Monetisation & Revenue
Pre-Roll Ad
Also called: preroll, pre roll
Pre-roll runs ahead of your video. It is the first thing a viewer meets after the click, and the format ranges from a skippable spot the viewer can dismiss after a few seconds to a shorter non-skippable one they have to sit through. Creators in the Partner Program choose whether ads are allowed on a video, and YouTube decides which format serves to which viewer.
People misread pre-roll as the cause of a weak opening retention curve. Retention is measured from the start of your own video, so an ad before it never appears on the graph.