no more Overlay Ads in YouTube Videos

[phranque]

Starting on April 6th, 2023, the “Overlay ads” ad format will no longer appear on YouTube to help improve the viewer experience and shift engagement to higher performing ad formats on desktop and mobile devices. Overlay ads are a legacy ad format that only served on desktop and are disruptive for viewers. We expect to see limited impact for most creators as engagement shifts to other ad formats.

source (YouTube Help Community manager's post): Optimizing ad formats - overlay ads are going away in April [support.google.com]

in my experience, mid-roll ads are far more disruptive than overlays, but that's a sample of one.
expect to see more (pre/mid/post)-roll ads...

[engine]

in my experience, mid-roll ads are far more disruptive than overlays

I completely agree. Overlays are far less disruptive.

I have, more often than not, quit the video entirely with mid-roll ads, which can also be repetitive, and irrelevant. I tend to ignore them, whereas overlays often sat there for a while, although sometimes the content of the overlay was questionable.

In addition, I think mid-roll hurts the creator more, imho.

[Swanny007]

I finally broke down last month and paid for YouTube premium simply because the amount of ads was p1ssing me off on a daily basis. It made many videos unwatchable. The last thing I wanted to do was pay for premium because it's a bit of scam, but I caved. I am glad to not see any ads now.

[engine]

@Swanny007
Indeed, and it's gotten out of hand.

I can think of ads that would still appear but not interrupt, but they don't run those. I'm not going to give G a clue because last time I mentioned something (long time back) of this nature they started using it.

[tangor]

Heh. We all want ads to work on our stuff.

But we don't want ads on what WE want to view (personally).

Beauty is you can have the best of both worlds, one facing with ads embraced, and a second that is ads free. That's why ad blockers exist.

While g is testing the patience of users with "how many ads are too many", you COULD be getting the info/video without ads without waiting for g to implode on the "too many side"...

</irony

[Swanny007]

Hey I get it, I've been making ad revenue since about 2000. But when I get 30 seconds of non-skippable ads every 3 minutes on average, not all videos but frequent I just had enough. If there was a free YouTube Adblock for Apple TV I could have saved some money LOL.

On my sites personally I don't care if people use Adblocks, I just wish *most* people don't use Adblocks ;)