Background: With advertising bans eroding direct tobacco advertising and promotional opportunities, tobacco companies are embracing more covert means of keeping their products in the minds of current and potential consumers. Given the potential for the anonymous exploitation of YouTube (including by tobacco companies) to reach a massive audience, particularly youth, by both promoting and culturally undermining smoking, this paper analyzes the content of smoking imagery on YouTube.

Method: Searches for videos with smoking content were conducted on the YouTube website.

Results: The search term smoking returned 29,325 videos. The top 50 videos were classified in to one of six categories: Anti-smoking, Female Smoking, Male Smoking, Smoking Fetish, Comedy, or Magic Trick.

Conclusions: Smoking imagery is prolific and accessible on YouTube. The smoking fetish and female smoking videos were the most watched pro-smoking vidoes. YouTube was conceived as a vehicle for the sharing of amateur videos. Much of its content remains true to that original aim, however, concern has been expressed over the authenticity of the videos on the site, with users and media commentators questioning the extent to which some videos might be covert advertisements posing as either entertainment or consumer generated media.

Implications: YouTube is an obvious vehicle for the dissemination of anti-smoking messages. If this material is entertaining and amusing it can become very popular. Producing unique content for YouTube, as opposed to posting already existing television campaigns, is a strategy that needs to be explored and evaluated for effectiveness. There is also potential to conduct a very cost effective quit campaign.