YouTube confirms your pause screen is now fair game for ads

[bnew]

YouTube confirms your pause screen is now fair game for ads

“We’ve since widely rolled out Pause ads to all advertisers.”

www.theverge.com

YouTube confirms your pause screen is now fair game for ads​

Google started testing them in 2023 and found them lucrative.​

By Sean Hollister, a senior editor and founding member of The Verge who covers gadgets, games, and toys. He spent 15 years editing the likes of CNET, Gizmodo, and Engadget.
Sep 18, 2024, 4:14 PM EDT

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

It’s been nearly six years since we warned you that ads were coming for your pause button and 18 months since Google revealed that YouTube would serve them up, too.

Now, YouTube confirms advertisers can broadly target your paused screentime: “As we’ve seen both strong advertiser and strong viewer response, we’ve since widely rolled out Pause ads to all advertisers,” YouTube comms manager Oluwa Falodun confirms to The Verge.

Technically, YouTube started piloting pause ads in 2023 with a limited selection of advertisers, but Google chief business officer Philipp Schindler revealed this April that they were unsurprisingly a big hit with ad firms and lucrative for Google.

Last week, Redditors started posting that the pause ads seemed to be rolling out more widely, as noted by 9to5Google.

I paused my video and this showed up
byu/Pale_Baker3255 inyoutube

Ads show up when you pause now?
byu/megaoscar900 inyoutube

WHY DOES AN AD POP UP EVERY TIME I PAUSE
byu/Jeter_3000 inyoutube

YouTube claims that the pause ads are actually designed to let the company offer you a “less interruptive” experience, but it didn’t tell us that its normal ads will appear any less frequently as a result. (It has experimented with longer but less frequent ads before.) The company also introduced unskippable ads in 2023.

YouTube follows Hulu and AT&T in selling pause ads; Sling TV also just introduced pause ads in July, though at the time, you could turn them off from the settings menu.

 

[Paper Boi]

were they actually successful at preventing people from using adblockers?

i just got premium when they started trying because i didn't feel like dealing with that shyt

 

[JadeB]

Pause screen

 

[Wiseborn]

Pipe Pipe and Clear Tube for the win

 

[Damnshow]

were they actually successful at preventing people from using adblockers?

i just got premium when they started trying because i didn't feel like dealing with that shyt

I still got adblock working fine on desktop version

And there are ways for me to block ads on mobile version as well

I could pay for premium, but youtube has deleted so much good old shyt, thanks to their dumb policy, I just refuse to support their platform with any kind of money.

 

[Artificial Intelligence]

 

[MajesticLion]

Pause at will

 

[Gloxina]

were they actually successful at preventing people from using adblockers?

i just got premium when they started trying because i didn't feel like dealing with that shyt

I was about to say, I might be willing to say f it and pay for premium. If I get ads during pauses I might break whatever phone/device I’m using lol

 

[7th Letter Specialist]

Yea. That shyt is mainey. It gets ridiculous if you click on a timestamp in the comments

 

[KingDanz]

good for content creators

 

[bnew]

 

[blues_funk_reggae]

were they actually successful at preventing people from using adblockers?

i just got premium when they started trying because i didn't feel like dealing with that shyt

I just pulled up youtube on both Brave and Firefox, and got zero ads.

 

[keond]

I hate capitalism, soul sucking vultures

 

[bnew]

 

[richaveli83]

were they actually successful at preventing people from using adblockers?

i just got premium when they started trying because i didn't feel like dealing with that shyt

I've been using premium for a few years now and it's a much better experience. Yeah I could do the whole different browser and ad block or whatever but it's inconvenient when trying to watch YouTube on my TV and on my PS4 or PS5. Plus I set my VPN to a foreign country so I'm only paying like $5 a month.

I watch a lot of youtube when I'm working at night so it's worth it.