Not long ago Google has automatically enabled mid-roll ads for all videos longer than a certain length [0]. Most likely, its net effect is that more ads are played and as a result, YouTube's ad revenue has increased.
Now they implement a similar measure whose net effect would probably be comparable - i.e. an increased ad revenue.
It is perhaps logical for Google to behave like that, purely from the financial point of view. However, they could have done it a long time ago. It is unclear to me why they believe that the right time to introduce such measures is now.
Maybe they believe that their user base is currently large enough and stable enough that the decreased comfort levels while using YouTube would not motivate a critical portion of them to leave. It remains to be seen whether that is true.
Or, perhaps, their ad revenue growth is slowing [1] and they are trying to compensate for it even by using measures whose long term effects are unclear.
This probably isn't the case, but would be kinda funny if Youtube keeps a list of unpopular policy changes they'd like to make, and rolls them out each time they start to push into some backend infrastructure limit or need to do a heavy migration.
I bet a lot of devops would love a 'reduce user usage by 20% for a week' button.
Now they implement a similar measure whose net effect would probably be comparable - i.e. an increased ad revenue.
It is perhaps logical for Google to behave like that, purely from the financial point of view. However, they could have done it a long time ago. It is unclear to me why they believe that the right time to introduce such measures is now.
Maybe they believe that their user base is currently large enough and stable enough that the decreased comfort levels while using YouTube would not motivate a critical portion of them to leave. It remains to be seen whether that is true.
Or, perhaps, their ad revenue growth is slowing [1] and they are trying to compensate for it even by using measures whose long term effects are unclear.
[0] https://support.google.com/youtube/thread/60293363?hl=en [1] https://variety.com/2020/digital/news/youtube-google-q2-ad-r...