Manage ad breaks in long videos

You can enable advertisements at the beginning of videos that you upload to your channel. When you upload longform videos (videos that are 10 minutes or longer), you can also enable ads during the middle of the video ("mid-roll"), not just at the beginning.

Use the ad breaks tool to create, preview, and edit automatically-generated or manually-set mid-roll ad breaks.

Manual placement

Manually place mid-roll ads

You can manually place mid-roll ads in long-form videos.

1. Go to your Video Manager.
2. For the video you want to place an ad in, click Edit.
3. At the top, click the Info and Settings tab.
4. Open the Monetization tab.
5. Scroll to the Ad breaks section.
6. To set manual mid-roll ad breaks in bulk, click Insert ad breaks in bulk or Edit ad breaks in bulk, depending on if the video already has mid-roll ad-breaks.
7. Enter in the desired time. For example, "2:30, 10:45" means the first ad break mid-roll will appear 2 minutes and 30 seconds into the video, and the second one at 10 minutes and 45 seconds.
8. To save changes, click Edit ads.
9. You can make edits by clicking on the timeline and dragging the ad to where you want it.
10. You can insert additional ads by clicking Insert ad and continuing to drag the ads to where you want them.

Auto-generated placement

You can enable automatically-generated mid-roll ad breaks at both the video and channel levels, as well as for multiple videos.

Set mid-roll breaks for one video

1. Go to your Video Manager.
2. For the video you want to place an ad in, click Edit.
3. At the top, click the Info and Settings tab.
4. Open the Monetization tab.
5. Scroll to the Ad breaks section.
6. To accept automatically generated mid-roll ad breaks, click Suggest placements. You can make edits by clicking on the timeline and dragging the ad to where you want it.
7. You can insert additional ads by clicking Insert ad and dragging the ads to where you want them.

Set mid-roll breaks for user-uploaded content (Content Managers)

1. Go to your Content Manager.
2. Select the Settings tab.
3. Click Overview.
4. Scroll to the "Ad formats for user-uploaded content" section. 
5. Click the edit icon . 
6. Check the box next to Automatic mid-roll ads.
7. Click Save.

Set mid-roll breaks for multiple videos

1. Go to your Video Manager.
2. Select the videos using the checkbox at the left of the video thumbnail.
3. In the drop-down menu, select Actions > More actions > Ad breaks.
4. Check the box next to Automatic mid-roll ads.
5. Click Submit.

Set mid-roll breaks as default for your channel

You can set mid-roll breaks for your channel so that all new content you upload will have auto-generated mid-roll breaks enabled by default.

1. Go to Channels.
2. Under the channel settings, click Upload Defaults.
3. Scroll down to "Ad breaks" and check the box for Automatic mid-roll ads.

 

Note: If you choose to use automatically generated mid-roll breaks, the placement of the ads may change after you set it to improve the number or quality of breaks.

Preview & adjust ad placement

Once you’ve accepted the automatically generated mid-roll ad breaks or you have manually inserted ad breaks, you can quickly preview their placement in your video.

1. Click the ad marker that you want to preview.
2. Click Preview ad and the video will begin playing right before the ad break.
3. When the video reaches the ad break, it'll pause and show an "Ad break" screen so you can make sure this is a good place for an ad.
4. If you don't like the placement, adjust the timing by double clicking the ad placeholder in the editor and typing in the exact time you want the ad to appear.

Remove an ad

1. Click on the ad placeholder.
2. To the right of the ad time, click X