By Sean Hollister , a senior editor and founding member of The Verge who covers gadgets, games, and toys. He spent 15 years editing the likes of CN

YouTube confirms your pause screen is now fair game for ads

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2024-09-19 01:30:01

By Sean Hollister , a senior editor and founding member of The Verge who covers gadgets, games, and toys. He spent 15 years editing the likes of CNET, Gizmodo, and Engadget.

It’s been nearly six years since we warned you that ads were coming for your pause button and 18 months since Google revealed that YouTube would serve them up, too.

Now, YouTube confirms advertisers can broadly target your paused screentime: “As we’ve seen both strong advertiser and strong viewer response, we’ve since widely rolled out Pause ads to all advertisers,” YouTube comms manager Oluwa Falodun confirms to The Verge.

Technically, YouTube started piloting pause ads in 2023 with a limited selection of advertisers, but Google chief business officer Philipp Schindler revealed this April that they were unsurprisingly a big hit with ad firms and lucrative for Google.

YouTube claims that the pause ads are actually designed to let the company offer you a “less interruptive” experience, but it didn’t tell us that its normal ads will appear any less frequently as a result. (It has experimented with longer but less frequent ads before.) The company also introduced unskippable ads in 2023.