If you’re a regular YouTube TV app user, you might have noticed suspiciously long ads over the past week.
Those enjoying the free YouTube are used to seeing ads, but these are often not extremely long in duration. The ones that are long are often skippable after a set amount of time, making the experience relatively painless for the casual viewer that doesn’t want to spend too much on subscriptions.
However, over the past week, YouTube users noticed that their ad experience on TVs was getting a little too lengthy for comfort. The app’s unskippable ads are normally capped at 30 seconds. Recently, though, the limit seemed to have been increased to 90 seconds.
This didn’t sit well with users, with many taking to platforms like Reddit to express their frustration.
There is now, however, some good news. The 90-second-long unskippable ads weren’t intended, and that has been confirmed by YouTube itself.
For reference, Dexerto posted about the issue on X, which garnered a direct response from the official Team YouTube account, as seen embedded below. “YouTube does not have a 90-second non-skippable ad format. This isn’t something we are testing right now. We’re looking into this further,” wrote the streaming giant, essentially confirming that the lengthy unskippable ads aren’t intended.
The streaming giant’s comment, however, does not discount the fact that users are facing the issue, and that 90-second-long unskippable ads are very real. Additionally, YouTube’s statement says that the company isn’t testing 90-second-long ads “right now.” Does that mean the company always intended to test out such lengthy unskippable ads? I guess we won’t get to know for some time now.
What we do know, however, is that this was a bug and Google alluded that it is trying to fix it in a comment given to 9to5Google:
We’ve determined this was a result of a bug, which resulted in higher, inaccurate timers being shown for shorter ads. We’re rolling out a fix now. As we’ve said, we don’t have a 90 second non-skippable ad format and this was not a test.
