YouTube will remove the unskippable 30-second pre-roll ads that accompany many of the videos on its platform, but it’s not all good news as the format isn’t going away entirely.
Google confirmed the move to Campaign, essentially acknowledging that the format doesn’t work well for users and that as of 2018, it’ll no longer be offered to advertisers to improve the overall experience.
Unfortunately, that doesn’t mean the end of unskippable ads altogether, and the shorter 15 and 20 second slots will still be shown before and mid video content, but at least the longest ones will have gone.
In the UK particularly, the ability to avoid ads would be less of an issue if YouTube offered its YouTube Red subscription service, which brings a couple of additional features and removes all the ads from the platform, but it’s currently only available to users in the US.
With Facebook, and to a lesser extent Twitter, both having their own video ambitions, focusing on user experience to retain its dominance in the market is probably a smart move at this point.
