YouTube is making important changes to the ad controls available to content creators. YouTube will no longer offer individual ad controls in YouTube Studio for pre-roll, post-roll, skippable, and non-skippable advertisements on new videos beginning in November, according to a company support document authored by “Rob,” a member of the YouTube team.
Instead, creators will only have the option to enable or disable advertising before or after a video. YouTube will choose whether to display pre-roll, post-roll, skippable, or non-skippable advertisements “when appropriate” if you enable these ads, as stated in another support document.
YouTube argues that this will not be a major issue. In the past year, more than 90 percent of long-form videos that were enabled for monetization at the time of publication had pre-roll, post-roll, skippable, and non-skippable ads enabled. However, this impending change may be disappointing for creators who desire greater control over the types of advertisements their viewers may see.
YouTube is also introducing several new mid-roll advertising options. For live streams, creators will be able to view a 60-second countdown before an ad appears, with the option to skip the commercial. The creators of live broadcasts will also have the ability to delay mid-roll advertisements by 10 minutes. YouTube says that in the future, creators of long-form videos will be able to choose between automated and manually selected mid-roll ad breaks; currently, only one option is available.
The YouTube ad changes follow news of the company’s experiments with extended but less frequent ad breaks on connected televisions. The company has also announced 30-second advertisements that cannot be skipped when viewing YouTube on a connected television and is experimenting with disabling videos for ad blocker users.
