It seems like YouTube is only showing up in the news these days for reasons related to its ads. More recently, it has been mentioned in reports for the same reason, this time hiding the countdown timer you usually see for the skip button. Instead, when an ad is skippable, the option to skip it appears abruptly, but still in the bottom right corner.
Android Police reports that this behaviour of the button to skip ads has been observed on the YouTube mobile app. This lines up with the behaviour of the playback seekbar, which only shows the duration of the unskippable segment of an ad, rather than its full length.
The report also mentions that a different behaviour of obscuring the skip ad button appeared last week, pointing towards a Reddit post of a user showing a screenshot of a YouTube ad. Here, the claim is that blackout squares were used to reportedly obscure the skip ad button once it had become skippable, though the veracity of the claim is difficult to verify from the screenshot alone.
Also noted in the report is that since YouTube has not said anything about this in an official capacity, this may be part of an extended test, as the video hosting platform often does. The same applies to the blackout squares blocking the skip ad button. With that in mind, you may run into these new behaviours yourself on ocassion, instead of always.
(Source: Android Police)
