Google is doing everything it can to encourage us to use YouTube Premium, the paid version of the popular platform. Now it turns out that the company has found a new way to discourage us from using the free version of the website.
It will no longer be the creators, but YouTube who will decide about advertising
Google announced on its website that it is changing its rules for managing ads when showing videos. Until now, creators who turned on monetization (earning money from their materials) could decide whether the viewer would see ads before, during and after the screening and whether they could be skipped. Now YouTube will decide when and how many ads will appear, and whether they will be skippable or not.
“We are simplifying the choice of pre-roll or post-roll ad formats to increase creator revenue,” it said. Starting in November, YouTube will always show ads before and after videos, even if the creator would prefer not to. What’s more, these ads will be both skippable (after 5 seconds) and unskippable. The non-skippable ones will be 15 or 20 seconds long (depending on the country), and 30 seconds on TVs. Creators will only be able to decide whether advertisements can be displayed during the screening. So they will still have the option to turn off these cutscenes.
The new rules will only apply to newly added videos. In the case of those already present on the platform, the settings will not be changed unless the creator himself decides to change the rules for monetizing a given material. According to Google, the changes will only apply to “long” videos, but the company has not specified which materials will be treated as long.
In practice, in line with the platform’s recent decisions, we can expect even more ads on YouTube. This is another “argument” from Google that is supposed to convince us to buy the Premium version of the platform. In June YouTube Previously, Google preferred more subtle methods. For example, it has added a lot of features to YouTube Premium (including downloading videos to the device’s memory) that make using the website much more convenient.
Source: Gazeta
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