Unskippable ads are coming to YouTube for TVs
When you watch YouTube on your phone and PC, there are a couple of different ads that you get served. Sometimes you get two ads back to back, but these ads are short so it’s not too bad. Then you get the longer ads where you can skip it after a few seconds have passed.
Unfortunately for those who watch YouTube on their smart TVs, the experience is going to get a lot more annoying. According to YouTube’s announcement, YouTube on smart TVs will soon be getting 30-second unskippable ads for YouTube Select content, which are basically videos the company thinks are “better”.
We know that running longer-form creative on the big screen aligns with your objectives, and allows for richer storytelling. YouTube Select is now landing over 70% of impressions on the TV screen, so we’re making it easier for you to use existing assets in front of the most-streamed content.
YouTube has also announced that they will be inserting ads whenever content is paused. What happens here is that when a video has been paused, the video itself will shrink down and an ad will appear until you have unpaused it. Thankfully there will be an option to dismiss this ad.
To be fair to YouTube, ads are pretty much the platform’s main source of revenue, so for them to come up with new ways to show ads and to entice advertisers with these new ad spots are to be expected, but at the same time, we imagine that the end-users probably won’t be as thrilled.
In the meantime, YouTube had recently run an experiment in which they prevented users who are using ad blockers from watching videos on its site.
Source: YouTube