We’ve been reporting on YouTube’s increasingly annoying ads for a long time now — plans to include unskippable TV ads early last year, followed by the arrival of longer ads on smart TVs last December, and so on. And now the streaming service has found a new way to drive YouTube Premium subscriptions: it’s going to make YouTube just a little bit more irritating.
The changes were announced earlier this year, but they're already rolling out. If you're not a Premium subscriber, you'll soon start seeing ads every time 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 full screen when you pause it, YouTube now makes your video smaller and places an ad next to it on the right side of the screen with a “dismiss” button below it.
There's good news: These ads so far appear to be static, not video. But when people talk about YouTube adding ad formats, there's often an unspoken “yet”: They're not video ads… yet; they're not full-screen… yet; YouTube isn't breaking into your apartment, kidnapping your pets, and demanding you subscribe to YouTube Premium if you want them back… yet.
As one Redditor said of Google's screenshot: “look at all that empty space on the screen where more ads could be placed.”
Is it time to skip YouTube?
These days, using smart TVs feels a bit like the urban legend of boiling a frog, where we are the frogs and the ads are the water. My experience with smart TVs has gone from being virtually ad-free to becoming increasingly intrusive, even on services I pay for.
I don't currently pay for YouTube on my TV, and it's gotten to the point where the amount of ads means that, for me at least, it's almost unusable.
The other night I inadvertently started watching a live concert and it didn't even manage to play a full song before interrupting with ads. I'm sure that for some people, more ads will push them to subscribe to Premium (which currently costs $13.99 / £12 / AU$16.99 per month).
But for me, it just makes me less likely to watch anything and moves me away from my smart TV's built-in apps and 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 amount of ads popping up unpredictably.
