YouTube is planning to make the video-watching experience painful for its non-premium members. As part of its plans, YouTube is going to introduce 30 seconds long unskippable ads to popular videos watched on connected TVs, a report published in The Verge said. YouTube will show a single 30-second long ad instead of two back-to-back 15-second ads. However, the arrangement of two 15-second ads is not being withdrawn.
The 30-second ads will be available to advertisers via YouTube Select, a curated advertising platform. These longer ads will be reserved for the top five per cent of YouTube content, the report said.
The video-sharing platform gets 70 per cent of YouTube Select impressions from content watched on TVs, which appears to be the ideal platform to serve longer ads.
Speaking at the Brandcast event, YouTube CEO Neal Mohan said, "More and More viewers are tuning to YouTube on the biggest screen in their home."
In addition to this, YouTube is also testing ads that can be played when the viewer has paused a video on a connected TV. YouTube is calling it "pause experiences".
These ads will appear in the form of a banner around the video and YouTube will allow users to remove it using the "dismiss" button, the Verge report said. So far, there is no clarity about when these updates will be introduced.
