YouTube is bringing longer unskippable ads to its TV app, unless you’re paying for the platform’s premium subscription
YouTube says these new ad units will appear in place of two-consecutive 15-second commercials. YouTube will also start showing ads when you pause videos.
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Maybe you started watching YouTube on your connected TV as a way to avoid some of the ads. The fact is the company had not yet made such a big push to monetize its TV app. Well, that is about to change. As announced at the YouTube Brandcast event on Wednesday, YouTube will soon add 30-second unskippable ads to top-performing content watched on connected TVs.
As noted by The Verge, YouTube viewers will start seeing a single 30-second ad instead of two consecutive 15-second ads. The shorter 15-second ads will still be available for brands to purchase, alongside the new 30-second ads, via YouTube Select, a curated advertising platform that targets the top five percent of YouTube content. YouTube claims 70 percent of YouTube Select impressions come from TVs, making it the ideal 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. “Viewers — especially younger viewers — no longer make a distinction between the kind of content they’re watching.”
At Brandcast, YouTube also announced it will start showing ads when the viewer pauses a video on a connected TV. “Pause experiences” – that is how the unit is called – will appear when you pause a video and can be dismissed by selecting the “dismiss” button on screen. As per the below screenshot, “pause experiences” will shrink the pause video to accommodate enough space for a banner to be displayed next to it.
