YouTube is a great way for creators to make money from their content. The problem has always been finding a balance between ads to support creators and a good experience for the viewers. Now YouTube is finally going to be removing one of the most annoying ads from its platform.
Recently Google updated the YouTube help forum to announce that the banner ads that appear over a video will be going away in April. 9to5Google first spotted this.
Here is what Google has to say about this change:
Starting on April 6th, 2023, the “Overlay ads” ad format will no longer appear on YouTube to help improve the viewer experience and shift engagement to higher performing ad formats on desktop and mobile devices. Overlay ads are a legacy ad format that only served on desktop and are disruptive for viewers. We expect to see limited impact for most Creators as engagement shifts to other ad formats.
Finally, instead of putting an ad over the video you are watching, YouTube will focus on pre, mid, and post-video ads.
These banner ads over videos have already been removed from mobile devices and streaming players now though all platforms will have these ads removed in April.
It will be interesting to see if YouTube makes any other changes to its ads with this move. For now this seems to be a huge win for viewers who don’t want to pay for the ad-free YouTube Premium.