YouTube Will Soon Make Mid-roll Ads Less Bothersome

Google will soon make changes to mid-roll ads on YouTube to make these ads less interruptive. The company hopes that by improving the viewer experience, content creators will also be able to earn more revenue from their videos.

“Starting May 12, 2025, we’re improving the quality of mid-roll ads on YouTube,” Google said in a community post (via The Verge). That means we’ll show more mid-roll ads at natural break points, like pauses and transitions, and fewer ads where they may feel interruptive or cause viewers to abandon the video, like in the middle of a sentence or action sequence.”

Mid-roll ads only appear on videos longer than 8 minutes from creators in the YouTube Partner program. These content creators can use automatic mid-rolls for their videos, and in that case, they won’t need to change anything.

For creators who manually placed mid-rolls in their videos uploaded before yesterday, February 24, 2025, Google will automatically update these videos to add to automatic ad slots at natural break points. Creators can still opt out, however, and they’ll still be able to manually add ad slots to their videos.

“In an experiment conducted in July 2024, we observed that channels who had auto mid-roll ads slots enabled in addition to manual saw an average of over 5% increase in YouTube ad revenue compared to channels with manual mid-rolls only,” Google explained on the support page.

To help eligible creators manually place mid-rolls in their videos, the YouTube Studio portal will now review each slot to make sure it isn’t interruptive. ”If you are only using manual mid-rolls and they are placed in interruptive parts of your videos, you may see a decrease in revenue as we improve mid-roll quality after May 12, 2025,” the company said.