Tag Archives: advertising

My Thoughts on YouTube’s Mid-Roll Ads

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I think I respect my viewers a lot more than other creators respect theirs.

I’m officially what’s referred to as a YouTube Creator. That’s someone who regularly creates content for publication on YouTube, a platform that gets thousands, if not millions, of new videos a day. Much of that is junk but a lot is actually good, valuable content. And some is really high quality, useful/entertaining material. I like to think that my content falls into that middle category — better than junk but not as good as the really high quality stuff. I do what I can with the materials and skills I have. And unlike other Creators there, this isn’t my full-time job and I don’t have a bunch of corporate sponsors feeding me cash. I set priorities in my life and YouTube content creation isn’t at the top of that list.

And now for a shameless plug…

If you like helicopters and/or flying and want to watch videos about helicopters/flying without a lot of hype, I hope you’ll try my channel, FlyingMAir. Many of the videos put you in the cockpit with me as I fly around and talk about what I’m seeing and doing. If you like it, subscribe and tell your friends.

That said, I am fortunate enough to be allowed to monetize my channel. I have 63,000+ subscribers (as I type this), a number that has been climbing steadily for the past few years. I’m not sure if the requirement is 1,000 subscribers or 10,000 subscribers for monetization, but I’ve met it. That means that I get a teeny tiny cut of whatever YouTube gets for placing ads before, after, and possibly during my content.

How teeny? It’s currently hovering around $3 per 1,000 views. So yeah — when 1,000 people watch one of my videos, I currently get about $3. Not exactly a wealth building opportunity for me. Sunday’s video, which has been out for 48 hours as I’ve typed this, has earned me about $5. (Thanks, viewers!)

Of course, one of the reasons this number is so low is because I only allow three kinds of advertising on my content and I allow them in only two places. Yes! Creators can specify what kinds of ads appear and when they appear! There are five kinds and three locations and this image from one of my video’s settings pretty much explains them:

YouTube Ad Types and Locations
This is how I normally set options for my videos.

YouTube’s advice — which apparently lots of Creators heed — is to turn on all ad options. YouTube wants the opportunity to sell ads everywhere, even though it does not display ads on all videos. (It’s about 60% for mine and I only make money on my videos when ads are displayed on them.)

My school of thought is this: I need ads on my videos to monetize them. (Yes, I know I’ve got Memberships and Patreon set up for my channel but not everyone can or wants to chip in with real money. Honestly, without monetization, I would not be motivated to create content regularly.) But I don’t want ads to ruin the viewing experience. So where can I put them to be the least obnoxious? The answer is before and after the video using ads that don’t obstruct or interrupt the content. That’s the settings you see above.

Some of my older videos might have Overlay ads and Sponsored cards selected, so don’t be surprised if you see some of those for content published before mid 2019. I don’t think I have During video turned on for any videos. And that’s what this post is about: mid-roll ads that appear during the video.

I’m a big YouTube viewer. I don’t have regular TV in my home. No cable or satellite, no antenna to pick up local broadcasts. I have whatever my smart TV or laptop can pick up through a wicked fast fiber Internet connection: Netflix, Amazon Prime, YouTube, and a variety of other channels I subscribe to or get for free like PBS, Lynda.com, and the Great Courses. I use YouTube to learn new things — even things I don’t need to know — and get ideas. To keep my brain going.

And, as a YouTube viewer, there is one thing I absolutely cannot stand: mid-roll ads. You know what I’m talking about. The ads that appear suddenly and without notice, sometimes in the middle of an onscreen sentence, disrupting the video with something you absolutely do not care about.

Mid-roll ad announcement
This “card” appeared in my YouTube Studio dashboard about a month ago and is still there.

Until recently, mid-roll ads were only available on videos 10 minutes long or longer. But recently, YouTube announced to creators that the ads were now available to videos 8 minutes long or longer. And oh, by the way, this feature will be turned on by default for all your new videos unless you change it by a certain date. (I immediately changed it for my channel.)

I need to point out something important here. Creators who enable mid-roll ads have the ability to specify points where the ads may appear. So say a Creator has made a video that shows a 4-step process with cuts between each step. Logically, a good place to put a mid-roll ad would be at one of those cuts. This is less intrusive in the content. But what I’ve seen lately as the number of mid-roll ads grows on YouTube is that Creators aren’t bothering to set up ad locations. They’re just letting them appear wherever YouTube puts them. The ultimate in annoying for viewers.

To me, allowing mid-roll ads to interrupt your content in such an annoying way is the ultimate way to tell your viewers that you don’t give a damn about their viewing experience. The only thing that matters to you is the fractions of pennies of ad revenue you’ll get by allowing that ad to appear.

And I think there’s something seriously wrong with that attitude.

I’ll admit it here: I’ve begun leaving comments on videos with disruptive ads asking the Creator to turn off mid-roll ads. And I think you should, too.

Of course, there is a way to get rid of all ads on YouTube — and it doesn’t necessarily hurt Creators. You can sign up for YouTube Premium. My understanding is that for $11.99/month, in addition to adding features to YouTube, it also removes ads from content. If you watch enough YouTube, you might find it worthwhile. I don’t watch that much YouTube and I’d rather see my money go directly to a Creator via Membership or Patreon support.

The only thing I’m really left wondering about is this: because I have disabled some YouTube ad options — rather than turning them all on as YouTube recommends — am I triggering some sort of penalty that keeps my videos out of search results? Is there some under-the-hood activity in the bowels of YouTube that will punish me for not flooding my videos with ads by simply limiting the number of potential new viewers? That’s something I’ll likely never know.

How YouTube Ad Revenue Works for Monetized Channels

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A behind-the scenes look at how YouTube creators can make money on advertising.

A while back, I blogged about an unexpected windfall from my YouTube videos and how that had motivated me to create new content and keep my channel growing as a real source of income. Since then, I’ve learned a few things.

The most important thing I learned was how YouTube advertising revenue works, and I thought I’d share it with the folks who think that they can become rich quick as YouTube content creators. As you’ll see, it isn’t that easy.

Yes, once your channel is monetized — a step that requires the channel to have at least 10,000 subscribers, which is a challenge in itself — you can get a small part of the revenue that YouTube collects on the ads that appear before, on, after, and sometimes during your video.

As a creator, you get some control over what kind of ads appear and when they appear. You can do this on a video-by-video basis or set default options that apply to all new videos you publish. Here’s what the Video Monetization screen looks like for one of my longer videos:

Video Monetization Options
Here’s the Video Monetization settings for one of my upcoming videos.

Of course, all this is moot for a video if you turn monetization off. That doesn’t turn ads off — it just turns off your ability to collect ad revenue on the video. Why would you do that? Well, perhaps the video has a paid promotion in it; if so, YouTube requires you to turn off monetization. Failure to do so is a violation of the terms of service which is a serious no-no in YouTubeland.

If Monetization is turned on, you can select what kind of ads you’ll allow on the video and when they will appear. YouTube recommends that you turn all of them on and it’s pretty obvious that a lot of creators do. But because I hate seeing ads in the middle of a video, I keep the During Video option (at the bottom) turned off. (I wish everyone did.) Other than that, I keep them set as you see here, with most turned on. Skippable ads run for about 5 seconds before you can click to skip them and I think that’s a small price to pay for free content. (To my knowledge, skipping an ad does not reduce my revenue.) Non-skippable ads are a little more frustrating but they’re always short. Overlay ads and sponsored cards both appear over content and I have one turned on and the other turned off; I think my logic was that one is more obtrusive than the other.

Now you might think that turning these on results in ads appearing on every single view. That’s simply not the case. Surely you’ve seen YouTube videos without ads?

There’s actually a sitewide estimate of how often ads appear on YouTube content: 40% of the time. So if one of my videos is viewed 10,000 times, only 4,000 of those views were likely to include ads. This becomes an important number, as we’ll see in a moment.

I should mention here that you can actually calculate your current ad percentage manually by consulting two different analytics screens. The Channel Analytics Overview screen tells you the number of views for a specific period — 28 days by default. The Channel Analytics Revenue screen tells you the number of monetized playbacks. Divide monetized playbacks by total views to get the percentage:

For example, as of today, for the past 28 days my numbers are as follows:
Monetized Playbacks: 62.7 ÷ Total Views: 124.3K = Percent of Videos Monetized: 50.4%

So right now I’m having a higher percentage of monetized playbacks than average. That could be because one of my recent videos has become very popular and may be more attractive for advertisers so I’m getting more ad buys.

Ad Types
Here are the kinds of ads sold on my channel in the past 28 days.

Of course, I don’t see all the details of every single ad sale. All I see is a breakdown of the kinds of ads sold for videos on my channel and the all-important CPM. The breakdown is on the Channel Analytics Revenue screen and clicking a SEE MORE link brings up a full screen of detail.

The CPM, which also appears on that Revenue screen, is an average of what I’ll be paid per 1,000 monetized views. This number changes regularly — it’s $6.79 this morning, but was down to $4+ the other day. (Again, I suspect a popular video has made space on my channel more valuable.) I’ve seen it as high as $11+. I would not be surprised if I checked in this evening and it was different. (In a way, it’s kind of like a stock market per share valuation for my channel or a specific video. It rises and falls depending on the market for ads on my channel or specific video.) They say that $4 is an average CPM for YouTube creators, so I’ll stick to that for illustrative purposes.

But no, this doesn’t mean you get $4 per view or even $4 per monetized view. It means you get $4 per 1,000 monetized views.

So going back to my previous example, if a video got 10,000 views and 40% of them were monetized and you were getting $4 per monetized view, that’s

10,000 x 40% /1000 X 4 = $16.00

My channel is doing pretty well this month, mostly because of my 737 MAX video‘s popularity. I published it 8 days ago and it has almost 50,000 views as I type this. I can get analytics for just this video and the numbers are very nice: almost 50% monetized playbacks and an $8.38 CPM. That video has earned me $104.54 in ad revenue in just 8 days. Sounds great, right?

Well, let’s look at the video that came out right before it, the Autumn Cockpit POV flight. Although it has a higher percentage of monetized playbacks, it’s only been viewed 2,800 times in two weeks. Its CPM is just $5.91. In two weeks, it’s earned me a whopping $11.99. (That’s not per day, by the way. It’s for the entire two weeks. That’s less than $1 per day.)

And please do remember that a video will not earn the same amount per day/week/month/etc. throughout its whole life. Sometimes they start like duds and pick up steam, like the 737 MAX video — it wasn’t doing well at all for the first two days. And then sometimes they’re going like gangbusters and interest suddenly disappears. You never know what to expect and can only hope for a pleasant surprise.

Views
Here are the view analytics for my most popular video ever. It had hardly any views for the first year it was published and then took off like a rocket, with periodic surges. The current live analytic for the past 48 hours shows 4,466 views — three years after it was released! This is a YouTube content creator’s dream; I wish I had a dozen like this.

When I started writing this, I didn’t mean to get into the complex details of revenue calculations for specific videos. I just wanted to explain how ad revenue works for monetized channels on YouTube. To take some of the mystery out of it.

The takeaway on all this is that in order to make YouTube a full-time business — as some creators have — you need a strategy that combines ad revenue from wildly popular videos and other sources. This is why so many content creators on YouTube also sell merchandise and offer memberships or Patreon patron benefits.

I’ll be frank here: creating content for my YouTube channel is crazy expensive. Not only do I have to fly an aircraft that costs hundreds of dollars an hour to fly, but I have to have the cameras, camera mounts, and video editing equipment to record and edit the resulting footage. And the time I spend doing all this is time I’m not spending doing something that could earn money elsewhere so there’s a definite value to my time. I could easily drop $300 to $600 to make a video that will never earn more than what it cost to make.

I’m not complaining here — I’m just telling it like it is. I love flying and having an excuse to fly. I enjoy making the videos. I like most of the very positive feedback I get. But a girl has to make a living so I hope folks don’t mind me pushing Flying M Air hats and T-shirts or asking for Patreon patrons. If my video creation efforts wind up costing me more than I take in over the long term, I simply won’t be able to continue making them.

And every once in a while, I publish one that actually makes the ad revenue work for me. My Home to Airport by Helicopter video, which has over 9.5 million views, is one of them.

Now if only I could come up with about a dozen more like that.

Another (Brief) Facebook Rant

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This might be enough to get me to completely pull the plug.

I’ll admit it: the only reason I haven’t completely pulled the plug on my Facebook account is because I use it to promote two businesses: Flying M Air and ML Jewelry Designs.

Flying M Air has been on my Facebook account for years. For a while, I tried hard to use Facebook to share information about what the company is doing through events, offers, galleries, and plain old posts. I was checking in daily to stay on top of messages. Flying M Air’s website has an annoying pop-up window that invites visitors to like us on Facebook. (I’m still trying to figure out how to turn that off.) The only thing I didn’t do was pay money to promote a Facebook post.

And here’s the rub. Flying M Air’s Facebook page has over 1000 likes. That means that over 1000 Facebook users have indicated that they want to see new content. I don’t post much anymore — heck, there are only five or six new posts since July — so it isn’t as if I’m bombarding page followers with content. It doesn’t matter, though. Facebook isn’t showing this content to the people who want to see it. Indeed, one of my posts from last summer “reached” only seven people.

Yeah. Seven out of over 1000.

Facebook Post
This post came out two days ago, yet was shown to only ONE person. For all I know, it could be me.

Against my better judgement, I set ML Jewelry Designs up on Facebook, too. I figured: why not? But rather than put a lot of energy into keeping its page up-to-date with new content, I set up new posts on its WordPress-based website to automatically post to the ML Jewelry Designs page on Facebook. This means the page gets new content just about every day. (I schedule posts so no more than one new item appears each day.) Now the page is less than a month old and has only 20 followers. But I’m getting the same ridiculous low reach numbers I get with Flying M Air.

So here’s the situation. Facebook users have indicated that they want to see the content posted on certain pages. But the Facebook algorithm has decides what they should and shouldn’t seen. My two business pages don’t pay for “promotion” so they’re pretty far down on the list of what gets shown. As a result, my content doesn’t appear for anywhere near the number of people who have indicated they want to see it.

So why bother posting it?

And what about the people who like a page because they want to see all of its new content? How many of them think there just isn’t anything new because it doesn’t appear in their newsfeed?

Can you see why I’m just so done with Facebook?