February 26, 2025, 10:50 am | Read time: 3 minutes
If you use YouTube without a paid subscription, you have to watch advertising and hope that it doesn’t bother you too much. The company would now like to fulfill this wish.
There are many useful and entertaining offers on the Internet, but not everything is available for free anymore. Nowadays, it is normal to have to create user accounts and, if necessary, take out a paid subscription for the best experience. If you don’t pay, you are either left out or have to accept compromises — such as advertising. These ads can sometimes be very annoying if they are too long or appear too often. At least YouTube will now display fewer ads that disrupt the viewing experience.
How to Make YouTube Advertising Less Annoying
Many users know the annoyance: you are watching an interesting or exciting video, and suddenly, sometimes in the middle of a spoken sentence, an advertisement appears. Many people find this particularly annoying, and the placement in dramatic moments can also seem very inappropriate. In the worst case, this can even cause users to simply stop watching the video, which is not in the interests of either the creators or YouTube itself.
This is why the company responsible, Google, has announced new changes to YouTube advertising. A help page states that it will begin improving the quality of ads in the middle of videos from May 12, 2025. To this end, they will be played more frequently during “natural interruptions,” such as pauses or transitions.
Less Disruptive Does Not Automatically Mean Fewer YouTube Ads
The mention of “more frequently” is important here. This at least gives the impression that the less disruptive YouTube ads will not completely replace other ads but will merely act as a more pleasant counterbalance. It is not clear from the article whether the total number of ad breaks will change.
The change will not only apply to videos uploaded from May 12 but also to certain existing content published before February 24, 2025. Content creators who previously inserted commercials manually will then have to pay attention to a change. In their older videos, additional, automatically running ads will then also appear at natural interruptions. Those affected can switch this off manually so that they can continue to decide on advertising in their content themselves.
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In addition, video creators will have the opportunity to receive feedback from users, specifically regarding the YouTube advertising used. This should enable them to find out whether the placements are perceived as annoying and to make appropriate improvements.
In the recent past, YouTube advertising has been the subject of outraged voices from users, especially as it has increased in quantity. For example, the fact that YouTube shows advertisements when playback is paused was a source of annoyance.