December 15, 2023, 3:35 pm | Read time: 3 minutes
Advertising is a lucrative business for many providers. In recent years, YouTube has significantly increased the duration and number of ad clips. Now, the platform has implemented another change regarding the display of ads.
Unless you have subscribed to YouTube Premium, you will see ads when watching videos on the platform. These can appear both at the beginning of a clip and in the middle of a video. Especially on TV, the frequency of ads on YouTube and the fact that they cannot be skipped can be annoying. The video platform aims to improve this. In September, YouTube informed via the Google Blog about a test with new ads. This test is now complete, and the change has been implemented. Users will now see longer ad displays.
YouTube Implements New Ad Format on TVs
“Viewers expect different ad experiences depending on the content they are watching. When it comes to long content on TVs, 79 percent of viewers prefer video ads that are grouped together rather than spread out over a video,” said Romana Pawar, Director of Product Management at YouTube Ads. Based on this information, YouTube has tested future ad displays that interrupt a video less frequently but are longer. YouTube is thus moving its advertising closer to traditional linear TV advertising, where multiple commercials are shown consecutively.
Along with this adjustment, users will also gain more insight into how long each ad break will last. A countdown in the lower right corner will indicate the remaining duration of the interruption. Previously, users were mainly informed about the number of upcoming interruptions, not their length.
As Ramona Pawar explains, providing the total ad duration was an explicit user request that emerged from feedback from thousands of viewers in dozens of markets. In the future, users will be able to skip the entire ad block if they wait a sufficiently long time. Previously, it was only possible to skip individual spots after a few seconds.
YouTube Shorts on TV Will Also Feature Ads in the Future
The mentioned changes in advertising only affect YouTube on televisions or through streaming sticks like the Amazon Fire TV. On the large TV screen, user streaming behavior is different from that on smartphones. According to a survey, 65 percent of videos streamed on TV are at least 21 minutes or longer, while users tend to watch shorter videos on their phones. Therefore, more frequent and shorter ad interruptions are more sensible here.
Read also: YouTube Introduces New Features – What Users Should Know
YouTube has long included ads in vertical short clips, known as YouTube Shorts. Until now, there were no ads for this format on TV. But that is changing now. In the future, YouTube will also show ads when playing Shorts on TV. The short clips have gained increasing popularity on YouTube, making the ad displays highly lucrative for the platform.