Youtube’s pesky new pause screen ads are its latest attempt to push you to Premium

At least the ads are only static ones… for now

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We’ve been reporting onYouTube’s increasingly annoying ads for a long time now: the plans forunskippable TV adsfrom early last year, followed by the arrival oflonger ads on smart TVslast December, and so on. And now the streamer has found a new way to really push those YouTube Premium subscriptions – it’s going to make YouTube a bit more irritating.

The changes were announced earlier this year but they’re rolling out now. If you’re not a Premium subscriber, you’ll soon start to see ads whenever you pause a YouTube video on your TV. As9to5Googlereports, it appears to be a limited rollout so far: the only advertiser that appears to be showing up is Dunkin Donuts.

Instead of keeping your video fullscreen when you pause, YouTube now makes your video smaller and puts an advert beside it on the right of the screen with a “dismiss” button below it.

There is some good news: these ads so far appear to be static, not video. But when you’re talking about YouTube adding ad formats there tends to be an unspoken ‘yet’: they’re not video ads… yet; they’re not fullscreen… yet; YouTube isn’t sneaking into your apartment, kidnapping your pets and demanding you subscribe to YouTube Premium if you want them back… yet.

As oneRedditorsaid about theGooglescreenshot, “look at all that empty space on the screen where more ads can be placed”.

Time to skip YouTube?

Using smart TVs these days does feel rather like the urban legend of boiling a frog, with us as the frogs and ads as the water. My smart TV experience has gone from being largely ad-free to increasingly intrusive, even on services I pay for.

I don’t currently pay for YouTube on my TV, and it’s already reached the point where the amount of ads means that, for me at least, it’s bordering on unusable.

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I idly started watching a live concert the other evening and it didn’t even manage to play one full song before interrupting with advertising. I’m sure that for some people, more ads will indeed push them towards a Premium sub (which currently costs $13.99 / £12 / AU$16.99 a month).

But for me, it just makes me less likely to watch anything at all, and drives me from my smart TV’s built-in apps towards something more viewer-friendly – like thebest streaming services, or even some of thebest free streaming servicesthat don’t have an excessive number of ads that pop up unpredictably.

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Writer, broadcaster, musician and kitchen gadget obsessive Carrie Marshall has been writing about tech since 1998, contributing sage advice and odd opinions to all kinds of magazines and websites as well as writing more than a dozen books. Her memoir,Carrie Kills A Man, is on sale now and her next book, about pop music, is out in 2025. She is the singer in Glaswegian rock bandUnquiet Mind.

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