The odds of someone using an adblocker when browsing the internet are high. If you use one yourself, then there’s a high chance that browsing YouTube, the second most popular website on the internet, prompted you to use one. YouTube’s main bread and butter are ads, the most annoying of which appear at the start of a video, requiring you to wait out the add or click the skip button after five seconds.
But that may no longer be true, come 2018. Google, the parent company of YouTube have announced that it will end non-skippable 30-second ads that appear before a video next year. The main reasoning behind it appears to be giving users a better experience.
“We’re committed to providing a better ads experience for users online. As part of that, we’ve decided to stop supporting 30-second unskippable ads as of 2018 and focus instead on formats that work well for both users and advertisers.”
However, while Google has now set in motion the death of 30-second ads, that doesn’t mean shorter versions won’t be going away. The preset formats of 15-second and 20-second ads will more likely stick around and there will more likely be an introduction of ads in other varying lengths.
Whether it will make a difference to the millions who have long employed ad blockers is unlikely, but it is likely that YouTube is trying to reclaim some of its lost revenue by doing away with the longer, more annoying ads. In the meantime, we can await the roll-out of YouTube’s in-app messaging feature.
