I was just on YouTube surfing around a bit and I notice a video featured on the right – so I click on it. It looks really professional and IMO lame.

So I click through and realize that it is actually a commercial for Boost mobile. Hmmm – it certainly didn’t seem like an ad to me and it seems like that’s the feeling from a lot of people in the YouTube community:

nice. a commercial – didn’t see it “badged” as an ad- that’s kind of deceptive, no?

Everyone, click Inappropriate , flag the commercial and rise against google . Remain a search engine only. Keep your google videos, we have YouTube. (btw, why don’t they just call it Goo Tube from now on :/?)

Why is there a commercial on youtube?

This ad was posted by a “real” user called atomic2797 (who has only submitted one other video showing a Suzuki GSXR doing 165 mph…).

Now the interesting thing is that this ad was put up a few weeks ago, and upon looking at it closer on the homepage, you can see that there is a banner above it which is managed through DoubleClick.

This ad was most likely in place well before the Google acquisition, but all of those comments above were made in the last few hours. This means that some in the YouTube community see Google as Big Business, as the end to their fun, concerned only with the bottom-line. Stories like this don’t help.

So what can Google/YouTube do? Label ads clearly. Your users aren’t dumb – they can see an ad a mile away. Most will be fine with video ads (as long as it’s not overkill) but they don’t want to be tricked.

Here’s the video ad in question…

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