Representatives for the company whose product is advertised in the commercial, Scotland-based IRN-BRU, didn't return calls seeking comment, and several days after Edelman first highlighted the video clip to InfoWorld, it appears to have been removed from YouTube.

Media representatives with the multimedia site, owned by search giant Google, refused to comment on the energy drink commercial specifically, but indicated that battling such schemes to distort its ratings systems remains an ongoing task.

"We are continually developing safeguards to secure the statistics on YouTube and recently updated video ratings, so it now is very difficult to fake a high rating or force someone else to get a low rating," the company said in a statement.

"When it comes to our attention that someone has rigged their numbers to gain placement on the top pages, we remove the video or channel from public view; we are continuously updating the product to provide accurate view, rating and subscription numbers and to prevent our community from being affected by malicious programs."

YouTube officials did not offer any specific steps the company has taken to help combat malware programs and other ill-gotten traffic.

The Web has long been known as an effective medium for malicious attacks, but the problem of people gaming YouTube and other user content-driven, or Web 2.0, sites is only beginning to rear its head, and it's an issue that the companies backing such portals must take seriously as they look into the future.

As more Internet users begin to turn to "user-generated content" for untarnished reviews and insights, YouTube and other Web 2.0 portals begin offering greater financial incentives for people to post popular content, said Joe Laszlo, an analyst at Jupiter Research in New York.

"This is a nascent issue, but one that YouTube and the rest of the user-generated content sites need to confront now, as so much of the Web 2.0 concept is built around the idea of trusting the community to help make judgments about content's quality," said Laszlo. "These types of scams call into question how reliable the community aspect of Web 2.0 really is, and if these types of sites becomes susceptible to a lot of tricks, and content that people don't really want to see gets surfaced, people will question their value."

News Web site Digg.com recently encountered a similar problem after it was exposed that people were paying others to log on and prop up traffic for their content. In another incident, mobs of Digg users forced stories containing a protected decryption key for DVDs to the top of the site's most popular stories, despite efforts by site administrators to block the publication of the key.

Such schemes to pump up user-generated content will grow as quickly as wider audiences tap into such Web 2.0 sites, the analyst said.

And, as sites such as YouTube begin offering money to content providers who can pass along clips that drive hits, more people will be encouraged to try and cheat the ratings systems and somehow cash in.

"Right now, YouTube and most of these other sites are still about building an audience for something, but in the next several years, these sites will begin sharing more of the advertising revenue with content providers, which will create even greater incentives to grow traffic," Laszlo said. "This gaming is still a scattered issue versus a plague, and these companies can still handle the problem manually; but if these companies cannot develop technological means to deal with it as its grows, it will eat away at this notion of community and aggregate wisdom that these sites are trying to promote."