Automatic placement of ads on YouTube is designed to increase the income of authors and retain the attention of viewers

Google-owned YouTube said it would begin showing fewer interruptive ads, which are ads that appear at inconvenient times, starting May 12. Ideally, ads should not interrupt a narrator’s sentence or sequence of actions. Automatic algorithms will ensure that ads are shown during natural pauses in a video.

Image source: Unsplash, Alexander Shatov

Videos uploaded to YouTube before February 24 will be optimized from this point of view. Authors who upload videos via YouTube Studio will still have the option to opt out of automatic placement of commercial breaks, but from May 12, videos with manual placement of ads will receive less advertising revenue, as the administration of the video hosting site warns.

YouTube will try to convince creators to trust the automatic placement of ad breaks with the help of a recommendation option that will offer the best position for each ad insertion in a specific video. If the author of the video agrees, the placement of ads can be entrusted to automatic algorithms. YouTube claims that creators who have trusted the automation and have not completely abandoned the manual distribution of ad insertions are already receiving an average of 5% more money from advertising compared to those who distribute ads exclusively manually. According to the YouTube administration, reducing the number of sudden ad insertions helps to better retain the attention of viewers.