I'm sorry, I've miscalculated, it's actually 28.5% rather than 36%! I'm not sure if I'm allowed to post exact values here on forum, so I'll stick to percentages for now. I'm not using mid-roll ads because I personally hate ads popping up in the middle of the video/game, especially if there's a big fight going on and would probably just annoy people and possibly make them dislike the video. I'd rather earn a little less and keep everyone happy!
But I agree, YouTube Red definitely sounds exciting and might be exactly what we need since CPM seem to be going down year after year. I'm curious though, how long are your videos on average? Because that seems to be very low since our demographic is similar. I'd say about 50 minutes here.
My content is short form content, around 5 - 10 minutes.
Fair enough about the mid roll decision, regardless, the likelihood of being served an ad is much greater on a longer video, so you will make more.