- So there's two questions that I asked myself
a little while ago.
One, do mid-roll ads affect a channel's performance and two,
do I make more money if I put mid-rolls into my videos?
Those are two important questions that a lot of YouTubers
are asking because they wanna know
if adding mid-rolls into a video is going to hurt a channel,
or is it going to not have any effect on the channel,
but earn more money.
So in this video, we're gonna dive into mid-roll ads
and I'm gonna use my channel as a case study
because I've been testing some different things
when it comes to mid-roll ads,
to figure out what works best for me and my audience
and I'm hoping through my experience,
you can take some of what I've used
or all of what I've used and apply it to your channel,
and hopefully be able to find a way to make more money
and also keep your audience happy.
All right, guys, let's get into it.
(upbeat music)
So before we get into talking about my findings,
I just wanna go through what a mid-roll ad is.
So for those of you who are newer to YouTube,
or you don't have your channel monetized yet,
or you just haven't really paid attention to monetization,
mid-roll ads are basically the ads
that are served in the middle of your video.
So there's three different types of ads.
There's ads that go before,
there's ads that go in the middle
and then there's ads that go after.
Now, the ads that go before and after
you don't have a ton of choice beyond just saying
skippable or non-skippable.
When you go into your back into monetization,
you can just leave everything on
and then YouTube's gonna determine
what type of ad is going to be served up to your audience.
And they'll determine whether it's gonna be a skippable
or non-skippable ad.
And a lot of this comes down to audience behavior,
and YouTube is not always going to serve an ad.
So they have their own algorithm,
that determines when an ad is going to be served.
Now mid-roll ads are actually the ads
that are in the middle of your video
and you can add these automatically,
where YouTube just chooses the best moment
and then puts an ad right there
or you can add them yourself and you can go in
and manually put in where the ad is placed.
So if you don't have YouTube Premium,
you're gonna see an ad right now.
Now, if you do have YouTube Premium on,
then you just saw an awkward pause.
And that's because YouTube Premium is an ad blocker.
So basically if you subscribe to YouTube Premium,
you're not gonna see any ads.
And this is one thing that I've noticed in my comments
when people complain about a mid-roll ad
or too many ads on videos, I always wonder like,
"Why don't you just buy YouTube Premium?"
It's not very expensive
and you don't have to deal with any ads.
I've always been subscribed to YouTube Premium,
so whenever I watch YouTube, I never actually see any ads.
And because of that,
I never really thought of mid-roll placement,
I never really thought of using mid-roll ads.
And for me, I thought it would be too much of a disruption
to turn these ads on.
But I started digging into it a little bit more.
I actually did a poll here, I did one on Twitter.
I was asking what people think of mid-roll ads.
And then I've also seen other creators talking about this
more and more recently.
So about three months ago,
I went through and turn mid-roll ads on
all the videos that didn't have them.
There were certain videos on my channel
where I did include them
and those are like my 30-minute guide
and I'd put mid-roll ads in those videos
and what I noticed is those videos made a lot more money.
So that made me think,
"All right, I'm gonna add mid-rolls to everything."
So a few months ago I went through
and added mid-rolls to all the videos
that were doing well on my channel.
So when I did that,
I saw about a 38 to 40% increase in my revenue.
And this is pretty significant.
That's going from like 150 something dollars
a day to over 200.
And over the course of the month,
that adds up to over another thousand dollars a month.
So you could see how powerful these mid-roll ads could be.
Now, one other thing to note,
when I'm talking about these numbers,
is I'm talking about when I'm not posting a video,
because when you post a video,
you're gonna see a spike in views,
watch time, revenue, everything.
So every time you post,
obviously you're driving more traffic to your channel
because of your subscribers and that number's gonna go up.
So you wanna look between video posts.
So when I'm looking at these numbers,
I'm looking between my posts,
to see where the average is over time,
not when I'm posting videos.
Now, there's a few factors that come into play
when it comes to mid-roll ads.
Number one is your CPM,
because if you have a super low CPM,
no matter how many mid-roll ads you add into your video,
it's not gonna increase your revenue that much.
And there are certain creators in different niches
that really don't have the potential
to earn a lot of ad revenue just because the CPM is low.
Now, if you're someone in like the financial industry
or something of that nature, the CPMs are super high.
And Roberto Blake did a really good video
that digs into the best topics
and the best CPMs that you can get.
And I'll link to that video down the description,
just so you can get an idea of where CPMs pretty much are.
Now here on my channel, I'm getting around a $16 CPM.
That's just channel wide.
Each video kinda depends on the topic of the video,
so if you're doing something in one topic
that has a higher CPM,
you might earn more money off of that.
But that's a big contributing factor to
how much money you're going to make off mid-roll ads.
Now, the other things you have to think about is
where your mid-roll ads are placed
and how often people are seeing them.
So if you have a low audience view duration,
and your mid-rolls are placed later in your video
and people never get to it,
then you're not gonna be making as much money.
So there's all these different factors that go into
whether a mid-roll ad's gonna trigger
and whether it's gonna make you money or not.
So recently I saw on Twitter,
Gerald Undone went through and stripped off his mid-roll ads
and he saw a 10% decrease.
So originally, I saw around a 40% increase
when I added mid-roll ads, so I wanted to do a test.
I wanted to see if I stripped mid-roll ads
off of every video on my channel,
would it affect my channel only about 10%
like Gerald was finding,
or am I gonna have more of a significant drop?
Now, the reason that you would wanna take off mid-roll ads
from your videos is audience experience.
So when someone's watching a video
and there's a mid-roll just in the middle of the video,
it's disruptive.
And there's an idea that if something is disruptive,
it's gonna cause your viewer to click away.
Maybe go to another video or maybe just leave your channel,
not wanna subscribe because they saw an ad, I don't know.
There's so many different reasons
that somebody might leave your video
and you don't wanna have ads being one of those.
So mid-rolls could be this disruptive factor
that causes someone to leave your video.
And you always gotta be thinking about audience
and your audience's experience,
because that's one of the most important factors
when it comes to your channel.
If you have a good experience for your audience,
that means people are gonna stay around longer,
which means your average view duration's gonna go up.
Your watch time's gonna go up.
Then YouTube's gonna start suggesting your content
out to more people and your channel's gonna grow.
All these things factor in together, to determine whether
you're gonna have a successful channel or not.
And so you don't wanna do things
that's gonna be disruptive and cause people to leave.
So I wanted to test this because originally, like I said,
I never really used mid-rolls.
I did it on a few videos,
but then I turned them all on
and I definitely saw an increase
in how much money I was making per month,
but I really wanted to test if it had an effect
on my audience view duration, my watch time,
all of that as well, so I did a test.
I took off mid-roll ads from every video on my channel.
I did it all at once because I wanted to see
the complete impact of no mid-rolls
from a period when I had mid-rolls.
And what happened is when I turned off my mid-rolls,
I saw a pretty sharp decrease in the amount of money
that I was making.
So in that period, I was averaging around $190 a day
and it dropped down to $120 a day.
And that was around a 36 to 37% decrease.
So that mirrored exactly what happened
when I turned on my mid-roll ads.
I saw about a 40% increase
and I just saw about a 40% decrease when I turned them off.
Now that's pretty significant
because that's the difference between
a few thousand dollars on my channel a month,
because my CPM is up there at like $16.
Now, if I was to have a lower CPM,
you wouldn't see as much of a drastic change
in terms of how much you're earning,
however, if you have a higher CPM,
that 40% drop makes a huge difference.
So the other thing I wanted to look at was watch time,
average view duration, views, all of that.
I wanted to see if there was an increase,
'cause the reason that you would turn off mid-rolls
would be audience experience,
and you'd wanna see those metrics go up,
even if your income is coming down,
because if you're getting more viewers onto your channel
and they're watching longer,
that in turn is gonna help your channel as a whole
and the whole channel is gonna move forward
which will lead to more money,
which will lead to more growth,
because if your channel grows,
then that's a good thing.
So what I saw in that period was no change whatsoever
in watch time, views, average view duration.
Like there was no change at all
when I turned my mid-rolls off.
And so for me on my channel,
I didn't see any significant reason
to turn off the mid-rolls, I actually hurt my channel
because I ended up making a lot less money
and as I said earlier, that's one of the ways
that I'm able to fund and make the videos
that I make here on the platform.
So there's one major issue,
when it comes to turning off mid-roll ads
and doing a test like this.
Is I had to go back and add mid-roll ads
to every one of my videos.
And this comes full circle
to what I was talking about earlier,
you can manually place mid-roll ads,
or you can automatically place mid-roll ads.
And you definitely want to manually place them
because you wanna put them at natural breaking points
so that you're not creating a disruption for your viewers.
If I was talking like mid sentence and boom there's an ad,
all of a sudden it pulls the viewer
out of whatever you're talking about.
But if you have these natural break points
and you think about it while you're creating a video,
then it's gonna flow better
and it's gonna cause less disruptions
when your audience is watching your videos.
And I think that's important.
If you're using mid-roll ads,
put 'em at natural break points,
don't just let YouTube decide where they go,
because they're gonna cut off sentences and all of that.
So I actually had to go back through
and add mid-rolls to all my videos,
and that took a long time 'cause I had to go video by video,
find natural break points and put the mid-roll in.
So if you are gonna go do this test,
it's not something that you can turn off
and just turn back on.
It doesn't really work like that.
Once you turn off a mid-roll,
it basically wipes out the data
to where that mid-roll was placed,
so you have to go back and do that.
So for a strategy when you're making your videos
and you turn on mid-rolls,
create break points in your videos
where a mid-roll's gonna go
and then when you upload your video,
make sure you add that mid-roll in right from the beginning.
You don't wanna have to go back later
and go through your entire library
and add all these mid-rolls in.
Now, after I added my mid-rolls in,
I went back through my library
and added 'em to all 600 videos that are on this channel.
And I went from where it was down to $124 a day
and now my average is up to about 220 to 50,
which is a huge increase.
So there was a lot of videos,
that I was missing mid-roll ads on before,
though this time around,
when I added all my mid-rolls back in
and I went through and placed them on every video
that I could, it took days,
it has an increase of around a hundred percent.
And that's a massive increase compared to other creators
that I've seen who say like,
10% or 20% increase or decrease.
40 to a hundred percent is a lot bigger number
and for me, it makes sense to add my mid-rolls in
because I'm not seeing any major decrease
in watch time or average view duration.
So take this as a case study
and maybe apply some of these things to your channel.
Go look through your CPM
and if you don't have mid-rolls on, maybe turn them on,
see what kind of effect it makes for each video.
So if you have some videos that perform super well,
turn the mid-rolls on those and manually place.
Now watch the income on that video over time
and see if there is a sharp increase in terms of percentage
of how much you're making, because that might tell you,
"Okay, I need to turn mid-rolls on to more videos"
and then also look at watch time,
average view duration, views,
see if there's any sort of massive decrease.
You wanna pay attention, you wanna watch your analytics
and if you turn mid-rolls on and it tanks your channel,
that's not gonna be good.
But if you turn mid-rolls on and it increases your income,
but your channel stays the same
in terms of all your metrics,
then why wouldn't you put on mid-rolls?
That's a question I have for you.
So guys, I'd love to hear your thoughts about this
down in the comments down below.
Let me know if you use mid-rolls
or if you have any questions around mid-roll ads in general,
but guys that's it.
I will see you on the next one.