As if watching YouTube with all its ads wasn’t already annoying enough, it will get more frustrating. This is of course to convince you to pay for the ad-free service that they offer if you haven’t already paid for it. Announced at the YouTube Brandcast event on Wednesday, YouTube will soon add 30-second unskippable ads to top-performing content watched on connected TVs.
YouTube has announced that instead of two back-to-back 15-second ads, viewers will now encounter a single 30-second ad. However, this doesn’t mean that the shorter ads will disappear completely. The option to run 30-second ads will be exclusive to advertisers using YouTube Select, a carefully curated advertising platform that focuses on the top five percent of YouTube content.
YouTube claims that a significant portion (70 percent) of YouTube Select impressions are generated from TV viewership, making it an optimal platform for longer ads.
“More and more, viewers are tuning into YouTube on the biggest screen in their home,” said YouTube CEO Neal Mohan during the Brandcast event (seen via Variety). “Viewers — especially younger viewers — no longer make a distinction between the kind of content they’re watching.”
YouTube also announced that it would start testing ads that appear when the viewer pauses a video on a connected TV. It’s similar to the pause ad feature Hulu rolled out a few years ago and has been dubbed “pause experiences” by YouTube.
YouTube’s pause ads will appear as a banner around the video and can be removed by selecting the “dismiss” button as seen by an example image published by AdWeek,
A screenshot of a YouTube video with an example of a YouTube pause ad overlayed around it.
The specific timeline for the introduction of these changes, such as the implementation of 30-second unskippable ads and pause ads, has not been disclosed by YouTube. We have reached out to YouTube for more information and will provide an update if we receive a response.b
