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Congratulations YouTube!
The video site is celebrating over 1 billion views per day and the 3 year anniversary of being acquired by Google with…some nasty spam videos.
No, this just in. YouTube is celebrating with a new logo. The spam is something it doesn’t actually have any control over–and that’s going to be a big problem.
RWW is reporting an uptick in spammy videos posted to YouTube:
Researchers at Kaspersky Lab have recorded a mass mailing of spam emails containing a link to a video advertisement on YouTube. Although in the past, spammers have have attempted to lure people into clicking links by claiming the link would display a YouTube video, this is the first case in which the link actually did. In this particular incident, the video in question is a Russian ad promoting industrial real estate.
As Sarah Perez points out, will YouTube take any action to remove these videos. After all, the "spam" is the mass emails being sent out, while the videos themselves seem to not violate any YouTube policies. Hmm, where have we seen this before? Oh yeah, Blogspot hosted blogs.
Whether Google decides to take any action to prevent YouTube being a pawn in the game of email spam, is yet to be seen. Whether it can actually prevent it anyway, is another question. In the meantime, YouTube will happily accept the poor schmucks that were fooled into watching a spammy YouTube video–after all, that all contributes to the 1 billion views, baby! 
