YouTube: Overlay ads are turned off

YouTube has announced that overlay ads will be cut off as of April 6 this year. It is expected that other forms of advertising – which are much more eye-catching – will be increasingly used instead.

Overlay ads only in the desktop version

The so-called overlay ads are small advertising banners that are displayed at the bottom during the video. It can be clicked away directly via an X at the top right edge of the banner. Against this background, it is surprising that YouTube states that it will remove this form of ad because it is particularly annoying. Compared to advertising videos, which interrupt the actual video being viewed and cannot be clicked away, overlays rather appear to be the significantly lesser evil.

The real background to the removal could be that overlay ads are only possible in the desktop version of YouTube. Those who use mobile devices – and that is the majority of YouTube users – do not see them anyway. For YouTube and its advertisers, they have simply become largely irrelevant. That this is the main motivation is also indicated by another YouTube statement: The goal of the elimination, it says, is also to shift “engagement to higher-performing ad formats on desktop and mobile devices.”

Increased use of other formats

That there will be an increased use of other formats that are significantly more eye-catching as a result of the shutdown of overlay ads, which are hardly worth mentioning anyway, has already been announced by YouTube. The platform pointed out that advertisers would presumably not incur any losses as a result of the shutdown of overlays, provided they used other formats instead. They can choose between advertising videos that are played before or after the actual video, but also those that interrupt the actual video.

If you don’t want to put up with this, you have to go for YouTube’s premium version, which is decidedly expensive, however, with a price of twelve euros per month. It includes no advertising, download options and access to YouTube’s music database.