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Comment by monkeyfacebag | Hacker News Reader

I pay for YouTube premium but I'm still subjected to ads in the majority of videos I watch: the kind that are embedded by the creator directly in the video, eg, a one minute sponsored by Squarespace segment. I don't know how Google is framing YouTube premium (I get it through my Google play music subscription) but it is most assuredly not an ad-free experience.

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You might be interested in using this extension: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/sponsorblock/

Doesn't work 100% of the time but seems to do the trick for most popular videos.

Hah, that's a cool hack. It reminds me of the folks who were editing pirated Mythbusters videos so each myth was its own continuous segment, without the recaps ("before the break, we were watching...") and.. precaps? ("Stay tuned to see what happens!")

/r/smyths is what your looking for, and it's way better than original mythbusters

FWIW, the videos with sponsored content are frequently either not getting money from YouTube (such as the gaming segment), or not getting enough from the ads that do run (COPA affected and . The creators may also be futureproofing their livelyhood in fear that their segment will be the next one that YouTube demonitizes by default.

It’s not very profitable to be a content maker (outside the top .01%), and many content creators are paying a team to help them produce regular, high quality videos.

I don't dispute any of that. I'm saying that, as a YouTube premium subscriber, I'm not clear exactly what I'm paying for. I mean, I guess fewer ads is better than more ads but I think a paid service should be able to provide me with stronger guarantees.

To the extent that YouTube is just a user-generated content delivery platform, paying for premium makes them stop injecting their own ads. Ads that are part of the videos are outside their purview. It's a defensible, and I think reasonable position to take (and I say this as someone who hates advertising in general).

I mean, I get how Youtube works. I understand there is a distinction to be made, if I cared to make it, between Google's ads and creators' ads. My point is that Youtube premium is not ad-free and explaining how Youtube works doesn't refute that point. You may think it's fine that Youtube premium has ads because that's how Youtube works. I respect that. I still watch Youtube all the time myself.

I agree, but then the price is too high. They charge $12/month because much of the money is supposed to go to the creators - but that goes against the idea that they're just a dumb platform.

For decades, people have accepted ads in television, though it's a paid service.

And then they jumped at the first ad-free alternative. Which at first, was cable. After that ship sunk under the weight of ad-crap the Internet was the new thing.

For a while, people managed with ad-blockers until they became too easy to use and too popular so now... Netflix had a brief moment where there were no ads. Now they advertise (their own content, but still).

So from what I gather, people have spent decades running away from advertisement.

It's the natural evolution. Everyone jumps on a great product, then it becomes heavily monetized and the user experience declines, and people run to the next firm's solution that has less ads, then once they have the eyeballs, they monetize it, it's cyclical.

For decades, we did not have the means to fight back. Now we have the technology to fight this abuse: ad blockers, DVRs that automatically delete ads in recorded video, radio ad/chatter filters, sponsorship segment skippers, etc.

What would a good solution for this be? Ask that creators upload a separate premium version of a video with no ads and with bigger payout for views?

Good luck with a message to creators that they can’t do their own ads in their content.

I doubt there's a definition of "ad" that would be feasible target on a platform like Youtube. A trailer, for example, is an ad for a movie, but I think Youtube would be harmed if all of the upcoming movie trailers were removed.

As a consumer, I find it pretty easy to distinguish between a "wanted" ad and an "annoying" ad, but I don't think there's a way to enforce rules based on user value systems if for no other reason than every user's value system is going to be distinct.

I see two solutions, each from a different side:

* YouTube (Google) should be enforcing that ads aren't intentionally embedded in videos (intentionally so that videos with a logo on someone's shirt or some such contentious type of "advertising" isn't subject to videos getting taken down or demonitised).

* Content Creators should be handing together to unionise (which I think they're already doing) or band together to move to a different platform. Without its content YouTube is just a video uploading platform.

I pay for premium as well and those embedded ads bother me much less because I can always skip it manually and I understand the content creator needs to be rewarded. I much prefer embedded ads to some solution like paywalls that appeared on newspapers/news sites after growth of adblockers.

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