Show HN: An “ethical” YouTube auto ad skipper chrome extension | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: An “ethical” YouTube auto ad skipper chrome extension

chrome.google.com

4 pointsnstart7 comments

Hi HN. This is my first published chrome extension :). I always skip ads in such a way that content creators get paid. But doing that manually especially with playlists can be a little tiring. So I made this extension to do it for me. It's open source as well

https://github.com/spartakode/Youtube-Ethical-Ad-Skipper

You wanna read my YouTube data, eh? No no!

Sadly I'm not in charge of the wording that Chrome puts out. Else it would read "wants permission to see if your URL is a YouTube URL and then insert some JS to control the mute and skip ad button" :D

If it helps, the source code is open so you can check out that no funny business is going on :) https://github.com/spartakode/Youtube-Ethical-Ad-Skipper

How is this legal?

Clicking on ads themselves wouldn't be legal. Since this doesn't circumvent normal behaviour and actually waits 31 seconds before skipping an ad, it def isn't illegal. There's no trickery involved either. It's just doing what the user would ideally do under normal circumstances but doing it automatically.

It's not entirely ethical because the advertiser gets ripped off. It increases their cost and reduces what they are prepared to pay for ads. If everyone else used it, content creators wouldn't get paid eventually. If YouTube was independent from Google it would die.

Thanks for the comment here. I spent some time thinking about this topic. I've done a write up here if you are interested - http://blog.spartakode.com/an-ad-skipper-for-youtube-that-pa...

The argument can be summarized as:

1. Skipping ads quickly on every chance you get means you are watching the video for "free". Which isn't fair to the creator

2. Not skipping ads in order to support the creator isn't great for advertisers either.

3. That said, Google is moving towards deprecating 30 second unskippable ads (unskippable ads will have to be 15-20 seconds or less). This means that users in general view ads longer than 20 seconds to be intrusive which means that the majority of people are likely skipping ads unless they are really compelling.

4. It's an unfortunate situation to be in but I choose to side with the content creators since ultimately they drive the whole site. YouTube ads should in the future normalise towards the better format of 15 seconds or less and most of them will become unskippable. This will happen regardless of this extension especially given that the majority of their traffic will come from mobile anyway.

5. Thus in the practical view of things, this chrome extension is likely to be used by a maximum of 1000 users (being extremely generous here). The market says that people just want to skip 5 seconds in. Not be ethical. And so I resolve the ethics conundrum within myself by accepting that this isn't likely to affect the YouTube eco system as a whole negatively, but it will at the very least, play a tiny part in contributing to the creators well being over time.

Last note: I really love YouTube Red. I broke borders using my VPN to get it but the hassle of having to keep the VPN going to use it especially on the mobile is a problem. Also I'm scared that YouTube will ban my entire Google account for breaking ToS so I stopped. The day they make it available globally, I'll be a happy person with a credit card at the ready :).

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