The Takeaways:
- Starting later this month, creators with videos of 8 minutes or longer will be able to run ads in the middle of their videos.
- Mid-roll ads will be turned on by default on all eligible videos, both newly uploaded and pre-existing. This includes videos where creators already opted not to include mid-roll ads.
- Youtube said: “Mid-roll ads will be automatically placed at natural breaks in your videos to balance viewer experience and monetisation potential for you. After these changes, you will still be able to turn mid-rolls off or adjust the placement in each video manually. If mid-roll ads are not a good fit for your videos, you can indicate this preference in YouTube Studio by 27 July 2020.”
What Happened:
YouTube is responding to declining ad revenues for creators. As reported earlier this year by OneZero, despite viewership increasing during the COVID-19 lockdowns, advertising rates on YouTube have dropped by nearly 50% since the beginning of February.
While creators will still be able to switch the ads off if they choose, and be able to choose where such ads are placed, the move shows Youtube is eager to boost its ad inventory to increase overall revenue.
Given approximately 30,000 hours of content is uploaded to the platform every hour, the expansion of overall ads will be significant.
Attempts to Recover Falling Revenues
This is not the first move the company has made to attempt to boost flailing ad revenues. The company recently introduced a new performance tracker, “RPM” (‘Revenue Per Mille’), allowing creators to track earnings per 1,000 views of their videos.
By boosting the monetisation potential for creators through the increased ad load, Youtube is not only keeping it own revenue intake going but vitally, that of its creators too, who it needs in order to maintain strong viewership.
