YouTube Adds New Automotive Channels

If you're into cars, you'll like the new additions YouTube just rolled out to its ever-expanding list of sponsored video channels. The first is a series of original Web shows from industry veteran MotorTrend. The second is a channel known only as Drive and will focus more on in-depth car reviews and automotive culture. This is the latest effort from YouTube as it seeks to increase its scope from the place where you watch cats dancing, to the place where you come for new and exciting original content.

Google announced that it wanted to launch more than 100 new channels over the next several months that include brand new, exclusive content to YouTube. The idea is to make the site's visitor loyalty a more known quantity. That is to say, if new episodes for an online show are uploaded to YouTube every week or every day, it would encourage users to visit the site on a regular basis as opposed to just every now and then when work is boring or you need to play that Bee Gees song that's stuck in your head.

Creating these targeted, niche channels also opens up attractive advertising opportunities. Instead of advertisers trying to navigate the swath of random content on YouTube, creating tailored ads for an automotive-themed channel, for example, makes a lot more sense. This is also part of Google's ambition to have a better monetization system in place for YouTube, which gets more than three billion video views every day but still remains full of untapped potential.

[via Wired]