To date, the video-sharing service has offer premium users a way to promote their videos to other users for a price. Today the Google-owned company has added new functionality to this service that lets premium YouTube users control their promoted videos directly through Google's highly popular AdWords service.
Many prominent adult studios and stars promote themselves through YouTube with carefully monitored channels that distribute non-nude content that typically includes a watermark.
YouTube's new AdWords-powered premium videos promotion service is available in the United States, as well as Canada, France, the UK, Italy, Germany, Spain and the Netherlands. The service is already garnering good reviews from prominent tech pundits.
"AdWords is Google’s bread-and-butter ad platform that plenty of brands and businesses already use to place their ads outside of YouTube, so this will help streamline the purchase process," said Jason Kincaid of TechCrunch.com. "It’s not all about convenience either — advertisers will also be able to use AdWords campaign tools, which are more robust than what YouTube offers."
But as useful as this new feature sounds, how will adult companies be able to use it, given YouTube's longstanding prohibition against explicit content and generally draconian policy against adult?
An informal survey of adult industry professionals indicated an overall positive response to the new service, though one adult webmaster, who spoke to XBIZ on condition of anonymity, said that even if YouTube were to suddenly embrace adult businesses, industry members would find a way to sour the experience.
"I think the adult community would effectively get it turned off in a matter of weeks," the webmaster said. "They always seem to ruin every good social platform."