The following is a response to Film Booth letting me know the midroll guide is out in the wild being shared in pieces by youtubers and spreading quickly. I thought it would be useful to have this as a full write of a majority of my thoughts about ads, midrolls, and making money as a creator on youtube in general. I hope this expanded version helps dispel a lot of the concerns, questions and holdups people have surrounding the idea of making money on youtube and the viewer experience. This was written at 12am after a long day. so there may be some errors in grammar and spelling. (more than some)

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Yeah, I am aware that as new members have come into our community over time,that they have more often been sharing some of our internal tips, guides, and info to outside groups, something which isn't bad, but sometimes I feel like it misses context and gets read in a poor light.

What's funny is this isn't even new knowledge, but there is sadly a prevailing and strong starving artist mentality that perpetuates in youtube communities, and I am glad people are waking up and realizing they can just make money and not feel ashamed to do so. The idea that it was bad comes mainly:

1. From major youtubers who have already "made it" and have a lot of money and then choose to pursue the art of youtube and care less about the money, and start to grandstand and act like midrolls are terrible and they  "would never sell out" to their audience's viewer experience. which is easy to say when you've made your millions and can afford to reduce your income by 50% and still have more than you can spend.

2. And then at the bottom of the rung, the tiny micro youtuber, or newtuber, who feels like they want to take a moral high ground of avoiding ad revenue as if making money from your work is something bad. and they see themselves as some sort of starving artist who is there for the art and shuns the idea of money being important.

We have worked really hard to help the middle class of youtube de-stigmatize the idea of making a living from youtube. It's okay to run ads, it's okay to take sponsors, it's okay to sell courses. It is okay to make money from your audience. running midrolls is only going to inconvenience the audience for maybe 10 to 30 seconds during a video.

I even compare it to other mediums of entertainment.

TV: 22 minutes of show, 8 minutes of ads.

Hulu with ads: 3, 60 second ads back to back every 10 to 15 minutes.

Radio: 3 minutes of ads every few songs.

Newspapers: are half news, half ad.

Magazines: are half ads, half content.

Youtube: is 5 to 15 seconds of ads for a sub 8 minute video, and based on the data, with a well loaded video, only 0.9 to 1.5 video ad sessions, so around 5 to 30 seconds of ads for your typical 8 to 15 minute video. That's an insanely low ratio of ad to content. Even if it were double, it would still be lower than most any other medium.

Another thing too, that people don't consider is that if they get one comment about ads, it's not the end of the world. The other hundreds of comments don't even mention ads. That's less than 0.5% of the audience. if the person is complaining about needing to watch 5 to 30 seconds of ads, as payment to watch a video that the creator spent  20, 40, 100, maybe even 1,000 hours on, that viewer was never going to buy merch, subscribe to a patreon, or support the creator beyond the few views they give anyways. There is no reason to sacrifice 50% of possible revenue for the less than 0.5% of people who may feel inconvenienced by 1 more ad across their viewing session than usual. To top it off.

I have also seen youtubers who reaching a financially desperate time, announced they were going to add midrolls so they could afford to keep going, and their audiences mostly just said they had been watching for years and never noticed the creator did not run midrolls. and when you see the data, it makes sense. a chunk of people don't even see ads during a video, and the rest may only see one ad, sometimes 2. and if someone is watching youtube for hours and all the creators around them are adding midrolls and the one creator doesn't. that person isn't going to remember the 8 minutes of their 120 minute watching session that day where they didn't see a midroll. because they saw midrolls the rest of the time. The reason is because honestly,  most creators see youtube from the perspective of their own channel being the center of the youtube experience, but unless you are the top of your niche, you will likely not be the center of very many peoples youtube experience and they really aren't thinking that hard about the ads or small details, so to worry about this stuff and how it may have some profound effect on viewers is over worrying.

Anyways. That's a lot of rambling. In the end. The way I see it, is that creators who truly care about providing the best content to their viewers, need money to make those big ideas happen. Having 50%+ more revenue each month means hiring editors, writers,better equipment, bigger videos. And it comes at very little cost to the viewer's experience overall, to the point where the benefits greatly outweigh any negative.

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that was just my thoughts to you (film booth). not an expansion of the midroll guide. Here is what I would expand, feel free to fix it up if needed. 

To preface this guide, It is intended to help creators be fairly compensated for their work, and also be able to effortlessly increase their earnings by a massive amount for little or no cost to viewership, retention, or viewer experience. For many creators this has been the difference between being part time to going full time, or from being paycheck to paycheck to being able to buy a home. For some it has meant going from solo, to hiring a team.It can have a great impact for only a few extra minutes of work per video. It was originally written in 2021, and has since been revised and edited, it has remained pinned in the discord group over the years, and shared many times on the subreddit when ad placement came up, and pieces from the guide have been shared around various youtube communities over time, with a lot more frequency in the past few months.

We have tested over and over again on over 100 channels with an average of a 50% RPM increase, and found that more midrolls does not really affect retention. The reason being that most people just don't care. The people that do either have adblock or premium.

Youtubers, and power viewers on youtube are the minority of users on the platform with 2 billion monthly users. the average user of youtube will binge 20 to 30 videos and often do not even have an account, they just go from video to video. channel to channel, blissfully unaware of ad frequencies and uninterested in minor details. ads are just simply a normal part of the overall youtube experience, but also of the human experience on the internet, your ads are but a small drop in the bucket indistinguishable from the rest of the water.

The Lead of the Algorithm at YouTube also stated that it doesn't really matter if you even place ads every minute, since there is an algorithm that knows each user by a profile and knows their ad tolerance and will choose to play an ad at your placed spots or not. Each placement is just a chance, not a guarantee. And if a viewer can't handle it, based on the user profile YouTube has, it will not play an ad there.

The source of this is Todd, Global lead of homepage and recommendations at youtube. He goes by "The algorithm" in discord, and has clarified this idea about midrolls and that they are only chances.

By far the largest misconception about midrolls, and the reason people are so hesitant to place them, is that they believe that it is guaranteed to play an ad every time. This is absolutely 100% not true. Midroll placements are only a chance to play an ad, and they will only play if it is deemed to be optimal for the current viewer, based on past and interaction behaviors that the ad algorithm has attached to them. I (Jokull, the writer) watch youtube while doing tasks like dishes where I can't stop to skip a hour long skippable ad, and prefer non-skips since they go away on their own. I end up seeing 80% of video ads being non-skip during my watch session even though they typically only make up 20 to 30% of ads on youtube overall. Some people almost always just see skippable ads, because they react better to those.

Another thing I found is that even videos with all types enabled, and have 4 midrolls, the average viewer only sees between 0.9 and 1.5 ads. Hardly ever will anyone see every ad you place because each one is just a CHANCE that an ad will be shown.

Ads simply don't play as much as you think they do. and if you get a complaint from a user, it's likely because they were the outlier and happened to get more ads than usual on your video, but the majority will see a much lower amount than you expect. I have a calculator you can use to see truly how many ad sessions your average viewer sees. Before manually placing midrolls, most channels actually have closer to only 0.7 ads per viewer, and after the implementation, even 1.5 per viewer is fairly uncommon, it typically settles at around 1.3 which really isn't a lot. but you can then see that going from 0.7 or 0.9 to 1.3 ads per viewer is the reason for that roughly 50% increase.  https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1wFwhfvRmsGeGEY5TnAvVtI3iO2u853CwglX19i7s5ok/edit#gid=0.

I suggest you do this.

Have all ad types enabled. That means, pre, mid, post rolls. Also display and cards.  Every type is enabled since youtube will determine the best ad type to show each viewer.

Then there are two options.

If you have chapters. Try to place your ads about 2 minutes or more apart with the ads being placed 1 second after the beginning of a chapter.

The reason for placing ads around chapters is because chapters are a super strong indicator used by youtube and google to determine the switch / transition of topics, making for a natural place for an ad to be less intrusive. Remember that youtube, while it loves money, also wants people on the platform for longer. The longer they stay on youtube, the more they associate their life with youtube, and the more they return. So youtube will absolutely appreciate and reward ad placements being as non obstructive as possible.

Or if you don't use chapters, do this. Make sure to place Midroll at the end of sentences, or in slow spots of the video, or places with little action, or places of silence. You have a higher chance of playing ads during times like that.

One easy way to do this is look at the audio waveform on the midroll editor and pick the places of silence. Some youtubers even edit in 0.5 second pauses into their videos, or choose to not take out a short pause where they plan to place midrolls,and it tends to have a decent effect.

Place them in the following patterns, give or take 15 seconds from the time markers ( try to get in the types of spots described above)

Some people have been confused by this, so to clarify, the timestamps are not meant to be followed down to the second. They are just rough approximations for space between ads, and of course you should seek the nearest slow spot, or natural  break that makes sense near the timestamp listed.

Because you actually understand how ads work:

Pre-roll, 1:00, 2:00, 3:00, 4:00, 5:00, 6:00, 7:00, 8:00, 9:00, 10:00, 11:00, 12:00, 13:00, 14:00, 15:00, etc., there is an obvious pattern here that you should have picked up by now.

This one where its placed every minute is in reference to the fact that even at peak holiday times where youtube has their peak of ad inventory, and even of your viewer was a high income earner parent, business owner, in Manhattan New York who love finance and they were watching on a TV, they would not see an ad more than every 1 to 2 minutes. youtube has a certain buffer between ads that is a maximum of 1 ad per minute in "perfect" conditions.

Aggressive (Recommended):

Pre-roll, 1:00, 2:15, 3:45, 5:15, 6:45, 8:15, 10:00, 12:00, 14:00, 16:00, 20, 25, 30, 35, 40, 50, 60 post roll.

Medium:

Pre-roll, 1:00, 2:30, 5:00, 7:30, 9:00, 11:30, 15, 20, 25, 30, 40, 50, 60 post-roll.

Light:

Pre-roll, 2:00, 4:30, 7:30, 10:00, 15, 20, 25, 30, 40, 50, 60 post-roll.

To end this, There are some disclaimers and outliers we found in the community while testing over the years. Channels who have a much older audience, typically have a higher % of TV viewers. if your channels have around 35% or higher TV viewers, you should take the light approach. Ads tend to show up more for TV viewers due to those being higher paying ads. The assumption for advertisers is that multiple people in a household are seeing the ad, it's clearer,less likely to be skipped, and more likely to be watched. TVs are also typically one of the less common devices using youtube, so they have a higher ad inventory compared to mobile or desktop.

 Another caveat to placing midrolls is that if you have a sponsored section, don't place midrolls on the sponsor section, and we advise typically a 30 to 45 second buffer around it, where you don't place midrolls.

I hope that this expanded version of the guide helps clarify things for those who may have seen bits and pieces of it floating around in recent times. and if anyone would like to ask more questions, please feel free to join the subreddit or discord and ask away. you can even ask for me specifically if you want. I will try to respond if I can.