by: Annabelle Pan
Graphics Editor

With most free digital media apps and websites comes a constant flow of advertisements. Spotify Premium, Netflix Premium, and Youtube Premium all promote an ad-free watching experience for anyone willing to pay a monthly or yearly subscription. However, to encourage subscribers, many streaming services lengthen advertisement time for non-paying users, and some of these products are not age appropriate. Youtube, in particular, has recently increased the amount of unskippable commercials per video. Youtube needs to shorten the length of its ads and ensure age-appropriate content in commercials so that viewers can enjoy their videos.

Youtube has heavily increased the length and number of advertisements shown to viewers, augmenting their revenue at the expense of viewers’ time. Of Youtube’s total revenue of 62 billion dollars in 2025, advertising generated more than 40 billion dollars, a ten percent increase from the previous year. Although Youtube has seen significant gains in earnings, viewers endure worse experiences as a result. Often, viewers watching Youtube on a TV must sit through four different advertisements spanning over a minute before returning to their desired content, just to repeat the experience after twenty minutes. Commercial length increased for users on phones, iPads, and computers as well, with an average unskippable time of ten seconds in 2023 and 30 seconds in 2025. Instead of encouraging platform users to support creators’ content, Youtube’s ads discourage long-form engagement while promoting Youtube Shorts, which feature fewer and shorter commercial breaks. Youtube needs to focus on providing a more productive watching experience instead of forcing constant unrelated advertisements.

Furthermore, quite a few of Youtube’s ads are inappropriate, especially when inserted into media targeting children. While many ads merely promote household products, stores, or websites, some are not suitable for younger audiences. For example, Youtube recently brought back the “Bent Carrot” ad from Xiaflex, a commercial about Peyronie’s disease with terminology about male genitalia. Another recent ad was about breast cancer, but instead of focusing on spreading awareness, the commercial visually zooms in on inappropriate locations during the unskippable portion. Commercial breaks also feature several political campaigns and videos promoting certain laws. Youtube allows the same ads to appear in any age-range targeted content unless the viewer is on Youtube Kids, which includes heavy restrictions on features like comments and content type. Additionally, Youtube Kids is only designed for kids twelve and under, so most viewers that deserve content protection do not receive it.

Instead of incentivizing viewers to buy their subscription, Youtube should monitor the ads they allow on their platform to protect younger viewers and shorten commercial length for improved viewer experience.

(Sources: MediaPost, NY Times, Statista)