854
YouTube confirms your pause screen is now fair game for ads
(www.theverge.com)
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
It's the opposite. If you pause the video you the viewers are almost always looking at the screen. The pause button on a mobile phone or web browser is literally on the player. You are guaranteed to see it immediately after you push the button. You will see it when you un pause. These ads are display banners not video. It only takes a second to see the ad.
Unlike video ads that just auto play, especially when the video player auto plays more videos, there probably is more probability you aren't actually watching, unlike pause ads that require user activity and focus on the screen to push the pause button.
Google probably only spent months researching this and they only have all the tracking and user studies to know what you said. Please ignore the obvious fact that you are looking at the screen when you are pausing or resuming a video, KingJalopy knows better and Google is just dumb. Nobody will see any of these ads and they are adding them in vain.