YouTube’s unskippable 30-second ads will go away
Sick of having to sit through 30 seconds of boring ads before your YouTube video plays? We have good news for you.
Google (GOOG) will scrap the unskippable 30-second advertisements that sometimes play before YouTube videos, BBC reports. The bad news? It’ll won’t happen until next year.
Shorter ad formats, such as ones that can be skipped after five seconds, will remain. It remains to be seen how this will impact YouTube Red, the streamer’s paid subscription service, a selling point of which is ad-free.
“We’re committed to providing a better ads experience for users online,” a Google spokesperson said, confirming the report. “As part of that, we’ve decided to stop supporting 30-second unskippable ads as of 2018.”
To the surprise of no one, most viewers are not fans of YouTube ads. In a survey done by Accenture last year, over 80 percent of respondents from various countries said they thought their online video watching was interrupted by ads too much.
It’s possible that Google is making the move after feeling heat from Facebook (FB), a company that’s been focusing more and more on video content in recent years.
Note: This story originally appeared on CNET.
