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Although its success is nothing new, YouTube continues to experience rapid growth. In fact, the video-sharing platform has never been more popular than it is today, with more than 42 million users aged 15 and over in France watching at least one piece of content every month.
This success represents an obvious opportunity for advertisers. Over the years, YouTube has become an essential platform for brands to reach their audience. However, it is still necessary to understand and master YouTube’s various advertising formats in order to reap the real benefits.
On YouTube, one of the main trends right now is watching content on the platform via television. In the United States, there has been a sharp decline in mobile viewing (57% in 2019 compared to 48% in 2024) and desktop viewing (18% in 2019 compared to 13% in 2024), while conversely, the share of viewing on other connected devices, such as televisions, continues to increase year on year. This trend applies not only to the United States, but also to the rest of the world.
This can be explained in particular by the democratisation of connected TVs, but also by the publication of content that is significantly longer and more polished than in the past on this platform. In France, YouTuber Inoxtag recently managed to attract no fewer than 40 million viewers to his Kaizen report, which is nearly two and a half hours long. Increasingly polished and longer content is moving the platform away from a bygone era when videos lasting less than ten minutes were the most viewed.
For advertisers, it is therefore important to take this information into account when using the in-stream advertising format. Advertisements broadcast in this format must be designed as advertisements suitable for television, lasting up to several minutes, as YouTube is likely to continue to gain ground on our largest screens.
In-stream advertisements are not the only ones on the platform that may be of interest to advertisers. Advertisers should also consider in-feed advertisements, which appear when users are searching for content to view.
In the past, in-feed advertisements were reserved for users who had just watched a video. YouTube would then suggest the advertiser’s content. However, for some time now, this advertising format can also be found on the application’s home page, or even within search results.
This represents a considerable increase in the scope of this advertising format, which should prompt advertisers to review their strategy with regard to these in-feed advertisements. Positioned in strategic locations when users are searching for new content to view, these advertisements need to be particularly inspiring to encourage users to interrupt their searches.
Following in the footsteps of TikTok and Instagram with its Reels format, YouTube has also ventured into short, entertaining videos with the arrival of Shorts in July 2021. Since then, this format has continued to grow in popularity on the platform, and advertisers can now see Shorts as a great opportunity.
These short videos, primarily intended for mobile devices, need to be particularly captivating from the very first seconds in order to resist users’ scrolling habits. To achieve this, it is generally best to be original and dynamic in order to quickly capture attention. When well-made and optimised for targeting, Shorts ads can be an excellent way for advertisers to redirect YouTube users to their chosen medium, thereby generating the desired conversions.
For advertisers, YouTube offers a wealth of advertising opportunities, both in terms of its growing audience and the variety of formats available. The key is to deliver the right ads in the right formats to the right audience in order to optimise the use of the platform.
Recognised as the basic advertising format on YouTube, in-stream adverts need to be fairly educational. In-feed adverts, on the other hand, need to be more inspiring to encourage users to interrupt their searches, while Shorts adverts must be captivating and entertaining in order to generate the desired engagement.
Would you like to improve your YouTube campaigns? Please do not hesitate to contact our agency.
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Pierre Blarre