Brace yourself for ‘bumper ads’ before every YouTube video

By Killian Bell

When you’re excited to watch the latest videos from your favorite YouTube channels, the last thing you want to see before them is ads you can’t skip. Normally, they don’t appear on every video you watch, but Google is planning to change that.

The company today announced that is introducing 6-second “bumper ads” that will play before all videos watched on mobile devices, and you have no choice but to sit through them.

Half of YouTube viewers aged between 18 to 49 watch videos on mobile devices, according to research, so Google has developed a new ad format that’s better suited to the “snackable videos” many people binge on with their smartphones and tablets.

These bumper ads are only six seconds long, but unlike most other YouTube ads, you can’t skip them, which is great news for Google and its advertisers.

“In early tests, Bumpers drove strong lift in upper funnel metrics like recall, awareness and consideration,” Google says. “We also see that Bumpers work well to drive incremental reach and frequency when paired with a TrueView campaign.”

You may have already seen some of these bumper ads, which have already been tested by Atlantic Records as part of a marketing campaign for English band Rudimental. But we’ll see a lot more of them starting next month, when Google makes them available to all.

It might take a while for bumper ads to reach every video we watch on mobile, but you can be sure that it will happen. In the meantime, enjoy using that skip button every chance you get while you still can.