Google is limiting the ways advertisers can buy ads on YouTube. The company announced on Thursday that at the end of the year, YouTube inventory will no longer be available through Google Ad Exchange (AdX).
Neal Mohan, head of display and video advertising at Google, wrote in a blog post that TrueView ads — the skippable video ads on YouTube — make up 85 percent of YouTube’s in-stream ads and that development resources would be geared toward those formats..
“To continue improving the YouTube advertising experience for as many of our clients as possible, we’ll be focusing our future development efforts on the formats and channels used by most of our partners. To enable that, as of the end of the year, we’ll no longer support the small amount of YouTube buying happening on the DoubleClick Ad Exchange.”
TrueView ads have never been available through AdX. Instead, advertisers buy TrueView ads through AdWords, and more recently, programmatically through Google’s own demand side platform DoubleClick Bid Manager (DMP). Direct sales teams also sell YouTube inventory on the top channels through the Google Preferred program, launched last year.
The move to cut out access to YouTube inventory from other DMPs will likely fuel theories that Google is aiming to drive buyers to using its own ad tech. TubeMogul CEO Brett Wilson, told AdExchanger that it’s an “unfortunate development [for advertisers] as they are now effectively prohibited from buying non-skippable video ads and from using data for targeting on YouTube.” Wilson also added that just five percent of ad spend through TubeMogul went to YouTube in the second quarter of 2015.
Mohan wrote of the change, “With this change, we’ll be able to invest even more in creating the best and most effective YouTube advertising and buying experiences possible, continuing our efforts in TrueView and offerings like Google Preferred.”
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