?? NEW YOUTUBE UPDATE: Big changes to mid-roll ads! (+ How this affects your revenue)
Starting May 12, 2025, YouTube is changing how mid-roll ads work. It’s going to show more mid-roll ads at natural break points, like pauses and transitions, and fewer ads where it believes them to be interruptive.
Let’s take a look at the changes, how this may impact your revenue, and my personal concerns.
(1) New feedback tool
YouTube Studio will now show warnings if your mid-rolls are considered interruptive, so you can adjust or remove them for a better audience experience.
This change should help us better understand when to place ads to optimize the ad experience and make sure the audience’s watch experience isn’t interrupted in a way that hurts the content.
While overall, I’m a big fan of this change, it does mean that we’ll have another manual process of regularly needing to check how our ads are performing, which could become a struggle when you’ve uploaded hundreds of videos on your channel.
On the other hand, this may teach us more than just where to place ads. This change could give us data to help us better understand when to do brand deals or when to add otherwise interruptive information.
(2) Better automatic ad placement
YouTube will automatically place mid-roll ads at natural break points—pauses, transitions—instead of interrupting key moments, like mid-sentence or mid-action. This should reduce drop-off rates, keeping more viewers engaged.
They’re stating that people who have both auto mid-roll ads and manual ad slots are seeing a 5% increase in YouTube ad revenue compared to channels with manual mid-rolls only.
However, this is where I’m going to insert some speculation. Here, YouTube isn’t very clear on how it’s going to find those natural breaks. It makes it sound good, but in the past, we found automatic ad placement to be significantly worse than manual ad placement.
We’ll have to see how this plays out, but I don’t recommend blindly following their advice on this yet until you’ve run a proper analysis.
(3) Older videos getting updated
If you uploaded videos before Feb 24, 2025, and manually placed mid-rolls, YouTube will add automatic ad slots at natural pauses on those older videos. You can manually configure ads if you want full control.
This seems like a pretty good change; however, I’m hoping they provide creators with an opt-in option for all videos rather than requiring individual adjustments. Otherwise, you might need to change the ad settings for hundreds of videos if you’re an established creator.
What I recommend you do
Enable the automatic ad slots, as I believe YouTube is genuinely trying to improve the ad experience and their systems. I still recommend placing your own mid-rolls manually every minute and using the new feedback tool to check if they’re interruptive. The ones that are interruptive should be removed and used as a learning opportunity for future placements.