We've been reporting on YouTube's increasingly annoying ads for a long time now: the plans for unskippable TV ads from early last year, followed by the arrival of longer ads on smart TVs last December, and so on. And now the streamer has found a new way to really push those YouTube Premium subscriptions – it's going to make YouTube a bit more irritating.
The changes were announced earlier this year but they're rolling out now. If you're not a Premium subscriber, you'll soon start to see ads whenever you pause a YouTube video on your TV. As 9to5Google reports, it appears to be a limited rollout so far: the only advertiser that appears to be showing up is Dunkin Donuts.
Instead of keeping your video fullscreen when you pause, YouTube now makes your video smaller and puts an advert beside it on the right of the screen with a "dismiss" button below it.
There is some good news: these ads so far appear to be static, not video. But when you're talking about YouTube adding ad formats there tends to be an unspoken 'yet': they're not video ads... yet; they're not fullscreen... yet; YouTube isn't sneaking into your apartment, kidnapping your pets and demanding you subscribe to YouTube Premium if you want them back... yet.
As one Redditor said about the Google screenshot, "look at all that empty space on the screen where more ads can be placed".
Time to skip YouTube?
Using smart TVs these days does feel rather like the urban legend of boiling a frog, with us as the frogs and ads as the water. My smart TV experience has gone from being largely ad-free to increasingly intrusive, even on services I pay for.
I don't currently pay for YouTube on my TV, and it's already reached the point where the amount of ads means that, for me at least, it's bordering on unusable.
I idly started watching a live concert the other evening and it didn't even manage to play one full song before interrupting with advertising. I'm sure that for some people, more ads will indeed push them towards a Premium sub (which currently costs $13.99 / £12 / AU$16.99 a month).
But for me, it just makes me less likely to watch anything at all, and drives me from my smart TV's built-in apps towards something more viewer-friendly – like the best streaming services, or even some of the best free streaming services that don't have an excessive number of ads that pop up unpredictably.
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