YouTube, Google’s video content publishing platform have announced that they are fully launching their video advertising service – and are giving away up to $50 million in vouchers to encourage small and medium sized businesses to use it. The feature will enable advertisers to bid on specific keywords and key phrases so their video ads can appear in front of some of the 3 billion YouTube videos that get viewed every single day.

Advertisers can create and manage the new video campaigns from their Adwords control panel and they only pay when someone actually watches their video ad. YouTube hope that this will encourage users to invest in the system as the budget should stretch that much further for them. TrueView allows viewers to click on a button and skip out of a video ad after five seconds so the advertiser is only charged if a viewer decides NOT to skip the ad.

This is fantastic news for small budget advertisers as it allows them a way into the world’s second largest search engine. There’s more info on the new features in the video released yesterday.

 

 

Prospective advertisers can apply for their AdWords for video here.