Place and clean up your mid-rolls in bulk
A browser extension that places and cleans up mid-roll ad breaks in YouTube Studio, in bulk.
Mid-Roll Manager works inside YouTube Studio, on the monetization editor for one video. Open the editor, click the extension, and it does the clicking you would otherwise do by hand, one ad break at a time.
No data is collected or transmitted. The extension makes no network requests and never leaves the Studio tab.
Three modes
The popup has three tabs, and each one does a different job. Every mode has a speed control, and every run can be stopped part way through.
Insert: ad breaks at a fixed interval
The straightforward case. You choose a spacing and the extension places a break at every multiple of it, from a start point you set.
- Open the monetization editor for the video and switch it to manual ad breaks.
- Click the extension and stay on the Insert tab.
- Set how many seconds you want between ads, and the second the first one should land on.
- Click Insert Ad Slots and let it run. Watch the log if you want to see each placement land.
- Use Add Ad at Start and End if you also want a break at each end of the video.
Silence: ad breaks in the quiet stretches
The mode worth having the extension for. Placing a break at a fixed interval is easy to do by hand and lands wherever the interval falls, which is often mid-sentence. This mode reads the audio waveform instead, finds the stretches where the video goes quiet, and puts the breaks there, so a viewer meets the ad at a pause rather than in the middle of a thought. Doing that by hand means scrubbing the whole video listening for gaps.
- Open the monetization editor for the video and switch it to manual ad breaks.
- Click the extension and open the Silence tab.
- Set the minimum seconds between ads. This is a floor, not a target: the extension never places two breaks closer together than this, so raising it gives you fewer ads.
- Set the silence sensitivity. Lower counts only near total silence, so you get fewer breaks; higher counts subtler quiet moments too, so you get more.
- Set how long a quiet stretch has to last before it counts as a usable gap.
- Leave the start and end checkbox on if you also want a break at each end of the video.
- Click Insert Into Silence. The extension reads the audio waveform Studio has already drawn for the video, so it does not have to play anything back.
Cleanup: remove the breaks that should not be there
For a video that already has manual breaks, whether you placed them or an earlier run did. Cleanup keeps the ones that work and deletes the rest.
- Open the monetization editor for the video and switch it to manual ad breaks.
- Click the extension and open the Cleanup tab.
- Leave the flagged only checkbox on to remove just the breaks Studio itself marks as bad. Turn it off to also thin out breaks that sit too close together.
- Set the minimum seconds you want between the breaks that survive.
- Click Run Cleanup. The summary line tells you how many it found, how many it is keeping and how many it is deleting.
What it asks for, and why
Three permissions, and no more. The extension asks for nothing that would let it read anything outside the Studio tab you opened it on.
activeTab- Lets the extension work on the tab you are already looking at, and only after you click its icon.
scripting- Lets the extension put its own scripts back into the Studio tab when they have gone missing, which happens after the extension updates or reloads.
https://studio.youtube.com/*- The monetization editor is the only page the extension runs on. It has no access to any other site.