If you are not among the Premium subscribers, the YouTube experience has increasingly become a “parade” of advertisements at every turn. In the clip, before the clip, longer or shorter commercials but grouped in pairs. And the options to get rid of ads without paying have kind of disappeared.
Even at the risk of adding to user frustrations, Google is experimenting with new ways to display ads. And the newest “invention” are the so-called “Pause Ads”.
As the name suggests, it’s about automatically playing ads as soon as you pause the currently playing clip. It doesn’t matter that you put down your phone or leave the room where the TV running the YouTube app is located, the ads will play both on the screen and in the speakers. And in order not to be able to “sneak” the new assortment of ads, they have a minimum duration in which they run without a Skip option or the possibility to resume watching the YouTube clip by pressing the Pause button again. In addition, if the currently playing clip has been stopped long enough, it is possible that when you press the Pause button, you will be served an advertisement first, and only then you will get back to the clip you were watching.
The news was announced by Google vice president Philipp Schindler in the latest investor newsletter, where he talked about the positive results obtained in an experiment aimed at showing ads to YouTube users.
“In Q1 we saw strong traction from the introduction of a pilot of Break ads on connected TVs, a new seamless ad format that appears when users pause their organic contentSchindler noted.
According to Google’s vice president, YouTube ads displayed when using the Pause feature “deliver strong brand-building results” and “attract premium prices from advertisers.”
In corporate parlance, the new ads are likely to be shown liberally from now on, with the YouTube admin appreciating that they are left to run to the end, to the delight of advertising companies, while users watch their toilet breaks.
Schindler hasn’t confirmed a precise timeline for the full-scale rollout of YouTube ad breaks, but we can be sure they won’t be confined to the TV app for long. The nature of these ads, including duration, skippability and more, is still unclear, with Google able to adjust their formula based on the specifics of the device users are using.
