- by foxnews
- 12 Nov 2024
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.
Last week, Redditors started posting that the pause ads seemed to be rolling out more widely, as noted by 9to5Google.
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.
YouTube follows Hulu and AT&T in selling pause ads; Sling TV also just introduced pause ads in July, though at the time, you could turn them off from the settings menu.
In a surprising twist for Australia’s wildlife scene, an emperor penguin has been spotted on Ocean Beach in Denmark, Western Australia, marking the first recorded sighting of this Antarctic species on the continent. This lone traveler, affectionately nicknamed Gus, has astonished locals and raised questions about the environmental forces that might have led him so far from his icy home. Discovered on November 1, Gus’s unexpected appearance, 2,200 miles from his native Antarctic habitat, has captivated wildlife enthusiasts, tourists, and scientists alike, highlighting the broader implications of climate change and shifts in marine currents.
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