YouTube confirms your pause screen is now fair game for ads

Now, YouTube confirms advertisers can broadly target your paused screentime: “As we’ve seen both strong advertiser and strong viewer response, we’ve since widely rolled out Pause ads to all advertisers,” YouTube comms manager Oluwa Falodun confirms to The Verge.

Technically, YouTube started piloting pause ads in 2023 with a limited selection of advertisers, but Google chief business officer Philipp Schindler revealed this April that they were unsurprisingly a big hit with ad firms and lucrative for Google.

Last week, Redditors started posting that the pause ads seemed to be rolling out more widely, as noted by 9to5Google.

YouTube claims that the pause ads are actually designed to let the company offer you a “less interruptive” experience, but it didn’t tell us that its normal ads will appear any less frequently as a result. (It has experimented with longer but less frequent ads before.) The company also introduced unskippable ads in 2023.