We previously wrote about how YouTube is the new lord of the living room. TV now represents the biggest slice of the pie as far as how people watch YouTube, displacing mobile devices and PCs, at least in the US. If you’re among those who mainly watch YouTube from a sofa, your viewing experience may soon become a little worse.
Google just announced via blog post that it has now begun rolling out unskippable ads globally on YouTube on TVs. Google AI will optimize the ads so that they’re shown to the right viewers at the right time.
These unskippable ads will be 30 seconds long and will serve alongside the 6-second and 15-second ads that are already being shown.
Unskippable ads are one of the biggest reasons why people use ad blockers on YouTube. If you don’t block ads, you might also want to consider a YouTube Premium Lite plan, which is actually now worth the $8/month with recent changes that added offline downloads and background playback on top of the (mostly) ad-free viewing.