Ad Pods are up next with YouTube

Annoyed of the YouTube pre-roll and mid-roll ads? Well, the good news for you is that YouTube has decided to make the binge video streaming much more fun by introducing its latest “Ad Pods.”

YouTube is rolling out a feature that would allow you to have a continuous video streaming experience without being bothered by the interrupting ads.

The video streaming site has introduced Ad Pods that would show the pre-roll and mid-roll ads back to back at once. These back to back ads are going to give an experience similar to the one on television. The update is rolling out for desktop currently. It will later be implemented on mobile and connected TV devices.

The ad pod feature is a result of YouTube’s analysis. This analysis shows that advertisers get better reach and results when their ads are shown in the form of pods. The lesser the ad breaks, the better the viewer metrics. YouTube hopes that instead of showing one pre-roll and one mid-roll ad if the ads are combined in a pod, there are more chances of viewers watching the ad content and sticking to the videos that they are watching. YouTube completely agrees to the fact that users are sensitive to the frequency and timing of the ads.

Also, YouTube shared another very interesting metric of the TV growth in its blog post:

“We’re seeing incredible watch time growth on TV screens. On average, users watch over 180 million hours of YouTube on TV screens every day. Last month, we introduced the TV screen device type in Google Ads and Display & Video 360. This allows you to tailor your campaigns for connected TVs. For example, by using a different creative or setting a specific device bid adjustment – and see reporting for ads that run on TV screens.”

Further, YouTube mentioned that Ad pods would not be implemented on all types of videos. The ad pods feature would depend upon the length of the video. Also, YouTube mentioned that:

“Early experiment results also show an 8 to 11 percent increase in unique reach and a 5 to 10 percent increase in frequency for advertisers with no impact to brand lift metrics”.

It seems like this new feature is going good with YouTube as well as the advertisers. What do you think?