Home > News

Prepare for Ads When You Pause YouTube Videos

By Charlie Fripp
Youtube Featured

Plenty of people watch YouTube videos on mobile devices or a computer and have to deal with sporadic advertising popping up at the beginning. But if you primarily watch YouTube on your TV through an installed app or gaming console, you’ll be getting longer ads – even when you pause a video.

Tip: did you know that you can download YouTube music on Windows? We show you how.

Forced Ads on YouTube

When using a social media platform or video-sharing service, you expect a certain amount of advertising. It’s part and parcel of how these platforms work, with advertising often being the biggest generator of revenue.

This is especially prominent on YouTube, where users can see as many as three or four ads in a single video. However, those are usually about 15 seconds in length, and you can skip them after watching about 5 to 10 seconds. Of course, there are also ad blockers for mobile and desktop browsers that completely remove the ads.

Youtube
Image source: Unsplash

While it didn’t specifically mention ad blockers as the reason, YouTube revealed that it would soon start introducing unskippable 30-second ads for users who watch videos on a TV. This will initially happen when watching “top-performing YouTube content” from creators who signed up for YouTube Select, a new advertising platform. The platform initially had 30-second ad slots but phased it out in 2018.

These details were announced at the YouTube Brandcast event. It was explained that users will also start seeing advertising when they pause a video. For now, these ads are dismissed by clicking on a button, but they could also be made unskippable in the future. It’s not as intrusive as it sounds, as the pause ads are essentially a graphical overlay, similar to what many streamers use to promote their other channels or contact details.

There is no definitive date yet for when the YouTube pause ads will roll out. YouTube has only mentioned that it could roll out toward the end of this year or early next year.

Good to know: looking for something a bit different? Check out these YouTube alternatives.

Image credit: Unsplash

Subscribe to our newsletter!

Our latest tutorials delivered straight to your inbox

Charlie Fripp Avatar
Charlie Fripp
Charlie Fripp is a technology writer with a strong focus on consumer gadgets, video games, and cyber security. He holds an undergraduate degree in professional journalism and has worked as a journalist for over 15 years. In his spare time, he enjoys playing various musical instruments and gardening.

Read next

When the SS Great Eastern laid the first working transatlantic telegraph cable in 1866, a message that had taken ten days by steamship suddenly crossed the ocean in minutes, and the financial markets of London and New York were forced, within a single trading week, to invent the modern concept of synchronised global price.
From below of blue starry sky over radio telescope and trees with leaves
The Big Ear telescope was scanning at 1420.4056 megahertz on the night of 15 August 1977, the exact frequency at which hydrogen atoms vibrate across the universe, because Giuseppe Cocconi and Philip Morrison had argued years earlier that any species trying to be found would broadcast on that channel — and then, for 72 seconds, something did.
In 2016, archaeologists dated two rings of snapped stalagmites in France’s Bruniquel Cave to 176,500 years ago, evidence that Neanderthals had walked 336 metres into darkness with fire and built architecture deep underground long before modern humans reached Europe
Otto von Bismarck was 74 when Germany adopted the world’s first national old-age social insurance program in 1889, setting the pension age at 70 after years of fighting socialists with bans, laws, and a promise few workers would live long enough to use
When cosmonaut Valeri Polyakov stepped out of his Soyuz capsule in March 1995 after 437 consecutive days aboard Mir, doctors recorded him at several centimetres above his pre-flight height, and his spine had become so unaccustomed to gravity that the recovery team carried him to a chair rather than risk the compression of letting him walk.
When Bell Labs engineer Karl Jansky pointed a rotating antenna at the sky in 1932 looking for sources of transatlantic radio static, he kept picking up a faint hiss that peaked every 23 hours and 56 minutes, and he eventually realized he had become the first human to hear the center of the Milky Way.
A contemplative scene with two scientists in a vintage laboratory setting.
When Harvard astronomer Cecilia Payne submitted her 1925 doctoral thesis arguing that the Sun was made almost entirely of hydrogen, the field’s senior figure Henry Norris Russell talked her into adding a line calling the result ‘almost certainly not real,’ and then published the same conclusion himself four years later to widespread acclaim.
When seismic waves from the Chicxulub impact reached what is now North Dakota roughly ten minutes after the asteroid struck, they appear to have triggered a ten-metre standing wave in an inland river that flung fish onto the bank and buried them under glass beads still falling from the sky.