YouTube Updates: Mid-Roll Ad Bug & Editing Restrictions Incoming!

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YouTube updates weekly, fresh off the press. Let’s start with the automated midroll ads update for videos with at least 8 minutes runtime, which is set to launch on May 12th. While the automated ad slots display when an ad break is considered interruptive, they didn’t initiate an ad auction. This led to a revenue drop for some creators.

The current best practice is to run the automated ad slots to identify the optimal placement, then manually insert an ad break into the suggested slot by YouTube. If you have further questions on this topic, feel free to leave a comment below and keep your most-watched videos updated. Moving on to the next subject: In the coming month, YouTube will discontinue the “revert to original” feature in the YouTube video editor.

This means that once you trim, cut, or blur something, the change will become permanent. They cite feature abuse and poor performance as their primary concerns, opting to remove the feature instead of fixing it, thus freeing up development resources. If you wish to edit your videos, you’ll need to download the original file via Google Takeout, as YouTube Studio only allows downloads up to 720p.

Without the original files, you’ll have to edit locally, re-upload the edited video, and consequently lose comments, likes, views, etc. Unfortunately, Google Takeout lacks a tool to select specific videos for download. For instance, on my gaming channel with 5,000 videos (2,300 public, 2,700 unlisted live streams), every request via Google Takeout downloads all videos.

Given that many people might regularly do this, it could significantly increase Google Takeout’s data traffic. It remains to be seen if they’ll invest resources in improving the YouTube Studio download feature, which currently only permits downloading a single video at a time. If you’d like a tutorial on using Google Takeout, please comment below.

Please utilize the feature extensively. YouTube is essentially forcing creators to do this. Even if you don’t save the downloaded videos, constantly downloading and deleting them in the background generates traffic. I’m genuinely tired of this.

Feel free to visit Creator Insider and tell them in the comments that you’d like to keep using the “revert to original” feature. They could allocate development costs to improving it instead of having thousands of creators download multiple petabytes of data weekly. Just saying. That’s all for this week. Apologies for the somewhat harsh undertone. We’ll keep you updated on new YouTube developments every week, so subscribe if you haven’t already. See you next week! Bye.