If you’ve used the YouTube app on your smart TV before, you may have noticed an annoying advertising policy. Users who are not YouTube Premium subscribers frequently encounter ads at very short intervals when accessing YouTube on their smart TVs, which significantly diminishes the viewing experience. The platform is now looking to address this issue.

Youtube is changing its advertising policy on CTV’s

YouTube is testing a different approach to its ads on devices like smart TVs, Apple TV, and gaming consoles. The platform is experimenting with longer but less frequent ad breaks on Connected TV (CTV) devices. The main idea here is to make ads more in line with the viewing experience on every platform where you watch YouTube.

You might be inclined to watch shorter content like Shorts on mobile devices. Therefore, shorter and quicker ad breaks may make more sense. However, when it comes to the TV portion, you typically don’t watch such short content on this platform. YouTube states that the average watch time on CTV devices in the U.S. is approximately 21 minutes. It doesn’t make sense to have short ad breaks in content of this length.

YouTube mentioned that there was research indicating that 79% of viewers would prefer YouTube to group ads in a long video rather than spreading them out. In other words, the ad policy will resemble what you experience with TV shows. You won’t see ads for a long time, but when you do, it will be a series of ads that are longer in duration.

YouTube believes that minimizing interruptions is the way to go and thinks that having longer but less frequent ad breaks makes sense. The specifics of how YouTube plans to implement this change are not yet clear. For example, will they provide a four-minute ad per hour instead of four separate one-minute ads? Additionally, it hasn’t been specified whether this approach will result in an overall increase or decrease in the number of ads shown.