Ad Formats to Consider

YouTube offers a variety of ad formats. These include:

• Display ads – these appear to the right of the feature video, above the video suggestions list – on the desktop platform only.
• Overlay ads – these are semi-transparent overlay ads that appear on the lower 20% of your video - on the desktop platform only. These can be either image or text ads
• Skippable video ads – the most common type of YouTube ad. These are the ads you see before during or after a video which a viewer can skip after 5 seconds
• Non-skippable video ads – these are video ads that viewers must watch before they can view the main video. There is an extended version, with 30-second ads, but YouTube is about to phase these out due to their unpopularity. Non-skippable videos are more typically 15-20 seconds in length.
• Bumper ads – these are non-skippable videos up to 6 seconds which a viewer must watch before seeing the main video
• Sponsored Cards – these provide content relevant to the video, for example, products featured in the main video

The video ads are sometimes called TrueView video ads. YouTube has simplified their ad naming recently. They have split their ad types into TrueView in-stream ads and TrueView video discovery ads.

The in-stream ads are those that appear as part of videos, i.e., the skippable and non-skippable video ads, and bumper ads. The video discovery ads, as the name suggests, are those ads that you use to help people discover your videos, mainly display and overlay ads.
In simple terms, you pay for a TrueView in-stream ad when somebody watches at least 30 seconds of your ad (unless it is shorter). You pay for a TrueView video discovery ad when somebody clicks on your ad thumbnail.
By far the most popular ad is the Skippable video ad. While non-skippable ads may sound lucrative to advertisers, they are unpopular with users.