If you thought YouTube’s preroll and midroll ads were already too much, then you’re going to love the next monetization strategy that it’s seemingly cooking up: pause-screen ads.
This idea has already been trialed on some YouTube TV apps. As the name suggests, when you pause a video, rather than the app laying dormant while it waits for you to return, the app instead shrinks the video and starts showing you an advertisement next to it until you hit play again.
During Alphabet’s recent quarterly investor call (via Android Authority), Google’s Chief business officer Philipp Schindler praised the ad format, saying “In Q1, we saw strong traction from the introduction of a pause ads pilot on connected TVs.”
Given the positive things Schindler had to say, it seems likely that the trial will roll out more widely to other YouTube TV apps soon, and maybe even other versions of YouTube.
YouTube wouldn’t be the first streaming platform to introduce pause ads. These new forms of commercial break are already found on Hulu, Max and Peacock, and have been a feature of these services for years.
Pause ads, admittedly, aren’t all bad. An obvious advantage for the watcher is they aren’t interrupting your viewing experience unless you actively choose to pause – maybe to take a bathroom break or restock your snacks. On the flipside, we doubt they’ll replace more disruptive mid-roll ads; instead they’ll likely just appear alongside them.
Again, you could see this as the price of enjoying YouTube’s free platform, but you could more cynically see it as the platform making the experience worse to push you into paying for Premium – perhaps even justifying higher Premium prices, given that the alternative is an ad-ridden minefield of marketing.
There’s no word yet on when a wider pause-ads release might happen on YouTube, but it would be yet another example of the increasing ad infestation we’re seeing everywhere – which recently saw Roku bring its first video ads to its TV OS home screen. And if it continues to prove successful for the streaming platforms then you might want to prepare to see pause ads on even more of the best streaming services in the future.
