Watching ads on YouTube has long been a part of daily life for most users. Whether you like it or hate it, it is difficult to completely avoid ads as long as you don’t pay to subscribe to YouTube Premium. In recent years, instead of making ads less distracting, Google has continued to experiment with new ad formats, some of which make the viewing experience even more disturbing. Now, YouTube has launched a new ad format in live broadcasts on mobile devices. Although it does not directly cover the screen, it does come with a rather obvious limitation.
YouTube’s new live ads solve one problem while creating another
Earlier this week, some users discovered that YouTube was testing a new way of presenting live broadcast ads. The ads no longer appear in full-screen or interrupted form, but are placed below the live broadcast screen and played simultaneously with the live broadcast content. In other words, the live broadcast screen still operates normally at the top, while the advertisements occupy the lower area in the form of banners. At first glance, this design seems less intrusive than before and more in line with the appeal of “uninterrupted live broadcast.”
In fact, Google has introduced similar live advertising formats on the desktop and TV versions of YouTube more than a year ago. However, according to Android Authority Confirmation, this feature has only recently begun to be rolled out to mobile devices. This means that viewers who use mobile phones or tablets to watch live broadcasts in the future will gradually encounter this new type of advertising.
YouTube now plays ads below live streams, so you can still watch it even if an ad’s playing.
by u/PuffballOfficial12 in youtube
From the perspective of screen presentation, this kind of advertisement is indeed less destructive than traditional interstitial advertisements. The live broadcast screen will not be forcibly interrupted, and the audience will not miss key moments on the screen because of the advertisement. However, the problem lies in the audio processing method. When the advertisement starts to play, it will directly receive the audio source of the live broadcast. In other words, although you can still see the live broadcast, what you hear is the sound of the advertisement. For live content, audio is often more time-sensitive than images. Whether it’s game live broadcasts, sports events, live news, or even interactive content from creators, just missing a few seconds of sound may prevent viewers from grasping important information. Therefore, this kind of design in which “the picture is not interrupted but the audio is overshadowed” can easily cause trouble at critical moments.
What’s even more disappointing is that many users originally thought this was just a bug in the testing phase and might be fixed in the future, but it later turned out that this was actually expected behavior. YouTube currently does not provide the option to mute ads during live broadcasts, nor does it allow viewers to choose whether to enable this advertising format. In other words, as soon as the ads start playing, the live broadcast audio will be temporarily extinguished. Still, looking at it from another perspective, this new format is still an improvement over live advertising in the past. In the past, live broadcast advertisements would directly occupy the entire screen. Not only were viewers unable to see the live broadcast content, they were also forced to wait for the advertisement to finish playing before returning to the live broadcast. In contrast, now at least the picture can be maintained without interruption, allowing viewers to still grasp the visual information of the live broadcast during the commercial period.
However, the problem of audio coverage is still the biggest shortcoming of this advertising form. Ideally, YouTube should be able to avoid inserting ads at key moments based on the nature of the live content, or at least give viewers the option to mute ads. However, considering the automation characteristics and business considerations of the advertising system, such improvements may not be achieved in the short term. For viewers who do not want to be interrupted by advertising audio during live broadcasts, the only way to completely avoid such ads is still to subscribe to YouTube Premium. Although this is not a solution that everyone is willing to accept, at this stage, it is indeed the only way to ensure that the live broadcast experience is not interrupted by ads.
Source: KOCPC Chinese