Your inputs

The first slider sets your daily YouTube time, from zero to sixteen hours in half-hour steps. Below it, instead of one generic “ad breaks” number, you set skippable and non-skippable ads per hour separately, because the two behave completely differently and mixing them into one average would hide more than it shows. The next slider sets how many seconds you actually watch before a skippable ad ends or you skip it — skippable ads can be skipped after five seconds, but nothing forces you to, so this runs from 5 seconds up to a full minute. The last slider is your own estimate for how long a typical non-skippable ad runs, since those formats vary from short bumpers to longer ones.

For example, someone watching 2 hours of YouTube a day, running into 4 skippable and 1 non-skippable ad per hour, and skipping most skippable ads around the 8-second mark ends up with about 1.6 minutes of ads a day — close to 9.5 hours a year and 4 days over a decade, with roughly two-thirds of that time coming from the skippable ads alone.

Your ad receipt

The receipt lines up your daily viewing and both ad counts first, then converts them into ad time for one day, one year, five years, and ten years, ending with a single number for the ten-year total in days and hours, plus its closest human-scale equivalent.

Where the time goes

The first bar underneath the big number turns your daily ad time into a percentage of your total daily YouTube time, so you can see the share going to ads instead of the videos you came to watch. The second bar splits that ad time between skippable and non-skippable ads, since for most people one of the two ends up doing most of the damage, and it’s rarely an even split.

What your result means

If your inputs add up to an unusually high share of ad time, a small note appears under the percentage bar as a nudge to double-check your numbers, since the result only reflects what you entered. The line below compares the time you’re currently giving to skippable ads with the fastest possible skip on every one of them, showing the potential yearly saving from doing that consistently. Turning on the Premium toggle adds the ad time a Premium subscription would let you avoid, its current cost over the same ten years, and what that works out to per hour of ad time removed — with a link across to the separate Is Premium Worth It calculator if you want to weigh that decision properly. The copy button below grabs a single short sentence with your ten-year total, ready to paste anywhere, instead of a long link full of parameters.