YouTube addresses reports of 90-second unskippable ads, says they were unintentional

Despite several posts on platforms like Reddit reporting that YouTube is now showing 90-second unskippable ads, with screenshots for proof, the Team YouTube account has responded to some posts on X, claiming that YouTube does not have a 90-second unskippable ad format.

Considering that many people have reported 90-second unskippable ads, this response has only led to people accusing YouTube of being purposefully evasive. The specific terminology they used was “…isn’t something we are testing right now,” which has led many to believe that YouTube had plans of implementing this in the future.

They also said that if you’re using ad blockers, it supposedly prevents the Skip button from showing up or working. A few people claim that unskippable 90-second ads were tested before in some countries, so despite this response from Team YouTube, I’d suggest taking it lightly.

Admins of social media pages such as Team YouTube are not always transparent about internal plans, and they’re trained to use elusive terminology to avoid issues.

Going through the comments of this post on Reddit (regarding YouTube’s response), you’ll find several people disagreeing with that statement. However, some people provide an interesting explanation for this situation: There are no unskippable ads that are entirely 90 seconds long. This would mean the UI was just misleading, and it wasn’t showing what exactly was going on there.

To put it simply, the total time of all the ads stitched together would be 90 seconds. This could mean three ads that are 30 seconds each, six ads that are 15 seconds each, or (let’s hope not), nine ads that are 10 seconds each. People are fine with such ads for longer content, but showing such long ads for one-minute videos or shorter videos doesn’t make any sense.

Reactions to this are surprisingly divisive. Some of them defend YouTube, claiming that a company exists to make money. Others say the quality of services is intentionally being downgraded to push people to YouTube Premium. Since they’ve already raised Premium prices in the US, this isn’t a good look. A few workarounds include using an adblocker, exiting the video and coming back to it in a few seconds, etc.

Another sneaky trick YouTube is trying is hiding the skip button behind an expandable card. So it’s clear that the platform is indeed experimenting with ways to get more watch time on ads, even if it means being a little shady.

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