Small businesses are known for making low-budget television advertisements. Now YouTube is encouraging those same mom-and-pop shops to take their homegrown commercials — and ad dollars — to its platform.

On Monday, YouTube plans to announce a program it hopes will position the company as a major player in the market for small-business video advertising.

A blog post announcing the news and written by Baljeet Singh, a group product manager at YouTube, cites the company’s growing audience. “With a global audience of 800 million monthly visitors to YouTube, every day can feel like you’re advertising in the Super Bowl, and one video can launch a business,” Mr. Singh wrote.

Many small businesses already buy search advertising on Google, which owns YouTube, by bidding on key words and setting the budget they are willing to spend.

YouTube will now allow small businesses a similar option with Google AdWords for video. Advertisers will be able to buy and manage key words for video ads from the same online tool used for search and display ads. They will still be able to bid on key words and will pay only when their ads are watched.

A baker who makes a video ad about his bakery, for example, can buy words like “baking,” “cookies” and “cake,” and his video ad will show up when someone does a search for those terms on YouTube. The baker will also be able to see how many people have watched the video, visited the bakery’s Web site or subscribed to the baker’s YouTube channel.

For start-ups and other small businesses, having a potential audience the size of the Super Bowl’s without paying Super Bowl ad prices is an attractive proposition. To entice advertisers to create their own ads and buy ad space, YouTube is offering $50 million in free advertising to 500,000 companies. Companies that are new to YouTube AdWords will receive a $75 credit toward advertising on the site.

YouTube has also selected a group of nine small-business owners to be marketing “ambassadors.”

The businesses include a vintage-inspired clothing retailer called ModCloth, a knitting instruction site called Verypink.com and a site called BBQGuys.com that sells outdoor grills and accessories. The ambassadors will also be hosts of a Google Plus hangout, sharing their YouTube advertising experiences with other small businesses.