Watching YouTube on your TV is about to get more frustrating if you’re not paying to avoid ads. As announced at the YouTube Brandcast event on Wednesday, YouTube will soon add 30-second unskippable ads to top-performing content watched on connected TVs. 

YouTube says viewers will see a single 30-second ad instead of two consecutive 15-second ads, though that doesn’t mean that those shorter ads will be disappearing entirely. 30-second ads will be available to advertisers via YouTube Select, a curated advertising platform that targets the top five percent of YouTube content. YouTube claims 70 percent of YouTube Select impressions come from TVs, making it the ideal platform for longer ads. <<<READ MORE>>> 

AI has long been a crucial component of Meta’s ads system. We began with manual feature engineering for small models and progressed to building hundreds of deep neural network models with trillions of parameters. Each model is independently optimized for different goals — such as improving ad quality to provide better experiences for people or increasing conversion rates for a higher return on ad spend for our advertisers.

Meta continues to take bold steps to advance and deploy state-of-the-art AI and deliver a step change in our ads system performance. We’re rolling out more powerful AI models to improve performance across all ad types and ad surfaces. We aim to achieve this through deeper alignment with advertiser objectives, and utilizing the rapid expansion of high-growth areas, like short-form video, to provide enjoyable experiences to people — all while working to safeguard privacy. <<<READ MORE>>>