YouTube ads are about to get a little less skippable

You might soon be seeing less of that “skip ad” button over on YouTube.

In a video titled Want to earn more money from ad revenue?, posted on the platform’s official Creator Insider channel, YouTube announced a big change for its YouTube Partners. 

Any channel that can monetize its videos will soon be able to implement non-skippable ads. Previously, as mentioned in the video, only select YouTube channels were able to run non-skippable ads.

In the video announcement, YouTube points out that advertisers pay more money for non-skippable advertisements, which in turn means more money for the creators who run these ads.

Earlier this year, YouTube set the maximum video length for non-skippable ads at 15-20 seconds, depending on a viewer’s location.

YouTube seems to be pushing its non-skippable ads as the preferred ad format over TrueView, ads viewers can skip after 5 seconds. Older video content that has TrueView ads enabled will be switched over to non-skippable ads by default, even if a channel wasn’t previously eligible for non-skippable ads. This means that if YouTube creators want their viewers to still be able skip ads on their video archives, they need to take action and switch the default or change the video ad settings in bulk.

While more money for creators obviously sounds good, a number of commenters on the video announcement point out that their audiences might completely click away from their video instead of waiting for the non-skippable ad to finish, thus denying them any ad revenue from that viewer at all.

Reached for comment, a YouTube spokesperson pointed Mashable to a support page detailing how creators can have control, somewhat, over what type of ads run on their videos. Via Adsense, they can block specific advertisers as well as entire ad categories. Creators will also be able to track non-skippable ad performance in their YouTube analytics to determine whether this ad format is best for monetizing their audience.

Non-skippable ads for all creators will begin rolling out next week.