Promoted Videos hit half a billion views

Update: As of December 1st, 2011, you will start to see Promoted Videos referred to as TrueView in-search and TrueView in-display.

When we announced our first performance-based video ad format, Promoted Videos, nearly two years ago, the first campaign was “Penny Pranks” by Office Max.

Since that time, thousands and thousands of advertisers have taken advantage of this ad format to entice likely customers with videos about everything from smoked brisket recipes to magnetic jewelry to sneakers. Politicians and political activists have used Promoted Videos to argue for a proposition or against an issue. And large companies have reached wide audiences with movie trailers, recipes, and ideas for Halloween.

This month we served the 500,000,000th Promoted Video view. Promoted Videos average approximately three minutes in duration -- it would take a single viewer 2,853 years to watch them all. In the past year, we’ve seen a more than six-fold increase in the number of times viewers have clicked to watch a Promoted Video. And more and more, advertisers are making ads for TV and YouTube that delight and entertain. In fact, many video ads reach over 1 million video views, offering everything from solutions for bad breath to candy bars and cars – some of which have achieved increased viewership using Promoted Videos.

We’ve made several recent product improvements to help more advertisers easily set up and manage campaigns with Promoted Videos. First, we’ve expanded the ability to set up video ad campaigns on ads.youtube.com beyond the US to Australia, Brazil, Canada, Czech Republic, Denmark, France, Germany, India, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Mexico, The Netherlands, New Zealand, Poland, Russia, South Africa, Spain, Sweden, and the United Kingdom. For anyone outside the U.S., the campaign will be tied to your Google AdWords account. Secondly, we’ve added Promoted Videos into our Video Targeting tool so you can select specific videos for advertising against in addition to appearing against search results and related content on YouTube. Finally, with our Promoted Video API in AdWords in beta, agencies can now use Promoted Videos to manage campaigns across multiple clients.

We’re excited about this momentum and look forward to building on viewer choice when it comes to advertising. We talked at length this week with the guys at ReelSEO about Promoted Videos, so read on if you'd like to know more about our plans.