Millennials and YouTube Ads: Most Watch Until They Can Skip

YouTube has been the leading digital video platform for over a decade and continues to hold strong appeal to US millennials—a group that adopted the digital video streaming platform early on. According to UBS Evidence Lab, 54% of 18- to 34-year-olds visit YouTube at least once per day, making it the third-most popular social media platform for daily usage among this age group.

eMarketer forecasts YouTube’s net US video ad revenues will reach $2.59 billion in 2017, accounting for 20.0% of total US video ad revenues this year—the largest share by far of any single company. Obviously that means that viewers are seeing a fair amount of advertising on the site.

But how engaged with the ads are millennials? In December 2016, online survey platform LaunchLeap surveyed US millennial internet users about the actions they take when viewing YouTube ads. Respondents were most likely to watch a YouTube ad until they could skip it, with 59% of respondents doing so.

Surprisingly, a fair amount of millennials—29%—reported watching YouTube ads all the way through.

LaunchLeap’s survey found that only 11% of US millennial internet users were blocking YouTube ads via an ad blocker, though other research showed that general ad blocking usage is much higher.

July 2016 research from Anatomy Media showed that 63% of US millennial internet users have an ad blocker installed on at least one device, while older research published in 2016 from Reuters Institute conducted by YouGov found that 44% of US internet users ages 18 to 24 and 29% of those 25- to 34-years-old used ad blockers.

Courtesy of eMarketer