YouTube came bottom of a major industry survey - seen exclusively by Media Week - ranking digital media owners in the UK.
The second Digital Media Owners Image Survey, commissioned by the Institute of Practitioners in Advertising, asked UK agencies what their overall experience of dealing with digital media owners was.
Only 17% of respondents agreed or strongly agreed that dealing with YouTube was a good experience. AOL topped the poll and, along with MSN, was one of only two media owners to register an approval rating of more than 50%.
The result will provoke concern at YouTube's new owner Google, which has taken care to roll out advertising on YouTube in a bid to generate a return on its $1.65bn investment in buying the site.
"You have to worry about YouTube," said Nigel Gwilliam, head of digital at the IPA.
"It has offered appalling service and has finished behind a rival, Facebook, that doesn't even have a UK office and has faced industry scandal regarding BNP ads."
A Google spokesman claimed it was set on investing further to improve YouTube's ad offering.
"It is still very early days for the YouTube advertising platform," he said. "And contact with agencies will increase as we build a dedicated infrastructure to meet the needs of the market."
The survey also reveals Yahoo! fell further behind Google in the search engine rankings. Yahoo!'s approval rating in the search sector plummeted from 44.7% to 25.7%.
Yahoo! has rolled out paid search platform Panama over the six months since the first IPA survey was conducted and the experience has provoked a backlash from agencies over the handling of the product launch.
"The only story in search is that Yahoo! has fallen off a cliff," says Gwilliam. "MSN is improving but Yahoo! is clearly going the wrong way. Service to agencies is suffering because of internal changes there and it has become a real problem for them."
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