Google forces you to see more of an ad by making an undisclosed change on the YouTube app

If you watch YouTube often, whether on mobile or desktop, you might have noticed a change to the Skip button that users press when they can halt an ad and move on to the content that they selected to view. On mobile, the usual countdown to the Skip button has gone missing on both iOS and Android. So instead of the countdown timer, you see the full ad until the Skip button pops up. On the desktop, some report seeing dark rectangles where the timer would normally be found.

In comments made to The Verge, Google says that it is not removing the Skip button. YouTube spokesperson Oluwa Falodun says in a statement, "On skippable ads, the button appears after 5 seconds into playback, as always. Yes, that is true. But for some reason Google did away with the five-second countdown timer that led into the Skip button appearing. Falodun's additional comments about this do make sense.

The YouTube spokesperson said that the Skip button isn't going away even if the seconds leading up to its appearance have changed. Falodun noted that YouTube is "reducing elements on the ads player" so that "viewers can engage more deeply with the ad through a cleaner experience." Instead of a rectangle covering a small part of the ad (which, to be fair, could be distracting), a progress bar on the bottom of the screen could replace the countdown timer on both desktop and mobile.

For those YouTube users who watch the countdown timer like a hawk and are poised to hit the "skip" button as soon as it appears, removing the countdown timer throws off your timing which Google might hope results in you catching a little more of an ad than you intended to watch. And if it is an ad you find interesting, you might be so mesmerized that you forget to  hit "Skip" and before you know it, you've caught the whole spot.

The concern that some have is that removing the countdown timer is a precursor to a future decision by Google to remove the Skip button altogether which would force YouTube users to wait for an ad to completely finish before they could watch the video they selected to view.