Monetisation & Revenue
Manual ad breaks
Also called: place ads manually, manual mid-rolls
Open a video's monetisation tab in Studio and you can drop ad slots onto the timeline wherever you want them, dragging each marker to the second. The obvious use is protecting a moment: no break in the middle of a sentence, none two seconds before a payoff. Marking a slot does not guarantee an ad runs there. YouTube weighs how likely a viewer is to leave at each point and can decline to fill one, and Studio now shows you which of your slots look unlikely to serve. Manual and automatic placement run together on the same video too, and combining them beat manual alone by over 5% in an internal YouTube experiment in 2024.