More ads are coming to YouTube – this time to your pause screen

Shortly after announcing a new picture-in-picture ad format that would play without interrupting the main video, YouTube is introducing another style of ads.

This time, commercials are coming to your pause screen.

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Pause screen ads have been in various testing stages for a while now, but it was only this week that YouTube rolled them out on a wide scale. The streaming video giant hasn’t officially confirmed the new ads, but did tell The Verge, “As we’ve seen both strong advertiser and strong viewer response, we’ve since widely rolled out Pause ads to all advertisers.”

Under the new ad format, when you pause a video, what you’re watching shrinks to a small box and a large advertisement appears. There’s a “dismiss” button at the bottom to return to the video, or you can just hit play to get going again.

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The new ads won’t appear every time you pause. Like other formats, it depends on what kind of ads the video creator has enabled. For now, the ads are appearing on TVs and browsers. It’s not clear if pause ads will hit mobile devices as well. 

Pause screen ads aren’t new in the streaming world. Hulu has used them for more than five years now, and Peacock, Max, Roku, and AT&T also display them. But for a service that it seems is continually introducing more and more ads, the pause screen intrusion might be enough to drive some viewers away (I can see it being especially frustrating if you’re pausing the video to take a closer look at something).

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This is just the latest step in the site’s battle to balance ads.  Earlier this year, the site decided to crack down on third-party ad-blockers to make sure commercials were being seen. Of course, YouTube’s hope is that you’re interacting with (or at least tolerating) the ads or choosing to pay $13.99 a month for a Premium subscription that takes away all ads.