YouTube first spoke about pause ads last year when it started trialing them in select regions. At the time, the company said that when you pause a video, it will shrink, and an ad will appear next to it.
“In Q1, we saw strong traction from the introduction of a pause ads pilot on connected TVs, a new non-interruptive ad format that appears when users pause their organic content,” Schindler noted. He went on to share that YouTube’s pause ads are “driving strong brand lift results” and “are commanding premium pricing from advertisers.”
Schindler didn’t share any timelines for when pause ads will start appearing on YouTube, but we know they’ll first roll out on smart TVs. The nature of these ads, including their duration, skippability, and more is still unclear. We also don’t know if Google plans to introduce these ads on YouTube’s mobile apps.
The service I get from YouTube is definitely worth what they're charging for YouTube Premium to me. I'd pay that today, given a lack of other options, but they aren't selling what I want, which is privacy. I don't want to pay them money and then just have them be able to link my financial data to whatever profile they're building based on me. I mean, I won't even use a YouTube account now. My Android phone isn't linked to a Google account. I don't particularly want paying for video service to take me down that route.
If they sold service that had a no-log, no-data-mining policy and I had some way to reasonably-reliably be sure that they aren't gonna change that underfoot, I'd go for it.
That being said, I'd imagine that privacy probably isn't what motivates the typical person who might pay them for service, so I don't know if there's enough of a market for them to offer something like that.
At the very least, it'd expose what the data-mining they're doing on someone is worth to the world, which might be considered a trade secret for a number of companies.