Spam on YouTube?

Just as it's becoming easier to filter out spam e-mail (my free Gmail account filters out nearly all spam e-mail: thanks Google!), spam is cropping up on another important internet destination: YouTube and Google Videos. The way it works is that the spammer will add a list of popular keywords to a video to get hits. According to Wall Street Journal [subscription required], searching for popular videogame devices such as Playstation, Xbox, Nintendo and PSP on Google Inc.'s (NASDAQ:GOOG) YouTube returned "a nine-minute promotional clip for Argentine tourism, steamy shots of fashion models, footage of a parade in Germany, and an apparently pirated clip of a concert by the band Queen."

Most disturbingly, YouTube is likely to become a common place to promote get-rich-quick schemes and other "products" likely to be scams. For example, the Journal brings a clip titled "Hot Blonde Tells You How She Wants to...," which was nothing but, of course. The clip, which directed some 500,000 users so far to a "How to Make Buckets of Cash" site, is now No. 6 on the "Top 10" list on Google Video. More than 100 misleading keywords were attached to the clip, "including sexually explicit terms and Harry Potter."

A few weeks ago, I reported on a bulletin board company that was using YouTube to promote its stock to investors. A chart of the recent performance of the stock shows that the video coincided with a pump and dump of the company's shares.

Hopefully, users will be smart enough to ignore the spam and give it low ratings so that others are less likely to view it.