No-one enjoys adverts interrupting their YouTube viewing, so you’ll be pleased to hear that mid-roll ads are soon becoming slightly less annoying.
As announced to creators via the YouTube community forum, the video platform is changing the behavior of mid-roll ads in order to “improve the experience for viewers and help creators potentially earn more.”
Beginning May 12, 2025, automatic mid-roll ads will be shown at more natural moments in videos, like when there’s a pause or transition. If this works as described, it sounds good. I’ve watched my fair share of YouTube videos where an ad runs at an inappropriate moment, like cutting someone off while they’re speaking, and it’s certainly annoying.
YouTube hopes the improvements to its automatic ad insertion will reduce this annoyance, feeling less interruptive and helping prevent viewers from abandoning the video entirely. Considering YouTube is in a constant battle against ad blockers, it’s an understandable goal; there is a fine line between ads being tolerable and annoying, and YouTube doesn’t want you to block them entirely.
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But not before YouTube’s crackdown backfires.
Arguably, YouTube is often on the wrong side of that line, especially considering how many ways it finds to serve you commercials—like with the introduction of ads when you pause a video and the testing of picture-in-picture ads.
Plus, while the changes to mid-roll ads are designed to make them less annoying, it doesn’t mean you won’t see fewer of them. Rather, any video that already has mid-roll ads manually inserted by the video uploader will be updated to include additional automatic ad breaks (though creators can opt out of this).
As a YouTube viewer, there’s nothing you need to do. Though, if you’re a heavy user of YouTube, you may want to consider subscribing to Premium—it removes ads and offers other features like downloads for offline playback.
YouTube Premium
For $13.99 a month, you get ad-free videos, YouTube Music, and offline video downloads.
As a creator, there are changes you need to be aware of, especially as to how it might impact your ad revenue.
If you only use automatic mid-rolls for your videos, you don’t need to do anything; this update will simply optimize their placement.
If you manually insert them, you’ll receive feedback in YouTube Studio if the placement is considered disruptive to the viewer. This is only a suggestion and it’s up to you whether you act on that.
However, the company notes that “videos with interruptive mid-roll ad slots may earn less revenue once we improve mid-roll quality after May 12, 2025.”
If you’re confident in your manual placement, you can opt out of YouTube’s automatic mid-rolls in the Earn section of YouTube studio.
If you don’t use mid-roll ads at all, YouTube won’t automatically insert any—this only impacts videos already using manual mid-rolls.
Alternatively, you may want to consider enabling automatic ad placement to supplement those you’ve inserted manually. According to YouTube, an experiment it conducted in July 2024 observed that “channels who had auto mid-roll ads enabled in addition to manual mid-rolls saw an average of over 5% increase in YouTube ad revenue compared to channels with manual mid-rolls only.”
Whether any of this will truly have a positive effect on the viewing experience, or creator’s ad revenue, remains to be seen when these changes roll out on May 12, 2025.
Source: YouTube via Android Police
