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Get discovered with video ads on YouTube

By Ogungbadero

Product Manager, YouTube

Like many creators, when fitness instructor Mike Chang first created his workout channel, he built a growing subscriber base but felt that he was only reaching a portion of people interested in fitness content on YouTube. He tried out YouTube video ads, and now 41 percent of new viewers find him through his ads and his subscriber base is more than 460,000 strong.

We realize that there may be other creators who also want to reach more people with their videos. So to make it easier to reach a larger audience on YouTube, we’ve developed a new way to create an ad for your video directly from your video manager. With this new feature, you can now easily upload a video to YouTube and start promoting it with a video ad within minutes. 

Starting today, you can access this tool by selecting the "promote" link on the video manager "edit" drop down menu, or from the watch page dashboard drop down menu. Enter the amount you want to spend and you can use the traffic calculator to estimate how many views to expect from your ad campaign. 

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You can then target your ad to reach a specific audience and write three lines of text that will appear next to your video ad.

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To complete your ad, simply set up your billing profile in Google AdWords for video and confirm your settings. If you are an existing AdWords advertiser, you will not need to create a new account, but if you’re new to AdWords, you will create an AdWords for video account as part of this set-up flow. 

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By default, your ads will appear as TrueView in-display ads on YouTube pages with related content and TrueView in-stream ads before related videos. As with all TrueView video ads you only pay when a viewer watches your ad. If you’d like to try other formats or targeting options, you can make these changes in AdWords for video at any time. New AdWords users can receive a $75 credit toward ad campaigns - request your free credit here. More information on creating your first video ad can be found in our Help Center.


This is the latest example of how we’re enabling you to reach more potential viewers and grow an engaged audience on YouTube. In March, we also announced YouTube Partner Promotion, which automatically pulls from your top content to create promotions that run across YouTube and the Google Display Network with the goal of reaching new subscribers. As always, you can find examples of other resources available to you at the  Creator Hub.

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