An open-source browser extension to auto-skip sponsored segments on YouTube
github.com
github.com
I love it technically... but sadly I have hard time believing it will ever work in practice, though maybe I'm just a cynic. :(
Simply because it needs a dedicated base of people always keeping up with all the videos coming out each day who actually will go to the work of rewinding, tagging, fast-forwarding, tagging again, continuing when all they really want to do is just sit back watching a video.
Crowdsourcing for things like adblockers or Wikipedia work because the content changes slowly and is evergreen. But popular YouTube videos rotate very quickly and then sink into a long tail.
I'd love to be proven wrong, however. :)
(One way of possibly increasing adoption, however: I'd love if the extension automatically ended videos when they jump into the "subscribe now!" trailer at the end, especially for talk show segments, and immediately jumped to the next video in the playlist if there is one. They're always the same length for each show, so very easy to keep up-to-date.)
It has not let me down once, and genuinely makes YouTube tolerable again
On the other hand, I just don't think it's possible -- it's going to have way too many false positives, because there are already so many unsponsored YouTube videos that review products or tell their customers to buy things, and there's very little actual text involved in the sponsorship segment. And you've got to 1) identify that there's a sponsored segment at all which is hard enough, but then 2) accurately detect where it starts and ends, which is even harder.
And if this ever did manage to work on existing videos, it just turns into an arms race which neutralizes it -- sponsors will require content creators to be more creative in how they embed the sponsorship so that they only get sponsored as long as the segment makes it past the classifier.
It reminds me of Adblock Radio [1, 2], which blocks ads on radios using several techniques (it has nothing to do with the Adblock browser extension).
Maybe they could share some knowledge, especially on things based on sound analysis? Seems hard to do for sponsored content though (nobody would be able to talk about $PICK_A_POPULAR_VPN on YouTube anymore, ah ah).
- sponsorblock dev
Or maybe you do because of free speech, but you definitely don't have a right to have other people not try and stop you from succeeding.
It's astonishing how many people on HN believe it is okay to shaft the sponsors of the content they enjoy and consume. What ever happened to "don't bite the hand that feeds you?"
Even nebula (CGP Grey and Kurzgesagt's steaming platform) sadly doesn't enforce this.
I don't want to hear your catchy jingle, get your brand stuck in my head, or hear about the same damn 3 services 1000 times. I just want to pay for content and watch it. It's not possible without something like this.
Is everybody using this service like me? No. That doesn't make them wrong either though, it's not like there was an alternative option they could have picked that would have let them avoid these segments "officially".
Get something for nothing.
(It would be approximately equivalent to copyright infringement in the case that the creator only gave you access to the videos upon you signing a contract that required you to view the ads to watch the video).
You and I can't both eat the same sandwich or park in the same space. We decided to adopt a complex set of rules for parking spots and sandwiches to keep people from settling matters for themselves by punching and kicking each other so we can go about all the other fun things that make civilization go. Re-purposing it to mean me doing or not doing something that will profit you is intellectually dishonest.
Of course ads are getting more and more obnoxious, so there's a lot of gray here, especially as I'm finding mobile sites almost unusable thanks to advertising.
That's not the social contract that either youtube itself or youtubers are offering. You can skip the ads, they make no attempt to block you from watching the video if you skip the ads.
I find sponsored segments really intrusive and I hate ads, but at least they are not targeted at me specifically. The sponsor hasn't installed some crappy js / resource to track me and target me. The ad is bound to the video instead.
- sponsorblock developer
Here is a thread where I explain: https://www.reddit.com/r/kurzgesagt/comments/ca7vub/first_de...
Note how the only mention of "Thanks to Dashlane for supporting this video!" is below the Read More button in the top comment.
It really hurts me because I love Kurzgesagt, and I know they can do better. I don't like how much leverage theses advertisers have.
- sponsorblock dev
Advertising isn't magic. Your creator is getting paid because they are encouraging users to either spend more or to direct their spending at a specific product (regardless of that product's actual value). I don't see how you're supporting a creator just by listening to ads. The people who buy the products are supporting a creator, and they're subsidizing you. Even to an advertiser, ultimately, your ears aren't valuable. Your money is valuable. A conversion is valuable.
There's this idea that if we all tolerate certain kinds of advertising, creators will get paid and nobody will have to lose -- but it just doesn't click with me, no matter how much I think about it. The money isn't free, it has to come from somewhere. Somebody has to have their spending habits manipulated against their will for this to work. The propaganda has to be effective for some people, or they wouldn't pay this much money to distribute propaganda.
And it's very difficult for me to imagine a scenario where introducing multiple massive middlepeople into that transaction will make the transaction ultimately end up costing us less money than if we just payed creators directly for their content.
We are paying for ads; or at least more vulnerable people are paying on our behalf. I strongly suspect we would collectively pay less as a society if we just gave creators money.
The bad ones are the ones that dedicate the first 3 minutes to some horrible mobile game (JonTron, etc.), or do mid-video cuts (New Rockstars, etc.), or, by far worst of all, do a very smooth and clean transition into the ad before you even knew the video was over, so for the first seconds you don't even realize you're watching an ad (Kurzgesagt).
I know creators need to get paid, so for all but the last, I don't mind them too much and just skip ahead (but will definitely be using this extension). Ads that are hard to distinguish from content are abominable, though.
Wendover is 100x worse, but I stopped watching his channel all together for that very reason over a year ago.
Then I clicked "unskip" and realized it had already skipped over the Veritasium sponsored content straight to the start of the video.
Magical.
Added this.
Brave has made my experience so much better in general - looking forward to seeing how this works for me.
But I want to work on easier ways soon.
- SponsorBlock Developer
But of course, I agree with you. Don't trust anyone.
On the other hand, user can use VPN, Tor, browser containers to achieve the same. If they really are as paranoid as they say - they already do.
Greedy content producers will not stop including sponsors in their videos. "This video could not have been made without $sponsor..." Yeah, yeah, what a BS: Lots (like several 100k) of subscribers, Patreons, ads on the videos, affiliate links in the description and sometimes sponsored hardware with a well visible brand logo and you still come around and tell me you couldn't make ends meet without even more sponsorships?
Especially with all the more-or-less shady VPN providers, "JLCPCB" on electronics videos or Skillshare on the rest of the videos, YouTube feels more and more like linear television.
What's left to fund your favourite content when none of this happens?
This will help Google stalk you even more (since you're now providing confirmed personal details like billing address and card details) so I would not recommend anyone doing so. Go with Patreon if you want to support creators.
"I have deigned to click on your video, you may entertain me! Expect nothing in return! It is my right!"
There's no arguments to force unwilling viewers to watch ads. The kind of people that install this extension are also presumably the kind of people that never follow ads, so allowing them to skip those ad segments doesnt result in a loss for advertisers. That they end up watching ads too is a simple effect of the ad market's inefficiencies.
The number of convertions from sponsored segments shouldn't move much from this extension, so the payout for video creators should also remain constant.
Its a win/neutral situation for everyone.
Then all the people pirating your content via torrents or more likely watching something else would know what social convention they were flouting or submitting to.
Only on tech or creator related discussions are people even aware of the absurd idea that there is an obligation to watch ads or a requirement to subordinate your property, your computer that is, to some yahoo on youtube in order that he can earn money. Where no law is present and enforceable we cannot rely on social conventions we wish existed.
Just because you could make more money if people followed such a convention doesn't create any sort of obligation on their part nor in any meaningful way do terms and conditions bind them beyond being able to in theory take away an account they as consumers not creators don't care much about.
I do buy things. I agree to buy them before I fork over my money and I reject deals that I perceive would disadvantage me. That makes me a smart consumer.
On the other hand something like this inevitable and I will check out the project.
Smart TV, on the other hand, manages to bypass my pihole (as if adds were burned into the vid), that's where I need to figure something out.
They often will pre-record these segments with a consistent "now with a quick word about our sponsors" jingle which can be statically detected and removed from the video.
No: only if it costs you less than the value of the content you're receiving. So yeah, it's win-lose: you get the content (which you consider valuable enough to spend your time on) and the content creators lose their revenue.