YouTube is trying to hide the skip button so you’ll watch more ads

Unless you pay $13.99 per month for YouTube Premium, you’ll have to deal with ads when you watch videos on YouTube. Thankfully, skipping the ads has always been easy, but over the past few days, YouTube has made a subtle change to the user interface on desktop and mobile that makes it more difficult to find the skip button while an ad is playing.

Last week, I began noticing that the countdown I was used to seeing in the bottom-right corner of YouTube videos was gone. Previously, it would count down before turning into a clickable skip button. Instead, a yellow line now appears at the bottom of videos that moves at variable speeds depending on the length of the ad. If it’s a long ad I could skip after 5 seconds, the yellow line will race to the end, and then the skip button will suddenly appear in the frame. If it’s an unskippable ad, the yellow line will correspond to the actual length of the ad.

This seems to be one of several tests that YouTube is conducting at the moment. As spotted by Android Police, a Redditor noticed that YouTube was using black rectangle overlays to hide the skip button. I’m not sure which of these two tests is more annoying, honestly.

Android Police also pointed out that the yellow bar I’m seeing is beginning to show up for some mobile users as well. It is possible that YouTube is conducting A/B tests to see which method is more likely to trick users into spending more time watching ads.

YouTube’s global ad revenue in 2023 was $31.51 billion, which was an increase of nearly 8% over 2022. Of course, no amount of revenue is ever enough, so even the slightest changes to potentially increase ad revenue are always going to be on the table.

So far, YouTube hasn’t shared any official statements about the changes to the skip button. We will keep an eye out to see if the company makes an announcement.