Introduction to YouTube Mid-Roll Ads
Mid-roll is a way of advertising to play short ads in the middle of a video. Mid-roll is a way to monetize longer video content displayed on YouTube, Facebook, and other platforms.
On YouTube, if being a part of the YouTube Partner Program, we can enable advertisements at the beginning of videos that we upload to our channel. However, if we upload long-form videos (videos that are 10 minutes or longer), we can also enable ads during the middle of the video (mid-roll ads), not only at the beginning or end of the video. Mid-roll ads are a good source to increase monetization potential.
The mid-roll ad experience for viewers may vary depending on the type of device they are watching videos:
On desktop: Viewers will see a countdown 5 seconds before a mid-roll ad starts.
On other platforms: Viewers will see yellow color dots/marks in the video progress bar to indicate when an ad will come up.
How Mid-Roll Ads looks to Viewer
How Mid-Roll Ads are placed by Creators
Changes in Mid-Roll ads on YouTube
Previously, videos longer than 10 minutes were eligible for mid-roll ads. From late July 2020, videos longer than 8 minutes will be eligible for mid-roll ads. As part of this change, mid-roll ads will be turned on for all the eligible videos whether existing or future video uploads. This means more videos will have mid-roll ads displayed on its content.
Best Practices with Youtube Ads
What are the Best Practices for placing Mid-Roll Ads?
- It is recommended to have automatic placement of mid-roll ads instead of placing them manually.
- We may want to turn off mid-roll ads if they are not appropriate for the content. For Example- Yoga and Meditation videos.
- If we do choose to use them, we recommend automatically placed mid-roll ads as they find natural breaks in your content to avoid an interruptive viewer experience and managing potential monetization.
Manual Placements of Mid-Roll Ads
Automatic Placements of Mid-Roll Ads
How does the automatic placement of mid-roll ad works?
- Automatically placed mid-roll ads optimally maintains the viewer experience and creator monetization potential.
- YouTube’s advanced machine learning helps in detecting the best places for mid-roll ads by evaluating factors like visual, sentence break, audio breaks, etc.
Can automatically placed mid-roll advertisements be changed to manual placement?
- Yes, automatically placed mid-roll can be adjusted manually and place the ad breaks basis creator’s requirement.
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