Recently, we introduced two new features to help you increase ads opportunities and viewership:
- New feedback feature that gives creators visibility into which manual mid-roll ad slots were unlikely to get ads from our ads serving system. You can use this feedback to adjust your manual mid-roll ads slots.
- Ability to combine manual and automatic mid-roll ad slots to give our systems more choices to serve ads on your video.
We launched these features to help your ads opportunities now and in preparation for May when we do some tuning to our ads serving system. This tuning will shift more mid-roll ads to natural breakpoints as part of our continual improvements to increase creator earnings potential and viewer retention.
To help you reduce the work of going back through your existing videos uploaded prior to February 24, 2025 and adjusting manual mid-rolls, YouTube will add automatic ad slots to existing videos with manual mid-rolls starting May 12, 2025.
In an experiment conducted in July 2024, we 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.
Creators who would rather adjust manual mid-rolls on their own or prefer not to have automatic ad slots on existing videos, can opt-out in the Earn tab of YouTube Studio anytime before May 12, 2025.
Regardless of whether you allow us to add automatic ad slots in your existing videos starting May 12, 2025, we recommend reviewing your top performing videos with mid-rolls and moving manual ad slots that are unlikely to serve ads to increase your ads opportunities.
For best results, we encourage you to use these new tools to inform your mid-roll ad strategies and improve ad opportunities.For more information on these changes, check out the Forum Post.
On monetized videos that are 8 minutes or longer, you can turn on ads during the middle of the video (known as "mid-rolls").
You can manage mid-rolls on any video regardless of your channel-level upload default. If eligible, you can also enable mid-roll ads for your live streams.
Types of ad slots in YouTube Studio
- Manual ad slots: If you choose to manually place ad slots, you are telling our systems specific places in your video where you would allow an ad to serve. Our ad systems then decide which ad slots may get an ad based on a number of factors to best balance viewer experience, creator earnings, and advertiser value. Ad slots placed at natural breakpoints, such as a pause in audio or transition in visual, are more likely to serve ads as our systems generally find higher viewer retention at these breakpoints. However, creators previously did not have feedback on which ad slots were likely or unlikely to serve ads to optimize their manual mid-roll ads slots. Mid-roll ad slots that can be disruptive to the viewer experience, such as mid-sentence or mid-action are less likely to serve ads.
- Automated ad slots: You can turn on automatically placed mid-roll ads, which means our systems help find natural breakpoints in your video for an ad slot.
- Manual and automatic ad slots: You can supplement your manual ad slots with automatic ad slots. This gives our ads systems more choices to serve ads on your video and could increase your ads opportunities.
Mid-roll quality feedback
This feature helps you see which mid-roll ad slots are unlikely to serve ads. Based on this feedback, you can choose to adjust the ad slot to a more natural breakpoint to increase chances of ads to show.
When first uploading a video and placing manual mid-roll ad slots, the initial feedback generally happens within an hour (though this can take longer especially on longer videos).
After the initial feedback, when you adjust mid-roll ad slots, you will see this information much more quickly, typically in less than a minute.
Upload videos 
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INSERT AD SLOT. Enter the start time of the ad, or drag the vertical bar to the desired time.
next to the ad slot.
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