YouTube is currently waging a war against users who try to escape ads on the platform without buying a Premium subscription. Recently, YouTube started slowing down video playback for users with adblockers to discourage them from blocking ads.
As the latest move in this fight, YouTube has made the ‘skip ad’ button smaller in size to make it difficult for its users to avoid advertisements. This new design was spotted under testing a few weeks back, and it looks like YouTube has started rolling out the harder-to-skip ads model to all users.
YouTube Is Pushing Ads Aggressively
YouTube has reduced the size of the Skip Ads button on its website, to make it harder to skip advertisements. Not just this, the new skip button is also slightly more transparent, making it difficult to even spot the button sometimes.
The video streaming platform has been pulling every trick up its sleeve to drive more ad-revenue. This is despite of YouTube being a profitable business. The company has also increased the number of unskippable ads on the platform as reported by some users.
YouTube also introduced consecutive unskippable ads before videos, which annoyed its free users even further. This has led to a case-and-mouse chase between viewers and YouTube where users are trying to avoid ads using ad-blockers, while YouTube is disrupting the video playback experience for adblocking users.
The new smaller Skip button for ads is expected to increase the average watch time of ads on the platform, and also drive higher ad enagement rates. However, users are not happy with this move and are expressing their displeasure on social media against YouTube.
YouTube Really Wants You To Buy Premium Subscription
While ad-revenue can sometimes fluctuate and depend on advertisors, a recurring paying subscriber of YouTube Premium is more valuable for the platform. Hence, YouTube has been trying to promote its Premium subscription by offering extended free trials.
YouTube is also partnering with some Android phone OEMs to offer 3 months of free YouTube Premium on purchasing a new smartphone. The company also launched a scheme recently offering 1 free month of Premium for users who set up the membership using UPI Autopay Mandates.
Last year, YouTube also launched a referral program where users would get up to 12 months of free Premium subscription on succesfully referring a friend to the membership. YouTube is now also increasing the number of features of its Premium subscription and recently introduced Playables, which are interactiuve games that can be played on mobile and TV.
YouTube’s constant measures to fight adblockers, design changes to make ir harder to skip ads, and extensive promotions of its Premium membership clearly means that the platform is now looking for recurring paid viewers, rather than being heavily dependent on ad revenue.
