YouTube will shove ads in your face even when you pause videos

YouTube, you’re exhausting. While I spend more time watching YouTube videos than any of the video services I actually pay for, it’s so jam-packed with ads that I’ve spent a lot of energy trying not to see them. And now Google’s web video monopoly is going to show ads even when you’re not watching and the video is paused. Great.

The Verge reports that YouTube is rolling out advertisements that show up when you pause videos, continuing experiments that the company started a year ago. A YouTube representative confirmed that the practice will now become commonplace “as we’ve seen both strong advertiser and strong viewer response.”

I can’t argue with that, but I’ll point out that retching up your Subway sandwich in response to salmonella poisoning is also a “strong response.” While the nebulous engagement metrics probably show YouTube that there’s a lot of information being passed on to users, the initial response on social media seems to be universally negative. YouTube isn’t the first video service to pull this move, but it’s absolutely the largest.

The representative said that advertising on paused videos is designed to create a “less interruptive” experience. But as The Verge notes, that doesn’t necessarily mean we’re going to see a drop in the increasing load of obnoxious and often unskippable advertising on YouTube. And since I’m seeing more and more creators pack their videos with sponsorships, I somehow doubt that the people making YouTube’s content are going to get a bigger slice of the advertising pie.

“We estimate we can sell up to 80 percent of an individual’s visual field before inducing seizures,” said the fictional CEO (of a company that bears more than a passing resemblance to Google) in Ready Player One.

Apropos of nothing, it’s possible to block every single ad on YouTube — even the sponsorships that are baked into the videos themselves — on both desktop and mobile.