• by Tyler Loechner  @mp_tyler, August 6, 2015

Google on Thursday announced it plans to remove YouTube inventory from the DoubleClick Ad Exchange by the end of the year. 

“To continue improving the YouTube advertising experience for as many of our clients as possible, we’ll be focusing our future development efforts on the formats and channels used by most of our partners,” wrote Neal Mohan, VP of display and video advertising, in a blog post announcing the plans. “To enable that, as of the end of the year, we’ll no longer support the small amount of YouTube buying happening on the DoubleClick Ad Exchange.”

This signals that Google is tightening its grip on YouTube inventory. However, it does not mean that no YouTube ads will be available for programmatic buying. YouTube’s more premium formats -- such as TrueView -- will be available for buying via DoubleClick Bid Manager, per Mohan.

“For advertisers, this is an unfortunate development as they are now effectively prohibited from buying non-skippable video ads and from using data for targeting on YouTube,” said Brett Wilson, co-founder and CEO of TubeMogul, a programmatic ad platform.

Wilson said that less than 5% of the total ad spend that went through TubeMogul’s platform during the second quarter of 2015 was directed to YouTube, so it’s far from a killing blow, but at least in Wilson’s eyes, it’s a setback for all advertisers because it limits their access to YouTube advertising. 

Google had no additional comment when reached by Real-Time Daily, instead deferring to the blog post authored by Mohan.

Update -- Google told Real-Time Daily that the move doesn't impact companies that are buying YouTube ads through the AdWords API and said that it will only impact a "relatively small amount of YouTube buying."