Today, YouTube has sent out emails to all their partners explaining how videos will soon become available offline when a user demands it and since it impacts the advertisement and how the ads will run on it, there is a way to opt out of this feature.
How this feature will work?
When a user doesn’t have much time to watch a video on his mobile or tablet, using the updated YouTube app he will be able to save it offline partially or fully for next 48 hours. This is intended to those users who get into Internet connectivity issue and would like to watch it later when the connection is back.
Now if the device on which the video is saved is offline for more than 48 hours the content will become unavailable automatically which makes sure that YouTube Content creators don’t miss on advertisement revenue.
This feature is however not applicable to videos for rental or purchase will not be included in this functionality.
How does it affect partners ?
It is clear that the ads will not run when they are offline but Google in-Stream ads will run. No other ad formats will run. All the views generated from the in-stream add will be included in the total view count.
How to disable this feature for your channel?
As expected this feature when turned off will be turned off for all the videos in your channel. There is no individual settings for videos. To disable this feature, you will need to use CMS Account or YouTube Advance settings.
YouTube Settings:
- Login to your YouTube account
- Click on your Channel Icon or username in the top right corner of the page to expand a menu
- Select “Settings” > Click “Advanced” under the Channel Settings menu.
- Look for the section “Add to device” and disable it.
CMS Settings : To get there: Login to your CMS account > from the homepage select “Add to Device” > you will be able to edit your settings from this page.
Conclusion: I will strongly recommend you to keep it enabled because if they cant save it, you will lose one subscriber because he may think that you aren’t letting him view the videos offline when others allow it.
