
YouTube has been making changes for users who don’t pay for its Premium service. Typically, when you watch a video for free, an ad plays first, and after a few seconds, you get a skip button to move past the ad. However, reports from Android Police reveal that YouTube is testing a new change that hides the skip button for some users.
On October 2, 2024, a Reddit user noticed that when watching ads on a PC, both the countdown timer showing how long until you could skip the ad and the skip button itself were replaced with black rectangles. Initially, there were only a few reports about this issue, and it was thought to be a small test with limited users.
By October 8, 2024, Android Police found that the same activity appeared in the YouTube app on Android devices. Instead of the skip button being visible after a few seconds, users reported that the button didn’t show up at all until they had watched the entire ad.
Here’s how the new system works: when you start a YouTube video, an ad plays, and the skip button stays hidden during this time. Only when the ad is almost finished—when the yellow progress bar at the bottom reaches the end—does the skip button finally appear.
As of now, YouTube hasn’t officially commented on this change, so it’s unclear if this will become a permanent trait. This small but significant change could be a sign of how YouTube plans to handle ads in the future, especially with users trying to find ways to avoid them, like using ad blockers or fake apps. This may shift the platform towards ensuring that non-paying users still engage with ads before watching videos.