Advertising is a profitable business for many providers. YouTube has significantly increased the duration and number of advertising clips in recent years. Now the platform is planning another change that affects the display of advertising.
If you haven’t booked YouTube Premium, you will see advertising when you watch videos on the platform. This can be at the beginning of a clip or in the middle of the film. Especially on TV, advertising on YouTube can be annoying because of their frequency and the fact that they can’t be clicked away. The video platform apparently wants to make improvements here. On the Google blog informs YouTube about a test with new advertising. This could be seen less frequently in the future, but it could become longer.
YouTube is planning a new format for advertising on TVs
“Viewers expect a different advertising experience depending on the content they watch. When it comes to long-form content on TVs, 79 percent of viewers prefer video ads that are grouped together rather than spread across a video,” said Romana Pawar, director of product management at YouTube Ads. Based on this information, YouTube would like to test future advertisements that interrupt a video less frequently but are longer. With its advertising, YouTube could move closer to classic advertising on linear TV, in which several commercials are also shown one after the other.
At the same time as this adjustment, users will in future also have more insight into how long each advertising break will last. So far, they have mainly been informed about the number of interruptions that are still to come, but not about their length. As Ramona Pawar explains, specifying the total advertising duration is an explicit user request that was filtered out from feedback from thousands of viewers in dozens of markets. In the future, users will be able to skip the entire advertising block if they wait a correspondingly long time. Previously, it was only possible to skip individual spots after a few seconds.
YouTube usage on the TV is different than on the smartphone
However, the changes in advertising mentioned only affect YouTube on the television or via streaming sticks such as the Amazon Fire TV. Users’ streaming behavior is different on the large TV screen than on their smartphone. While, according to a survey, 65 percent of videos streamed on TV last at least 21 minutes or longer, users tend to watch short videos on their cell phones. More frequent and shorter advertising breaks make more sense here.
The company has not yet revealed exactly when YouTube plans to start testing and broadcast the new advertising on TV. Then it remains to be seen whether the new solution really pays off for the user. It is possible that due to the longer advertising break, he could see more advertising than before.