YouTube Ad Formats: Skippable, Non-Skippable, Bumper and Live Ads

YouTube says it simplified the choices: when you turn on ads for new long-form videos, viewers see pre-roll, post-roll, skippable or non-skippable ads when appropriate. The formats it describes:

Mid-roll ads can be turned on for videos longer than 8 minutes, with breaks placed manually or automatically. Back-to-back ads, called ad pods, can occur on long-form videos of at least 5 minutes. YouTube stopped running overlay ads, a legacy desktop-only format, starting April 6, 2023.

Outside the player there are watch feed ads, subscriptions feed ads and Watch While ads. Watch While ads serve on monetizing videos that are not eligible for mid-rolls, and viewers can close them or let them auto-dismiss after 30 seconds. These cannot be controlled from YouTube Studio.

In YouTube's horizontal versus vertical live comparison, horizontal live streams support live ad mid-rolls and pre-rolls, while the vertical live feed does not. In Go Live Together streams, pre-roll, mid-roll and post-roll ads appear and are attributed to the host channel.

YouTube's live-streaming page also says creators can run live ads manually or let YouTube insert them automatically.

Our reading: the formats your viewers see depend on the video type, so a long-running horizontal stream is the format with the widest ad support, while a vertical feed trades ads for discoverability in the Shorts feed. Ad suitability and policy checks still decide whether ads run at all.

YouCast turns the videos you upload into a 24/7 live stream that runs from the cloud, to YouTube and, with a stream key, to Twitch, Kick and Instagram, so there is no encoder to configure, no computer to keep awake and no home upload line to saturate.

Ads apply to a monetized channel's live stream like any other video. YouCast keeps a long-running horizontal stream online, which is the format with the widest ad support.

You can try one stream on the free trial and add more streams as the channel grows.