YouTube started testing longer but less frequent ad breaks in September, and now they’re launching across all TVs. The change means you’ll see an updated countdown timer in the bottom-right corner of your screen that will now show how long you have left until the entire ad break ends or when you can skip.
QUARTERLY REPORT
YouTube Q1 Ad Sales Top $8 Billion As Parent Alphabet Declares First Dividend, Shares Pop
Google and YouTube parent Alphabet blew away Wall Street estimates with revenue up 15% to $80.5 billion driven by strong ad growth. The company also announced a major milestone, its first ever dividend of 20 cents a share in June. The stock is up more than 12% after market close. During a call, CEO Sundar Pichai said YouTube TV has more than 8 million subscribers, a stat YouTube CEO Neal Mohan noted in February.
League is advancing toward lucrative deals with incumbent partners and is in talks with tech giants as well as NBCUniversal.
In an effort to help brands get the attention of as many viewers as possible, YouTube is launching a “Select Shorts” ad offering, to give advertisers the ability to engage audiences across a variety of content genres by placing their ads alongside best-performing Shorts. According to the Google-owned social platform, YouTube Select Shorts will allow advertisers to choose to place their ad alongside the app’s top Shorts across five categories including entertainment, beauty, fashion and lifestyle, food and recipes, gaming and automotive.
YouTube made an update Monday in relation to third-party ad-blocking apps, which may make it more difficult for users to watch YouTube videos without paying for the company’s ad-free tier. Specifically, viewers using these third-party apps to access YouTube may begin experiencing “buffering issues” or be met with an error message stating that “the following content is not available on this app.”
Approaching spring shopping trends, YouTube is unveiling new in-stream shopping tools in an effort to facilitate new ways for creators to show off products, push more purchase activity, and gain more revenue opportunities in the video-sharing app. YouTube says its new “Shopping Collections” feature provides creators with a thematic way to curate products from their favorite brands. The feature — which is intended to highlight a creator’s tastes in a similar way to a Pinterest board — may enhance the possibility for more direct promotions, helping creators earn more revenue on the site.
After making an initial announcement in November, YouTube is officially rolling out a new set of rules around synthetic media. To enforce a sense of transparency around what users are seeing on the video-sharing app, YouTube is now requiring creators to publicly disclose when they upload synthetic content, including generative AI, that they have altered or created to be realistic in any way.
Exclusives
The Taliban-run government is fostering a thriving community of YouTube influencers and video bloggers in Afghanistan, seeking to shape a positive narrative about the country by rewarding those who have welcome viewpoints with access to stories that can draw millions of views online.
By embracing live sports and blending its creator content and TV offerings, the platform is revolutionizing the beleaguered pay TV space.
WWE, a sports entertainment company that is part of TKO Group, is also among the top 10 most subscribed YouTube channels globally, with no professional sports leagues currently in that mix. Others in the top 10 include Indian record label and film production company T-Series, Sony Entertainment Television and social media personalities MrBeast and PewDiePie.
The ability to cross-measure YouTube ad performance got a boost on Monday with the integration of Comscore Campaign Ratings (CCR) into its platform. Comscore and YouTube on Monday announced the expansion of YouTube’s existing measurement capabilities to include YouTube Shorts and In-Feed inventory, as well as the ability to measure YouTube standard video inventory, YouTube and YouTube TV across connected TV (CTV), desktop, and mobile. The tool also will include the measurement of Masthead inventory in the coming months.
The Super Bowl is not just a big moment for television. With the big game approaching YouTube has a few new tricks in its playbook for advertisers to engage its millions of viewers. YouTube is offering First Position Moments, which ensure that a brand’s ad is the first one seen when audiences watch the platform at the times most relevant to its business.
Google execs are actively considering an international expansion of pay TV service YouTube TV, Chief Business Officer Philipp Schindler said during the company’s fourth-quarter earnings call. “It is something we are closely looking at,” Schindler said. “There’s nothing specific I have to add at this moment in time on this one.” Schindler and CEO Sundar Pichai both took note of highlights for YouTube TV in the quarter, notably the debut of NFL Sunday Ticket as an exclusive offering after 29 years on DirecTV. The premium package is available either as an add-on for YouTube TV subscribers or as a stand-alone offering through YouTube’s channel store.
YouTube Chief Business Officer Mary Ellen Coe announced the changes in a memo to staff Wednesday.
Bite-size clips, granular targeting and simple buying afford advantages to the Alphabet-owned platform.
Darlene Love’s annual television performance of Christmas (Baby Please Come Home) was essentially orphaned after CBS’s Late Show With David Letterman went off the air in 2015, putting an end to the 28-year streak that had the music legend singing her signature holiday song with Paul Shaffer‘s band on Letterman’s last original show before Christmas each December. But they all reunited — not over the air, but on YouTube — for a resumption of the tradition.
Content from at least 30 channels in the network drew nearly 120 million views and 730,000 subscribers since last year.
YouTube, the video platform owned by Alphabet Inc.’s Google, will soon require video makers to disclose when they’ve uploaded manipulated or synthetic content that looks realistic — including video that has been created using artificial intelligence tools. The policy update, which will go into effect sometime in the new year, could apply to videos that use generative AI tools to realistically depict events that never happened, or show people saying or doing something they didn’t actually do.
NFL Sunday Ticket subscribers on Sunday were often unable to watch games without buffering or getting a black screen. The problem began shortly after kickoff for the 1 p.m. ET games and continued for most of the day. YouTube’s X customer support team acknowledged the issue during the games on Sunday and added that it would post a follow-up when there was a resolution. However, YouTube never posted a follow-up on Sunday or Monday. The streamer did tell some customers in responses that there are no refunds for the NFL Sunday Ticket, although the refund remark did not specifically address Sunday’s technical difficulties.
Teenagers in the United States say they watch more video on YouTube than Netflix, according to a new survey from investment bank Piper Sandler. The data point shows that the streaming business is getting more competitive, and highlights YouTube’s strong position as a free provider of online video, especially among young people.
YouTube will end its Premium Lite subscription tier on Oct. 25. Users paying for the Premium Lite subscription tier will be required to subscribe to the platform’s Premium tier if they want to continue an ad-free video-watching experience on the app.
Philip Inghelbrecht: “YouTube is in the midst of an ad fraud scandal. As advertisers and agencies struggle to deal with the fallout, a popular piece of advice has been to treat YouTube as if it were TV. But that reveals another issue: YouTube is now a rival to TV networks. Yet many networks still post their content to the platform via friendly licensing agreements. In the current war for viewer attention, this is a potentially crippling move.”
YouTube is now home to NFL games every Sunday. Will it bring more young people into the NFL? Or will it hasten the demise of linear TV networks?
AI-generated election ads on YouTube and other Google platforms that alter people or events must include a clear disclaimer located somewhere that users are likely to notice, the company said in an update to its political content policy.
Facebook and YouTube are receding from their role as watchdogs against conspiracy theories ahead of the 2024 presidential election.
One of the groups said it had used Google’s tools to run a targeted ad campaign this month on children’s channels. Google has said it did not allow such ads on videos made for children.
The youngsters do watch and recall ads, the report also finds.
Google’s YouTube is tweaking features of NFL Sunday Ticket — less than a month before the football season kicks off — in the hopes of luring more paying customers to the pricey sports package.
Legal and true crime network Law&Crime announces the premiere of its newest YouTube series, The Lineup. Featuring wild, never-before-seen crime fighting moments, The Lineup “is for the network’s millions of […]
