Good news for anyone who's seen the unskippable ads on YouTube and thought, “Man, I really wish I could have this unpleasant experience on my TV”: Google will answer your prayers by adding mandatory ads to free content on Google. Accessories for TV and smart TVs.
The ads are part of a new advertising network called Google TV Network, and will reach a wide range of brands that use Google's TV platform, including many household names such as Sony, Hisense and TCL. Currently, the platform reaches more than 20 million active users each month not only on Google TV devices but also on Android and Chromecast hardware.
Google TV Network will bring your ads to the integrated streaming channels offered by Google TV.
What do Google's advertising plans mean for your Google TV experience?
New ad formats include non-skippable video ads, like those beloved by all YouTube viewers, as well as mandatory “bumpers” that play before or after a video and can last up to six seconds. Google promises that more ad formats will arrive in the not-too-distant future.
The ads arrive on free channels, known as FAST (Free Ad-Supported Television), which means we can't complain: the ads are mentioned right there in the category, and it's what pays for the content to be delivered free of charge. To you.
The FAST sector is growing very quickly, especially in the US: according to Google, American users of its free Google TV channels watch an average of 75 minutes of programs per day. That's about two columbos either Murder she wrotes. By the end of 2023, one in three American viewers subscribed to some FAST services; Amazon's Freevee was the fastest growing, but FAST offerings from Pluto, Tubi, Roku and others were also growing, shall we say, rapidly. That adoption has undoubtedly been helped by price increases for streaming services: with the cost of streaming rising, free, ad-supported channels look much more tempting.
And the nature of FAST means the new advertising platform might not be too intrusive. FAST channels generally offer fairly low-quality content that has a lot of repetitions, programs that were usually structured for networks that already included commercial breaks in each program. And it tends to be the type of TV you have on in the background while you do something else, so the ads probably won't be as annoying as they are on more premium products *cough* main video *cough*.
