Yup, and that's what I meant by them turning the pain dial all the way towards money. Presumably they can run A/B tests and will no doubt be able to prove that this change makes them $X more money (since it's 1/6 a full screen ad after all). At the cost of being a miserable tasteless change.

The YouTube team has been blindly chasing monetization at the expense of their website being useful and pleasant for a while now. Unfortunately it seems they can get away with it. I wrote this post to just shake my fist at the cloud