Today we're excited to announce partnerships with Harmonic, Telestream, and Digital Rapids, three leading companies in broadcast video delivery and management. These partnerships will make it possible for many media companies to provide us with reference files for their content at almost the exact same time it is being produced, and without changing how they currently do business.

Think about it this way: when media companies -- like the BBC, HBO, and Time Warner -- record big news or sporting events live, they use technology from Harmonic, Telestream, and Digital Rapids to quickly convert that high quality video and audio content into the files they use to broadcast on cable, the Internet, mobile phones, and other platforms. By integrating Content ID with this technology, YouTube is effectively inside broadcast headquarters, helping to convert footage into reference files almost instantaneously. This is a direct integration of YouTube into how these companies' create and broadcast content: much less custom work dealing with YouTube.

We're excited about what our Content ID partners will now be able to do. For some media companies, getting live television events -- like awards shows or soccer matches -- into our system could take hours. But with this integration, our partners will be able to provide us with reference files in a few minutes, allowing them to block, leave up, or monetize videos of their live events on YouTube in near real time.

We still have work to do, but we're happy with how far we've come in only two years.

Posted by George Salem, Product Manager

File these under "need to know"...

1. Five stars dominate ratings.

As this graph reveals, the vast majority of videos have a five-star rating, which begs the question: how useful is this system anyway? This blog post starts an important conversation.

2. Warner Music comes back to YouTube

Under this new, multi-year global agreement, you will be able to discover, watch and share music videos by artists such as Green Day, Metallica and Diddy on the site. The partnership covers the entire Warner catalog and includes both videos uploaded by Warner and user-generated content containing WMG acts. More details here.

3. Creator's Corner launches

Take a spin through our new hub for uploaders, containing everything budding artistes could want to know about making videos for YouTube. Contact us at ytcreators@gmail if you're a hard- or software provider who wants to be a part of our Discounts section, if you have a great tutorial video about video production, or simply have feedback about the site.

4. Kanye-Taylor drama

When Taylor Swift won the award for "Best Female Video" at this year's MTV Video Music Awards, Kanye West snatched the microphone out of her hand and declared that Beyonce was better. Users weighed in on this questionable behavior, and even President Obama had a word for the brash rapper. Taylor later vented on The View.

5. Best in Show at OMMA 2009

Congrats to Carl's Jr and the YouTube stars who appeared in the restaurant's campaign for the portobello mushroom burger. It earned top honors at these awards celebrating the best in online media, marketing and advertising. We sat down with Carl's EVP of Marketing back in June to get the inside scoop on the campaign.

Posted by Mia Quagliarello, Community Manager

(Cross-posted from the Inside AdSense Blog)

As the number of YouTube content producers continues to grow, many are looking for new ways to reach new audiences. That's why we're happy to announce the launch of YouTube Promoted Videos in AdSense ad units. Promoted Videos are YouTube videos -- from movie trailers to product demos to really almost any kind of video on YouTube -- promoted by their creators so they can reach a wider audience. (You may have already noticed Promoted Videos on YouTube.com, as they appear on partner watch pages and alongside YouTube search results.) Extending Promoted Videos to AdSense sites will enable these content producers to broaden their reach, while providing you with another way to earn from your ad space. At this time, these ads are only available in English to U.S. publishers, but we're looking forward to expanding to additional regions and languages in the future.

Promoted Videos feature a thumbnail image with three lines of text, and when clicked, will bring the user to watch a video or view a channel on YouTube. They're contextually targeted to your pages, and you'll earn from these ads on a cost-per-click (CPC) basis. In addition, they can appear in the following ad formats, as long as you've opted these formats in to displaying both text and image ads: 300x250 Medium Rectangle, 336x280 Large Rectangle, 728x90 Leaderboard, 250x250 Square, and 200x200 Small Square. Just like other ads, Promoted Videos compete in our standard ad auction, so they'll help drive up competition among advertisers bidding to appear on your pages. When a Promoted Video wins the ad auction, it'll be shown alone in one of the eligible ad formats.

All Promoted Videos are required to comply with the YouTube Advertising Policies, and the advertised videos with our Terms of Use and Community Guidelines. You can prevent Promoted Videos from appearing on your pages by adding 'youtube.com' to your Competitive Ad Filter list. Please note that currently, this method will block all Promoted Videos from your sites.

Finally, we'd like to mention that these new Promoted Videos are separate from our video ads offering, which stream ads in video format and are classified as image ads.

We're continuing to look for additional revenue opportunities for publishers, and we hope these new ads will help you earn more.

Posted by Arlene Lee, Inside AdSense Team

Last week was Advertising Week, New York City's annual gathering of Mad Men and media mavens from across the globe. Advertising Week brings marketers, agencies, and publishers together to discuss the issues of the day, from the latest advances in audience measurement to the ways in which innovative marketers are approaching social media. Through panels, workshops, expos, and awards ceremonies, Advertising Week provides a forum to discuss, debate, and celebrate the advertising industry and all its players. Here are some highlights from Google and YouTube's participation during the week:

87 cool things to do with YouTube & Google. Andy Berndt, Managing Director of the Google Creative Lab, and Tom Uglow, a Creative Lead in the Lab, took the stage on Monday to present 87 cool examples of Google and YouTube tools in action. We wanted to remind our audience that, while Google and YouTube create tools and platforms, marketers and agencies are the actual architects of their visions. Andy highlighted mashups and annotations, as well as experiments with data usage. Flip through Andy's list and see which examples might spark an idea for your client or brand. (Did you ever think Ohio could be a piano? We sure didn't.)

Rock on. On Tuesday evening, we hosted 700 agency guests at the YouTube Battle of the Ad Bands. After 20,000 votes and video views from the advertising community on the first-ever YouTube Advertising Week channel, six finalists took to the stage. For the second year in a row, McCann Erickson's took home the trophy.

Social Media for Social Change. Later in the week, we co-sponsored a social media panel with the Ad Council. Suzie Reider, YouTube's head of advertising sales and marketing, led a discussion around how innovative thinkers are using social media for the benefit of the global community. The panelists covered everything from Charity Water's use of user-generated videos to R/GA's national public service advertising campaign with The Ad Council, "That's Not Cool." In a week filled with talk about ad spend and metrics, this panel showed the larger, global potential for these new media. (You can view the panel in its entirety on FastForward's YouTube channel.)

The End of Digital Media? At the IAB's MIXX conference, Google's President of Global Sales and Business Development, Nikesh Aurora, took the floor to spoke of the future. During his keynote, he made some predictions: (1) Everything will be localized down to you. Personalization will be the norm, as in this augmented reality application. (2) We'll contribute to the creation of new generations of information. We're now creating new types of information that simply couldn't exist in an analog world -- and they'll all live online. (3) Marketing is the new finance. Data will drive intelligent marketing decisions across media. (4) All advertising will be engaging. "Digital Marketing" will be a redundant, dead term. In the future, all marketing will be digital, personal, engaging, and measurable.

Check out more highlights from the week on the "More" section of the official Advertising Week YouTube Channel. Hope to see you next year!

Posted by Kristin Kovner, Industry Marketing