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Alphabet’s YouTube already delivers adverts throughout a video and even when the video is finished, but now advertisers will be able to broadly target entertainment when it is paused.
The Verge reported that the development was confirmed to it by YouTube comms manager Oluwa Falodun, who claimed both strong advertiser and strong viewer response as the justification.
It comes despite the fact that Alphabet in July during its second quarter earnings release, had revealed that revenues from YouTube ads had risen 13 percent to $8.7bn (up from $7.7bn last year).
Now it seems that YouTube is expanding the opportunities for where advertisers can place their content during the video.
“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 confirmed to The Verge.
According to the Verge, YouTube had begun 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.
9to5Google reported that Redditors last week started posting that the pause ads seemed to be rolling out more widely on YouTube.
YouTube claims that the pause ads are actually designed to offer the user a “less interruptive” experience, but the video channel didn’t tell the Verge whether its normal ads will appear any less frequently as a result.
YouTube has reportedly experimented with longer but less frequent ads before. It also introduced ads that cannot be skipped in 2023.
Of course, YouTube viewers can opt out of adverts on the platform by purchasing a premium subscription.
In the UK a YouTube premium subscription costs £11.99 per month.
YouTuber and right to repair champion Louis Rossmann has previously published videos on YouTube justifying those users utilising adblockers to avoid adverts on the platform.
But the Rossmann video about this was subsequently removed from the site for breaching the platform’s terms of service policies.
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