Monetisation & Revenue
Automatic Ad Breaks
Also called: auto ad breaks, automatic midrolls
Switch automatic breaks on and YouTube picks the points, aiming for natural pauses; leave it off and only the slots you place by hand can run. Since May 2025 YouTube has moved more mid-rolls towards natural break points and added automatic slots to older videos that carried manual ones only.
The choice gets framed as one or the other. YouTube's own 2024 experiment found channels running both together earned over 5% more on average than manual placement alone, so the two work as a pair. Mid-rolls only become available once a video is long enough, and the real cost of a badly placed break is the viewer who leaves at it.