ByFor YouTube creators, mid-roll ads are an essential revenue-maximizing tool, which plays an advertisement in the middle of a video. To maintain the flow and excitement of the video, mid-roll advertisements should play at natural breakpoints, like pauses or transitions. However, mid-roll advertisements often disrupt the flow and content of the video, especially when a creator manually inserts it during a key moment of the video.
To enhance viewer experience, beginning May 12, 2025, YouTube is improving the quality of mid-roll ads by showing fewer ads that may feel disruptive to the viewer. YouTube asserts that reducing irritating ad breaks can help retain more viewers on the video.
The official announcement from YouTube’s Community Manager says(translated to English using Google Translate), “We’re improving the quality of mid-roll ads on YouTube. This means we’ll show more mid-roll ads at natural breakpoints, like pauses and transitions, and fewer ads that might feel disruptive or cause viewers to abandon a video, like in the middle of a sentence or action sequence.”
The change will not affect you if you are a creator and use auto mid-roll for your videos. But in the case of manual ad-slot placement, this update may override your manual ad-slots with automatic slots. In the case of opting out from automatic ad slots, videos with disruptive mid-roll ad slots may see a reduction in revenue.
To make it simpler for creators to manage mid-roll ads, YouTube is introducing a new feature in YouTube Studio later this week. This feature will display ad slots that are deemed disruptive and allow you to change their timestamp.
This change could be attributed to providing a balanced ad experience to viewers and YouTube’s new quality standards. As per a survey conducted in July 2024 noted in the announcement post, YouTube observed that channels that have placed manual mid-rolls with automated mid-roll ads have seen a 5% increase in the overall YouTube ad revenue.
“Our goal with this feature is to give you more information and new options. You still have control over whether to show mid-roll ads in your videos and where you want them to appear,” says YouTube.
