YouTube testing new supervised accounts feature where ad bumper displays before & after a video ad is shown

YouTube is the world’s biggest video sharing platform where thousands of videos are published every single day across several categories such as entertainment, tech, music, education among tons of others.

After all, it is the second most visited website with over 21 billion active monthly users. On the other hand, thousands of content creators publish awesome videos for their audience to enjoy.

Many have also chosen YouTube as a full-time job thanks to the business model of YouTube which has allowed creators to earn a living out of it. This indicates that YouTube is only ever going to expand by adding more viewers gradually.

There’s definitely something or the other for anyone to watch on YouTube. Taking that into account, YouTube in 2015 launched a dedicated app for kids which is simpler, safer, and distraction-free from unnecessary content which kids won’t watch.

The app, known as YouTube Kids, aims to provide an independent experience of YouTube, with a bunch of tools and controls for their parents/guardians to keep an eye on their children’s daily YouTube activities.

But since that particular app is largely targeted towards kids under and around 13 years of age, it doesn’t provide the mature experience to teens and tweens above that age level.

To tackle that, YouTube had announced supervised features on the YouTube app itself for teens which provides them a more independent YouTube environment but at the same time monitored by parents.

As mentioned, supervised features for YouTube are largely for teens above the age of 13 who are now ready for some independence on their internet activities.

The main goal of YouTube supervised features is always to provide teens with age-appropriate content which can be decided by parents what to watch and what not to. Also, do note that this is a beta release initially.

Some of the existing features were namely, content restrictions based upon 3 levels, limited features to provide to-the-point app experience, and redefined parental controls with in-depth information regarding their kid’s YouTube journey.

But, in order to gain the said features, the teen’s account has to be registered to a supervised one which can be done while setting up their Google account initially or anytime by going onto account settings.

To know more in-depth information on setting up supervised accounts, head on over here which details all the process in a text and video form.

To make supervised accounts even better, YouTube has recently added more features such as ‘ad bumpers’ and ‘ad click prompts’ to the beta program. Below is the updated bit of the official announcement.

In the coming months, we’ll be introducing some new features across supervised accounts and ‘made for kids’ content to help further distinguish certain video advertising content from organic content. This means your child may see an ad bumper (to alert them when an advertisement is starting and ending) before and after a video ad is shown.

If they click an ad, there will be a disclaimer to let them know they are navigating away from YouTube. We’re first testing with a small percentage of people to help us find potential issues and fix them before rolling out more broadly.
Source

This sheds light on how at times ads can result in distraction and children might deviate from the actual video they’re watching.

Therefore, the ‘ad bumper’ feature will alert children when a video ad is starting and ending. This way, it will be easier to distinguish between the actual video and ad content.

On top of that, when clicking on an ad, it will prompt them about leaving from YouTube which makes watching video limited to the app itself.

These are rolling out to a small percentage of supervised accounts and should be available widely over time.

PiunikaWeb started as purely an investigative tech journalism website with main focus on ‘breaking’ or ‘exclusive’ news. In no time, our stories got picked up by the likes of Forbes, Foxnews, Gizmodo, TechCrunch, Engadget, The Verge, Macrumors, and many others. Want to know more about us? Head here.