YouTube will kill the overlay format next month

Here’s what you don’t see every day: fewer ads on YouTube. Well, at least fewer ad formats. The latest post on the YouTube forum says the company will be phasing out “overlay ads”on YouTube videos. These are old school banner ads that appear above the video player, making it hard to see anything you tried to watch.

YouTube says ads will disappear on April 6, calling them a “deprecated ad format.”According to the company, the ads only worked on desktop computers and “interfered with viewers.”Now the only ad in the video player will be a video ad that can play before, in the middle, or after the video. “View Product”pop-up ads are also allowed, and banner ads will still appear in the list of recommended videos.

The company says it expects to see “limited impact on most creators as engagement shifts to other ad formats.”Ads annoy viewers, but creators often only get paid if certain ad thresholds are met. Viewing the overlay wasn’t necessarily enough for the creator to make money – advertisers could only choose to pay if the user clicked on the ad, so there was a high chance that no one was actually getting paid from those pop-ups. Video ads with a Skip button are also not paid if users click the Skip button.

Listing image of Jericho/Ron Amadeo