The company has been developing a mobile interface over the past year, and now claims that "millions of people" visit YouTube every day via their mobile phones.
"You may have noticed that we started running a test of display ads on select pages of the YouTube mobile site in the US and Japan," Christine Tsai, product marketing manager at YouTube, said in a blog post on Google's mobile site.
"This is our first step in testing mobile advertising for YouTube - it will offer a new way to interact with content on-the-go, while allowing us to learn how video viewers engage with mobile advertising.
Tsai added: "Our test advertisers will also have an additional branding tool at their disposal and the opportunity to reach the millions of people who visit YouTube every day, on their phones."
Tsai said that Google is looking to explore new approaches to mobile advertising, and "will evaluate this test closely over the next several weeks".
While the current mobile ad test does not extend to Europe, the addition of ads on YouTube mobile sites will play a key part in Google's bid to earn advertising revenue around the video-sharing service.
Last week, Google chief executive Eric Schmidt conceded the search behemoth still has not worked out the best way to generate ad revenues around YouTube, although he maintained that the company would improve the site's commercial performance.
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