Earlier this week YouTube users have started reporting 90-second ad breaks Appearing on televised videos appears to be expanding on the 30-second broadcast that began last year. YouTube has officially responded to the allegations, but it raises more questions than it answers.
a Reply to a popular Twitter account Dexerto Regarding reports of these extended ad breaks, the YouTube Team said that its app does not currently use non-skippable 90-second ad breaks and is not actively testing this format. YouTube also said it’s “looking into this further,” though it’s not particularly clear what that means in the context of this experiment. Numerous viewers have posted similar accounts, including virtually identical images, noting that the UI initially promises a “90+ seconds” switch.
YouTube representative also applied 9 to 5 Google sharing the company’s official response posted on Twitter repeating these exact comments.
None of these are concretely answered so far why If the 90-second ad breaks aren’t actually happening, these reports started surfacing this week. If it’s a bug, you’d think YouTube would lean in that direction rather than just saying “it’s more watched.” If it’s a random release, it’s not too far from A/B testing. Frankly, I have a hard time coming up with an explanation that doesn’t make sense some of them the amount of work done to test this new format.
We’ve asked YouTube for further comment on how these ad breaks came to appear in the first place, unless it’s something the company is actively testing, and we’ll update if we hear back. For now, if you’ve experienced 90 seconds of unskippable ads while streaming YouTube videos to your TV, share your experience in the comments — we’d love to hear about it.
Update 4/10: YouTube issued the following statement confirming that this week’s 90-second ad breaks were the result of a bug.
We determined that this was the result of a bug that resulted in high, inaccurate timers being displayed for shorter ads. We now present a correction. As we said, we don’t have a 90-second non-skippable ad format, and this wasn’t a test.
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