YouTube Keeps Shoving Ads Into Everything
And you have no say in it.
Last year YouTube announced they were adding side-by-side ads to livestreams on desktop and the TV app, but now they are officially rolling this to mobile.
When the add shows up, it moves the livestream to one side of the player and mutes it for the duration of the promotion. Unlike its usual adds which take the whole stream, this way the stream remains visible.
This is not a new add format, though. It's exactly how Twitch runs them on its platform, but it's now coming to YouTube.
While this is better than losing whole the screen to an add for a whole 15 seconds, it is still annoying that we now have to deal with promotions of products we don't care about while watching creators we like and potentially miss important moments of the livestream.
On another note, your subscription feed will now display "Sponsored" videos mixed with the content from creators you subscribed to. A page that has never once had paid content on it will have ads masked as videos in the hopes that you click them.
YouTube continues with this aggressive push for ads on almost every corner of its ecosystem despite it earning $9.88 billion in the first quarter of 2026 according to a report by The Hollywood Reporter.
For no ones surprise YouTube Premium users don't have to deal with any ads, however, the service had a price increase this year.
TL;DR
YouTube decided to show side-by-side ads on your livestreams and Sponsored content in your Subscription feed and the only way to get rid of them as a viewer is by paying YouTube Premium which got a recent price hike.
On the other hand, creators can choose to disable mid-rolls ads to prevent side-by-side ads from appearing and instead they place them manually but they lose on revenue.
What can you do as a creator?
If you are a streamer who goes live on YouTube, fortunately, you can do something about these ads.
You see, YouTube automatically recommends you to enable automated mid-rolls ads. This setting lets YouTube display side-by-side ads on the format and place it decides.
You have no control.
However, you can deactivate mid-rolls and trigger them manually instead. The trade-off is that you miss on revenue in exchange for giving your viewers a better experience, which might be worth it if you ask me.
My Thoughts
Even though YouTube is the best platform for content creators, this aggressive push for ads is becoming unbearable.
We can at least disable side-by-side ads but the fact they keep adding ads everywhere while simultaneously increasing the price of YouTube Premium seems like a planned move to make more money from its users.
Coincidently, a report from CNBC shows that YouTube Premium is growing faster than YouTube Ads.
I wonder why.
