YouTube Premium’s R72/m price isn’t looking so bad after all, huh? The writing has been on the wall (and YouTube’s own blog post) for months now, ever since the company announced it would be bringing “pause experiences” to the platform which, unfortunately, is exactly what it sounds like. And now, advertisers are coming for your big, paused screen, as confirmed by The Verge.
“As we’ve seen both strong advertiser and strong viewer response, we’ve since widely rolled out Pause ads to all advertisers, said Oluwa Falodun, YouTube’s comms manager. We’re not surprised by the renewed interest of advertisers for something that’s a) bound to make them even more money, and b) drive YouTube Premium adoption rates. It’s a win-win for YouTube and a lose-lose for YouTube free-loaders.
Oh, right. It does get worse. What are your two favourite things about YouTube? That’s right – AI and Shorts. But what about the two of them combined? That’s what the company’s been cooking up in the lab these last few months, with eventual Veo integration in the offing. Yay?
The short Short
As initially reported by 9to5Google, users noticed an uptick of pause-screen ads on YouTube a little over a week ago – confining the original video to the left side of the screen, while an ad for Dunkin’ Donuts or something similar dominates the right-hand side. The best thing we can say for the change is that it appears to only affect TVs (a consistently growing market), and won’t harm the primarily mobile or PC watchers. For now.
But don’t worry. YouTube said that the change was meant to implement a “less interruptive” experience, while entirely failing to explain exactly how that would be the case. It offered no indication that the service’s regular ads would drop off in favour of these pause-screen ads, and we doubt that we ever will. But PR gotta PR, right?
On the AI front, the Google-owned company announced that it would be integrating the search giant’s most capable video generation model yet, Veo, right into Shorts later this year.
“You’ll be able to create even more incredible video backgrounds, breathing life into concepts that were once impossible to visualize. Imagine a BookTuber stepping into the pages of the classic novel, The Secret Garden, or a fashion designer instantly visualizing fun and imaginative design concepts to share with their audience.”
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Also on the way is the ability to create entire 6-second Shorts using just AI, “because who wouldn’t want that” – some YouTube exec, probably. The idea is to build on YouTube’s ‘Dream Screen‘ feature we saw back in 2023, which allowed creators to whip up a background with just a couple of words. That’s progressed to 1080p video clips just a year later.
Feed Veo a few lines of text and it’ll generate four images to choose from. Pick your favourite, and it’ll develop that into a 6-second clip, that’ll perfectly augment the Short you’re building on the side. At least, that’s how YouTube sees it – as a simple augmentation to a Short. From where we’re sitting, it seems closer to an excuse for ‘creators’ to pump out even more low-effort content, only serving to build even more engagement farms on the platform.
YouTube will, at least, watermark these abhorrences using SynthID, and whack a label on content created using Veo. As for when we might see Veo turn up officially, YouTube hasn’t said. Enjoy it while it lasts.