Anyone who spends time on YouTube – particularly on a smart TV – will have noticed there seems to be a lot more ads recently that can’t be skipped. 

It used to be that many of the ads could be skipped after five seconds. 

The smart brands ensured their product was front and centre in those five seconds, because they knew that unless we were interested in buying no-cost solar panels, Wix subscriptions, titanium cutting boards and not-at-all-dodgy self-publishing “opportunities”, we weren’t sticking around.

YouTube ads can run from a few seconds to minutes. And YouTube owner Google encourages people posting longer videos to jam in as many ads as possible: “Now, when you turn on ads for new long-form videos, we show your viewers pre-roll, post-roll, skippable, or non-skippable ads when appropriate. This change makes the recommended best practice to turn on all ad formats, the standard for everyone.”

Often, the longer the ad, the cheaper the ad, and the greater the chance you will have no idea what they’re actually promoting, as the ad is merely a lure to get you to click through to what is surely a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to develop a second income stream that works for you around the clock.

 

YouTube ad.

When it launched in 2005 YouTube was a platform essentially built on illegally published, copyrighted material (TV shows, movies, concerts, etc). It got away with it simply because some copyright holders didn’t care, others saw it as free promotion, and others couldn’t keep up with tracking who was posting their content without permission.

There was no future in that (as Napster learned the hard way), but over the last 19 years it has evolved into a behemoth that allows everyday people to make videos about DIY or baking or bird watching or anything else, and one that is now actively courted by record labels, TV networks and production houses.

So, do all these non-skippable ads mean YouTube is about to tighten the screws and force people to subscribe to its ad-free version?

YouTube says it isn’t removing the skip button on some ads, telling The Verge the skippable button will continue to appear on select ads.

A YouTube ad promising improved performance for men, you just need to click.

A spokesperson says YouTube is “reducing elements on the ads player” so that “viewers can engage more deeply with the ad through a cleaner experience”. What this corporate word salad means is anybody’s guess. 

“Apart from not seeing the countdown, I have also seen this terrible behaviour where you cannot know how long the ad is because the progress bar makes you think it is a short unskippable ad, but when it reaches the edge, the ad continues playing with a full yellow bar,” said one commenter on The Verge.

“So there is no distinction between short unskippable ads where you only need to wait till the end and the content you wanted starts playing, and longer ads that you need to actively press the skip button if you are not interested in the ad … you see the the bar fill up, it reaches the edge and for a few seconds you think, ‘Huh! This should have ended’. But you realise you have to tap the ad for the skip button to appear.”

YouTube has introduced the ability to show an ad while the user has the screen paused.

Late last year it moved to disrupt blockers that allow users to skip over ads.