YouTube Announces 30-Second Unskippable Ads for Connected TVs

YouTube, one of the most popular video streaming apps, shows ads to users who haven’t bought its premium subscription plan. The Google-owned company has made several changes to its plans to force users to buy a YouTube Premium subscription plan. Just recently, it announced that it will block any adblocker extension on the browser.

The company has now announced some new changes comes to its users who like to watch YouTube on TV. The changes will be coming to the ad experience for the users. Here’s everything you need to know about it.

YouTube recently hold its Brandcast 2023 event where it announced new changes coming to the platform. On its blog page, the company stated that it will now show a 30-second non-skippable ad instead of showing two 15-second ads. The company has announced that YouTube users on TV will now be able to pause ads to know more about the video.

Do note that this will be coming to TV users in the US for now. However, given its history, YouTube gradually rolls out most of its features to other regions, and we can expect this to arrive in Nigeria as well.

YouTube in its blog states that AI will allow advertisers to hit their campaign goals from reach to action. Google promoted its AI features loudly at the Google I/O 2023 and it wants advertisers to use the Google AI for all the necessary implementations. Giving an example, Google stated that Sony Electronics used Google AI to add relevant voice-over to their product ads. It saw a 25% increase in its ad recall.

Is YouTube Premium The Only Way To Avoid Ads?

Given how hard Youtube is trying to remove ad blockers and other shortcuts that block ads on YouTube, it won’t be wrong to say that buying a YouTube Premium subscription is the only way to avoid ads officially. In the past, YouTube blocked the YouTube Vanced app which was a clone of YouTube without any ads. Android users were able to watch YouTube videos without any ads seamlessly. However, it was shut down last year.

Although users could still watch YouTube without ads using an ad blocker that blocked all sorts of ads like banner ads, unskippable ads, etc. However, YouTube is now attempting to stop users from using ad-blockers.

However, if you want to shift to another browser to watch YouTube without ads, here’re some of our recommendations.

With all that said, it is now clear that YouTube wants to shift its user base to its Premium tier plan and for that, it wants to block every way that users can explore to watch YouTube without ads for free.

May 18, 2023