SponsorBlock – Skip over sponsorship segments on YouTube | Hacker News Reader

SponsorBlock – Skip over sponsorship segments on YouTube

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192 pointsbgstry174 comments

I really don't like how most sponsored segments are just downright misleading about what VPNs do. Making them funny doesn't change the fact that the ads are deceptive.

There's always some fearmongering about people stealing your data on public networks, but no actual substance about feasible attacks that could happen in reality.

In the UK, similar ads have been banned by the advertising regulator for being misleading, and it's about time that spurious claims in YouTube videos got more scrutiny.

I feel like if someone is hawking wares on their channel they should at least use it/have faith in it/do their research. Tom Scott has a great video about VPN sponsorship and how he turned down a sponsorship from a VPN company because of the copy they wanted him to say and debunks the ads: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WVDQEoe6ZWY

Mad respect for him, and if he ever suggest a paid product in the future i'd trust him. Conversely i really dislike when they clearly don't use the product, or are shilling a product that i KNOW is bad - looking at you raycons. I can't help but lose respect and definitely distrust every sponsorship they have.

tl;dr integrity matters, raycons are really not that great, and i'm tired of hearing the same copy over and over: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zb58b7ob2yQ

VPN ads that are truthful and delivered with integrity are still disrespectful and disgusting, because advertising is a cancer.

Advertising isn’t black/white. I want to see ads telling me there’s a local farm selling produce a few minutes from my house. Or that the new Marvel movie is coming out in a couple months.

These things bring value to my life. How else would I know about them?

Yeah, even Cancer isn’t black / white. That concentrated mass showing up on your CT scan might have a chance to be co-living peacefully for the rest of your life. And removing them is actually causing your body more harms.

I think that's pushing the boundary on what can be considered advertising these days. It's a question of choice. Advertisements are foisted upon (mostly) unwilling viewers to convince them to buy things they don't want or need, or at least to cause them to make a choice based on brand identity rather than a rational evaluation of the value provided. This is bad.

What you're talking abut is something else entirely. If I'm watching something on Hulu, and the show stops to show me an ad for a Marvel movie coming out in a couple months, that's intrusive. If I deliberately go to YouTube to watch the trailer, that's a free choice. They're such completely different experiences from the user's point of view that it's a misnomer to refer to both as "advertising".

Likewise, my parents have solicited mailers from local groceries because they want to know what vegetables are in this week. There are all sorts of websites and other mechanisms for letting people know about events and opportunities going on in their area. Me sitting down to watch some sports or something and getting bombarded by ads (by Arby's, not a "local farm") is not the same situation.

If you want a bright line, imagine a world with no profit motive. Would we still have movie trailers and fliers to let you know about local farm produce? I think so. Would there still be television advertisements and lies about VPN services on YouTube videos? Obviously not.

Tom missed the biggest factor in VPN companies' exaggerations - that they call themselves "VPNs" because of the positive connotations of "Private", even though they're just proxies and have nothing to do with VPNs.

...and even the ones that use actual VPN software don't actually have anything for the "N" part of "VPN", so they are still just proxies.

But I guess it makes it easier to refer to than "proxy for all protocols."

I've only used my work VPN, so I just assumed commercial VPNs had similar mechanics. They don't lease IP addresses?

There's a tunnel from your computer to the VPN entrypoint, but the point of a VPN is to become part of another Network of computers that is Private and could thus not be reached otherwise. There's no private network of computers for these "VPN" services. They're just a proxy to the internet.

I don’t either but I think the blame is often misplaced, most of them literally don’t know any better. They go to an ad network’s website, check a box agreeing to the deal, and receive a prompt to read on air.

Now of course they should be doing their own due diligence, but this is the state of podcast advertising right now (and has been for a while, see: BetterHelp controversy)

The bullshit is coming straight from the VPN providers themselves, fear mongering for profit.

I think the blame is appropriately placed here, no one is forcing them to take sponsorships without due diligence. It’s not exactly secret knowledge that these VPN providers can be scummy.

I feel sorry for average non-technical people who get hoodwinked into VPNs. The majority of people have absolutely no need for a VPN for "privacy" reasons, particularly these days with wide adoption of TLS which prevents ISPs from reading and/or injecting content into streams.

Modern cases for a VPN:

1. The few countries/regions with severely corrupt governments/ISPs.

2. Accessing region-locked services; eg. another country's Netflix.

I use the TunnelBear VPN because it has a 500MB/mo free limit and I use their different servers in different regions to check the localization of prices/text on my sites.

Yeah, I don’t think many people seeing those ads realize a VPN is almost like choosing a different ISP.

It is great to see this getting more traction!

To the larger discussion brewing: I honestly don't understand all the pushback on here. Why should I have any type of moral imperative to support revenue streams I find bad for the industry/society/brains? Simply because the creator decided it was the right choice? People decide things I disagree with all the time, if I have I the power to choose differently, I do. Not liking that I reversed a video creator's choice is one thing, but the accusations of theft (or general moral failings) are another.

Truthfully, if I had the power to make baked-in adverts unprofitable for all Youtube/podcasts/whatever, I would. If anything, I feel some obligation to keep ads out of as many spaces as I can. There are lots of way to make money, selling viewer's eyeballs/ears to the ad industry doesn't have to be the default one and shouldn't be protected like some deep creative choice.

Of course, I want my favorite creator to make money; people have to eat. Alternative sources, such as asking for patroonships or donations, I'm amenable to. I even support a couple smaller channels I think make special content. Unlike baked-in ads, donations are non-compulsory and in my control.

At a more base level, you don't get my eyeballs without my computer, internet, etc. I have a stake in viewership and I choose to modulate what is in my control. If that modulation offends the creator, they do not have to allow it and I will stop watching, but that (currently) means taking their content off mainstream (vs premium) YouTube and lowering viewership. I generally pay for content, but even if I didn't, I can't imagine going out of my way to pirate videos of people fixing old C64s (something I genuinely enjoy).

Morality is complicated.

What an excellent application of automating everything you can. Yay!

This is great. I'm already spamming the right arrow key as soon as I realize a video has segued into a "I sold my soul to..." bit. I appreciate creators who quietly make such segments a consistent length and clearly cue them, so I can accurately guess how long to skip :)

As for "but why???", well, I believe advertising is fundamentally broken because it has no feedback loop. It's "throw money at the wall and see what sticks."

Analytics and THE COOKIE MONSTER YEETS ALL YOUR PERSONAL INFORMATION tries to handwave a feedback loop into existence (with measurability, the appearance of substance etc), but that doesn't really close the loop either.

IMO, the complexity of modern privacy invasion is solely a function of the ridiculously high flotation point advertising confers onto everything it touches. I argue that the apparent success of that complexity is partly due to the fact that we simply cannot reason about it end-to-end, and have to reduce our analysis down to simple numerical metrics such as "X is making 1 billion dollars a year" ("wow that sounds successful"); and partly due to the fact that throwing trillions of dollars at a problem will cause parts of that problem to move of the way regardless of how fundamentally unsolvable that problem is, which can give the appearance that the problem is tractable when it is not.

Advertising might be the single most attractive thing in the world (a meta-correlation I find endlessly amusing) right now, but I can't help but see it as infinitely wide and shallow. What scares me is that it's growing faster than people's attempts to properly probe its depths; this will eventually peter out and-- oops, someone just popped the balloon.

Perhaps I could acquire sufficient sponsorship to fund a move to Mars before that happens...?

In the meantime, because of the lack of a proper feedback loop, there's a massive disconnect between the fact that the ad industry is growing on one side, while uBlock Origin has "10,000,000+" users on the other.

- the more people that use adblock/sponsor block, the less effective ads are in general (lower advertiser ROI for each ad)

- if ROI for ads drop, ad sellers (eg. youtubers) have to reduce the price charged to advertisers

- given that ad budgets are more or less constant (companies will always need to reach customers) there will simply be more ads, since each ad view is now worth less.

- if ads become completely ineffective (eg. reddit) ads will simply become disguised as content to get past people's filter (aka content marketing, submarine articles etc)

Are the people who tend to use adblock likely to actually engage with the ads with adblock off?

Yeah, I always wondered if adblockers actually _improved_ per ad engagement, as users of an adblocker are opting themselves out of advertisement (thereby removing themselves from "inventory"), and seem like they would be less likely overall to engage with ads, and thus the adblocker usage is reducing the number of non-engaging users.

Sure, overall "inventory" would go down, but I would expect for ads that actually make it to users, per-ad engagement/ROI (and thus "value") to go up.

----

Unless ad networks are charging advertisers for ad units that aren't actually shown to anybody, which smells an awful lot like grift to me!

(effectively charging for hidden ad units to inflate numbers)

I block ads because I don't have ad blindness, when I watch ads I focus my attention on it like on normal content people who are used to seeing ads don't notice most of ads

I’m absolutely not like you, I tune out ads but internalize them, but I’m happy for you that you live in this time. At least you have options to live an ad-free life. I guess you would have been the person to buy a Foreman grill and a Bowflex if you had lived in the 80s.

As existence proof, I buy stuff I see when I'm watching TV at someone else's place or when I use Instagram (which has ads right in the Stories feed). I see no reason why I'm special since I'm a pretty normal user when I'm using these things.

I block all ads and I don't think i've ever purchased something from an AD, even when i see them elsewhere or on instagram ect.

I honestly wonder what makes me different to you? I definitely don't have self control like that in other aspects of my life. Maybe it's I'm skeptical and figure ever ad is trying to swindle me out of my money maybe?

Maybe you just spend less than me. I also have high scam tolerance. i.e. one of my personal OKRs is to spend some amount of money per year on things just past my scam threshold.

I've always wondered this.

To add a datapoint, I've used adblock forever, but in places where I do see ads I've never had the thought to click on them, just get past them as quickly as possible.

Other people in my family however have bought things through Instagram/Facebook ads, so there are at least SOME people buying things through ads. They also have never bothered to install adblock.

Conversion rates for ads are super small in my experience anyway so driving conversion up should(?) balance the price out the price of people using adblock who would not see anything, and would not click if they did.

What is your definition of engagement? clicking on it? buying a product after clicking on it? or recognizing the brand when you are buying a product weeks after seeing the ad?

> - if ads become completely ineffective (eg. reddit) ads will simply become disguised as content to get past people's filter (aka content marketing, submarine articles etc)

There's no "if" here. This type of advertising exists across all platforms and content distribution channels, and has existed for centuries. Whether or not ads are blocked does nothing to stop it.

What's a submarine article? Can't find the term on google.

http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html

Good. Let them scramble to find lunch money; jamming ads in my face is rude.

And if ad blockers didn't exist, they would still increase the number of ads anyway. If nobody could block ads, there would be no incentive for companies to be scared about having "too many ads", as there would be nowhere for users to turn to (ie. ad blockers).

aka the "you actually want to show ads to paying customers, because you've got evidence they have disposable income and a willingess to part with it" phenomenon.

So by your logic, we should all be taking in as much advertisements as humanly possible because that would lead to the least net amount of advertisements for all? Excuse me for being somewhat skeptical of that.

I get the technical justification for doing this: You own your player, so you should be able to control it in whatever way you want. But as consumers, how do we expect the uploader to get paid for their work if we use both Adblock and Sponsor-skip (for the lack of a better word)?

Pay to watch is, of course, an option, but that leads to discrimination based on income – unequally distributed between parts of the world and individuals in the same part of the world. (Yes, I am aware that the sponsorship system leads the creators to cater to the more well-off within each bubble, so it's still a bit discriminatory.)

Any ideas or objections?

I am curious if direct revenue shares are a sustainable model.

E.g., I pay some money -- $10/month. I can choose to pay more. A fraction of that is divided evenly amongst all the videos I've watched. Creators get a check at the end of the month.

This wouldn't rake in billions of advertiser money. But I think it would sustain a very decent business, and be better for society in general.

This does need to be voluntary: I need to be able to choose to not pay and not watch (or watch with ads, as an alternative). And you need to be very transparent about the rules from the get-go, as well as about how those rules get changed, and apply those rules equally, lest you sacrifice the trust of both your viewers and creators.

That is literally how YouTube Premium works today, but people seem to feel entitled to watch without paying any money and blocking the ads.

Will the sponsored bits be skipped if you pay for Youtube Premium? Or would you get to both pay AND be shown the sponsored segments?

Great question and we all know the answer.

I can't blame people for not giving money and personal information (signing up to Premium requires creating a Google account and provide true personal information for billing purposes) to a hostile company that makes its money on stalking users.

So, basically, ads are more private than subscriptions?

When it comes from a hostile company, yes.

You can mitigate the privacy impact of ads with countermeasures such as ad-blockers or provide fake personal information if asked.

You can't easily do so with paid services because you need to provide real information for the payment to be processed. This requires mutual trust on both sides of the transaction.

Maybe. But Google has sacrificed trust.

Look at the comments under "YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki Gets 'Freedom Expression' Award Sponsored by YouTube"[1]. And this is on Hacker News, probably one of the more Google-friendly communities you'll find online.

This is how you kill a vibrant community of creators.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26880582

Of course. I'm entitled to block ads and I'm entitled to watch things that are offered for free without paying. If you want to be paid for something, don't give it away for free.

Advertising is bad and I will oppose it in all its forms. What other system for financing the content does or doesn't exist is irrelevant to the my decision to block as much advertising out of my perception as I can.

That said, Patreon seems to be working very well for a lot of people making high quality content.

That reads an awful lot like: “If a content creator’s patronage is not in the form I prefer, I deserve to circumvent that patronage and consume their content anyway. It’s irrelevant to me how & if they are compensated.”

Correct.

I fully agree with that statement.

Yes.

I also buy almost all my books used. Sometimes I flip past two-page-spread ads in magazines without looking at them. I use ad-blockers. Back when I watched TV with ads, I'd go take a whizz during ad breaks. I'd fast-forward past trailers in front of VHS movies.

Thug life, then?

Yes that’s exactly how I feel.

It’s more like “if a content creator doesn’t use multiple revenue streams, they don’t deserve the money they left on the table”

Not sure why you would expect people to act any differently when given freely reproducible content. The only solution here would be making adblock illegal and ramping up surveillance.

Yes. Content consumers being "lost customers" is a problem if your business model requires them to do something that they are incentivized to avoid doing.

Overlapping options for content creators (many of which do or do not apply depending on various factors, mostly forms of privilege) include picking a different business model, having a different means to support yourself, giving up, and realizing that your existing business model is compatible with free viewing.

Depending on consumers to be selfless by donating or choosing to consume ads is not the only business model in town; there are more paths to take than "expect selflessness or give up". Selflessness isn't typically a basket worth all your eggs.

Let me try to say in a more nuanced way what other replies have said more bluntly.

It's not a matter of deserving, it's a matter of supply and demand and technological capabilities. To ignore the latter, let's pretend YouTube is capable of 100% effective DRM, such that you only watch the content if you see all the ads and sponsorships, eyeballs on screen, in the style of "15 Million Merits".

Even in this case, it's unmistakable that the supply of entertainment overwhelmingly exceeds the demand. This is why all the traditional Hollywood companies are all entirely focused on making blockbusters: it's the one thing they can do that no one else can (because of the initial investment required). But they're the exception. The vast majority of content creators, including people trying to do it full time, are making basically nothing or just enough to get by. There are thousands and thousands of Twitch streamers scraping by on 12 hour days where they average a hundred or so viewers.

In other words, even in this DRM hellscape, the push of the market is going to be towards less and less remuneration for each creator, because the total market capacity of entertainment as such is not enough for each entertainer to live off of. There is quite simply not enough money in it. If I'm forced to watch ads, I'll switch to content providers that don't use ads. The result is worse for the creator, because the vast majority of them are suffering from lack of visibility. So they make their content more palatable by reducing ads, and the downward spiral continues. This is already happening, because most creators are not making enough to live off of.

The only way to solve this problem is for us to decide socially that artistic creation is good as such even if there's not a marketable demand for it, and that therefore creators deserve to be compensated. The fact that it's society that would have to come to this conclusion means that it's society upon which the burden of providing this compensation would fall, not individual consumers. In other words, the solution isn't sponsorships or watching ads, it's something like universal basic income.

Personally I do pay for YouTube Premium, so videos I watch do make money (and do not have ads for me). As for in-video sponsor segments, I doubt the actual sponsors get any analytics about when they're skipped or not.

They surely get analytics on how well a sponsorship works since they use dedicated URLs. And if a sponsorship does not produce a return on the investment, the sponsor will stop giving money to the content creator.

I would also guess there's some watch time data access through the YouTube API, too. Plus tracked links in those cards at the corner of a video.

YouTube does show the creator/uploader engagement throughout the video, so you can tell if there are less viewers for sponsor segments. My point is that info isn't necessarily shared through to the advertiser

What I mean is, it's entirely possible for sponsors to ask for channel data.

> As for in-video sponsor segments, I doubt the actual sponsors get any analytics about when they're skipped or not.

LOLLLLL

Does YouTube share a part of your premium/fee to the creators based on what you watched? That is actually pretty neat.

That is my assumption and it would be shocking if that were not the case. This is the case for ad revenue. Youtube premium replaces ad revenue with a fee.

The interesting question I'd like to know the answer to is if creators get more money per ad impression or per premium subscriber view.

Creators are paid "a majority" of revenue from YouTube premium based on watch time.

Do demonetized channels get their share? A couple of channels I watch swear a lot, and are demonetized. It's a bliss to watch YouTube without ad interruptions. I don't mind product placement by the content creators. I would be happy to pay if I knew they are paid too.

> (and do not have ads for me)

The sponsor segments are ads. You're getting doubled-dipped.

And that's why I've been using this sponsor block plugin.

I thought about using that plugin, but I'll be missing out on the creative sponsored ads done by some YouTubers like Daniel Thrasher (plus his sponsored section is at the end so I can always skip them anyway).

Ultimately there's only one inevitable consequence of this - YouTube will move to using Widevine on all YouTube streams to stop it happening.

As far as I understand Widewine "protects" (quotes because piracy websites are proof of the contrary) the video content but wouldn't prevent the player being controlled to skip past ads.

Well technically you could only send the data to be buffered up until the sponsored content and only continue sending the stream after the content was supposed to be finished. Or a bit earlier to ensure smooth playback. If the sponsored content is blocked at least the player will not be able to continue until the time for the content or ad has passed.

I can imagine people on a radio would be fine to have sound muted automatically during ads. But how many will wait for a video to continue after 30s of nothingness?

SponsorBlock would work fine with Widevine. In fact, I am planning on expanding it to some other sites that have DRM.

> But as consumers, how do we expect the uploader to get paid for their work if we use both Adblock and Sponsor-skip

Sponsors and advertisers should realize that nobody wants to hear about the same product on every single video, have pages with more ads than content and have their privacy compromised - there's a middle ground where both sides can be happy, but the problem is that one side is continuously overstepping its bounds, causing the other to develop powerful countermeasures.

Ads and sponsorships are two ways that creators can earn a living, but there's additional ones; YT subscriptions, Patreon and selling merchandise comes to mind.

Anyway the sponsors won't know (unless I'm mistaken) if a viewer skipped that segment, so the creator will get paid anyway.

the sponsors will have metrics to measure the conversion rate from ad-rolls in their sponsored videos. They will pay initially, but over time, less and less as the ads become less and less effective.

By your logic, high-income viewers (such as most of the HN users) are currently paying *more* for viewing videos than the average viewer since their attention is worth more.

Personally, I just pay content creators as directly as possible. If they have a YouTube subscription option available I'll do that, but most of them seem to have a Patreon instead. If I like someone's content, a couple of bucks a month (or a video, or whatever) is more than worth it to me.

I have the right to watch or not whatever I want , in the same way publishers have the right to add sponsorship content on their videos, same applies to ads , if you don’t want to see ads use an adblocker or skip the sponsorship part with an app like this one. If creators don’t like it , they should find another way of monetizing their work. Shaming people into watching ads is disgusting and wrong.

I think it strongly depends on your legislative region whether you are allowed to watch whatever you want on your own terms if the content has been published under different terms.

When you use YouTube you accept the terms and conditions (at least the parts that apply in your jurisdiction) which (probably) should state that you are not allowed to circumvent ads. If you do so you are in violation. Not sure what the consequences of that are though.

> When you use YouTube you accept the terms and conditions (at least the parts that apply in your jurisdiction) which (probably) should state that you are not allowed to circumvent ads. If you do so you are in violation. Not sure what the consequences of that are though. I don't think so. Can you provide a link to the section of the ToS that says that?

>terms and conditions

I'm sure all sorts of sites have magic words that claim I cannot block their ads. Meanwhile, some of them may have ad blocker detectors even if they don't have magic words. Either way, it's on them to show me or not show me whatever content they want, and on me to block ads or not and view their content or not.

> I have the right to watch or not whatever I want

You don't though. You have the right to not watch whatever you want, but if content is published with the value proposition that the ads and/or sponsorships are the price of admission, then it's hard to argue that you have the right to access the content anyway. Some publishers try to enforce restrictions like that, mostly ineffectively, and it's probably only because of technical challenges that more don't.

No. If content is published for 0€, it's free. If you want money, charge for it. That's the only business model that ensures that businesses serve their customers and thus the only legitimate one.

I do though. You can't force people to watch your content the way you like. You can hope, encourage, or maybe even incentivize. I do not have the right to watch a video, but I do have the right, once the video is publicly available, to watch the parts of the video I want. In the same way I have the right of changing channels during tv ads breaks. You can't dictate how people use their time.

Does Youtube track if I skip the ad segment? Or better: do the uploaders know how many users saw the ad?

I pay for Youtube Premium with the expectation that the content creators will get a cut of the monthly fee that I pay towards Youtube.

Is that not the case?

I'm really not a fan of the double-dipping that content creators are all doing now with their own unblockable inline ads.

I've actually stopped watching a number of Youtube channels because I get so annoyed by ads. I HATE HATE HATE ads!

Honestly, I do not expect most youtube "content creators" to get paid for making those videos. I only want those who are in it for the passion to make videos.

Will it result in vastly lesser free content to watch? Yes. I don't see a problem with that. I did not have Youtube growing up, I am sure we will survive without it. Maybe we will spend time on more productive things, than watching pewdiepie reacting to memes.

Doesn't matter. I'm going to skip through it anyway. It won't make a difference to Skillshare, SimpliSafe, Audible and NordVPN if I'm skipping their stuff manually or automagically. Hell, it doesn't truly make a difference if I'm sitting watching their segments because I'm not going to sign up and become a customer of theirs anyway.

Past related threads:

Show HN: SponsorBlock – Skip YouTube Sponsorships, Intros, Outros and More - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23533858 - June 2020 (2 comments)

An open-source browser extension to auto-skip sponsored segments on YouTube - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21743196 - Dec 2019 (101 comments)

Show HN: SponsorBlock – Skip sponsorship segments of YouTube videos - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20778926 - Aug 2019 (137 comments)

I'm not going to bash this or anything, I see why people dislike the sponsor segments, it's advertising after all, but as someone who honestly could not afford to donate to every single channel I enjoy watching, I'm glad content creators have a way to make money while still providing content essentially for free. I'd rather sit and watch a silly ad than just not have access to the content because I couldn't afford to donate that month or something.

Similar, I've actually found that they are producing useful adverts, but I'm in niche high-performance manufacturing, so once it figured that out... Also, I'm happy to give a bit of sponsorship funds to creators I like, as long as I can skip the obnoxious adverts in <5sec (that's more than I need to sort useful from chaff).

This is about skipping sponsorship ads that are part of the content, inserted by the creator. The "This video was sponsored by <VPN Company>. For x% off, go to <vpnco.org/whatever> and enter My Channel Name" type things.

Right. And I have no problems with this stuff being stuck into content that I pay $0 for, as long as it's not obnoxious.

There's at least one Youtuber that I enjoy who actually makes decent ads. I'd hate to skip over them because they're usually funny.

Internet Comment Etiquette with Erik and Internet Historian come to mind. Nord VPN Man and Raycon Man ads are the highlight of the latter's videos.

Internet Comment Etiquette was the one I had in mind, yeah.

Jay Foreman (Map Man, Unfinished London) does sponsorship messages as silly skits, which is nice.

One of my favourite instances of this was in podcasts where Cards Against Humanity sponsored and just sent one of the podcasters toasters to review: https://cardsagainsthumanity.com/toasters/

Nothing else was said about the sponsor's product. There should be more sponsors like that.

I prefer those sponsored segments to regular web ads. They are old school, no tracking and are usually relevant to the content I am watching. I can't afford to donate to the YouTubers I like so I'm glad they can make money from those ads.

I don't mind sponsored segments in general, but most of the channels I watch end up with some combination of Raid Shadow Legends, Nord VPN, SimpliSafe, Squarespace, and Raycon. It's actually refreshing when the sponsor is in some way related to the channel content, but I find it's fairly rare especially on the higher-subscriber channels.

I pay for YouTube Premium, which goes to creators, so it's extra annoying to still have to watch a million awkward VPN pitches.

I pay for Youtube Premium specifically because I DON'T WANT TO WATCH ADS.

Ever.

I hate ads with a passion.

I get the fact that content creators need to make money, but there needs to be a better way.

Youtube needs to give content creators a way to put ads in their own content in a manner that gets automatically hidden if people pay for Youtube Premium.

Worst case scenario, I would even pay for a higher tier of Youtube Premium that let me hide that type of sponsor ad.

YouTube Premium pays creators substantially more than viewing ads would, and the creators thank you by shoving ads down your throat anyway. Skipping them is more than fair.

Yeah, agree with this 100%. Really want to support creators, but I’m also specifically paying not to see ads. Would also pay for a higher tier were it available.

Ideally the terms of any such new higher pricing tier would preserve creator profitability (versus whatever arrangement they have now), but not sure how realistic that is once it all comes under Google’s purview.

I note that a lot of the best creators seem to put their private sponsorship arrangements at the back end of their videos, so at least you can switch away after the content is over.

Yes, yes, yes. YouTube can solve this problem easily by requiring annotating ads "chapters" from the uploader, then having a higher paid tier that skips these chapters.

I am the same. I hate ads, I pay not to see them, and hate anything that has "paid sponsorship" inside the content. It's like product placement/shows designed to sell things, in between the outright advertisements occuring all over again.

Tired of getting VPNs, audiobooks and mobile games getting flogged to me by people who are reading a script and come across as disgenuine all because they have a big enough audience that can be monetised.

I don't like being monetised.

I think people aren't realizing that the SponsorBlock tool also isn't just blocking sponsored segments. It also has options to skip other segments too such as intro segments, self promos, engagement badgering, etc...

A couple examples from Linus Tech Tips when I compare the video times with all these segments skipped versus nothing skipped:

Original: 14:10 SponsorBlock: 12:38

Original: 14:11 SponsorBlock: 12:04

Original: 19:31 SponsorBlock: 17:40

I'm saving almost 2 minutes in each of these videos and there are many creators who are much worse in this regard. I've had some shorter videos where they basically are half as long once all the crap is cut out of it. It's also nice for when I don't have my hands on the keyboard/mouse such as if I've got my laptop connected to my TV. I will get some videos queued up and set my wireless keyboard down to the side and just watch. With AdBlock + SponsorBlock I don't have to touch the keyboard or mouse through multiple videos and can just enjoy things without issues. I don't have to worry about skipping past ads, sponsor segments, intros, outros, self-promo's, etc...

Overall it just makes my viewing experience so much better. At one point I had YouTube premium but it felt like I was paying so much to basically just get rid of ads but not completely get rid of them. Even with ads gone I still have sponsor segments. And if I'm having to use a tool to skip sponsor segments it starts to make me just not care to even pay for the product anymore.

I've been using it for a year and it works amazingly well:

- It blocks all of the popular videos out there I've tried

- For the freshest videos, I find the UI to be super-easy to submit a new video; you press a button when the sponsor segment starts, another button when it ends, then pick the category and click "upload"

Blocking 3rd party network ads do deprive creators of revenue; but using uBlock Origins does have these important benefits:

*Protects you from malicious attacks through 3rd party ad networks.

*Keeps your browser fast from trackers.

*Stops intrusive ads that literally take up 30% of your screen and move the website around making it difficult to read an article.

But sponsored segments built into the video itself? It has none of these issues. A lot of creators do what they love, but they still need income. If you value the content they create these sponsored posts allow them to keep doing that or you can chip in a few bucks to pay for an ad-free feed.

Video is a lot of work.

Source: made my own DevOps video course that I had to video edit + now part of a video D&D podcast that I thankfully do not have to edit or subtitle.

> Blocking 3rd party network ads do deprive creators of revenue

That is true and if you are using this extension consider disabling "Sponsor" auto skip.

i agree with your points except:

Stops intrusive ads that literally take up 30% of your screen and move the website around making it difficult to read an article. But sponsored segments built into the video itself? It has none of these issues.

any ad disrupts the viewing experience and makes a video difficult/annoying to view.

a̶l̶s̶o̶,̶ ̶t̶h̶e̶ ̶i̶m̶p̶a̶c̶t̶ ̶o̶f̶ ̶s̶p̶o̶n̶s̶o̶r̶ ̶s̶e̶c̶t̶i̶o̶n̶s̶ ̶c̶a̶n̶ ̶o̶n̶l̶y̶ ̶b̶e̶ ̶m̶e̶a̶s̶u̶r̶e̶d̶ ̶b̶a̶s̶e̶d̶ ̶o̶n̶ ̶t̶h̶e̶ ̶t̶o̶t̶a̶l̶ ̶v̶i̶e̶w̶s̶ ̶o̶f̶ ̶t̶h̶e̶ ̶v̶i̶d̶e̶o̶,̶ ̶r̶e̶g̶a̶r̶d̶l̶e̶s̶s̶ ̶o̶f̶ ̶w̶h̶e̶t̶h̶e̶r̶ ̶p̶e̶o̶p̶l̶e̶ ̶a̶c̶t̶u̶a̶l̶l̶y̶ ̶s̶e̶e̶ ̶t̶h̶e̶ ̶a̶d̶ ̶o̶r̶ ̶n̶o̶t̶.̶ ̶i̶f̶ ̶i̶ ̶a̶m̶ ̶n̶o̶t̶ ̶i̶n̶t̶e̶r̶e̶s̶t̶e̶d̶ ̶i̶n̶ ̶t̶h̶e̶ ̶a̶d̶,̶ ̶t̶h̶e̶n̶ ̶b̶l̶o̶c̶k̶i̶n̶g̶ ̶i̶t̶ ̶f̶r̶o̶m̶ ̶v̶i̶e̶w̶ ̶m̶a̶k̶e̶s̶ ̶a̶b̶s̶o̶l̶u̶t̶e̶l̶y̶ ̶n̶o̶ ̶d̶i̶f̶f̶e̶r̶e̶n̶c̶e̶ (whereas adblock not loading an ad may reduce the exposure count) (correction: apparently youtube does show engagement over time, so it may be possible to figure out how many people skip ads)

> the impact of sponsor sections can only be measured based on the total views of the video

I don't think that's true at all.

1. There are video analytics to measure what parts of the video were watched.

2. Even if you generally dislike ads, there is a chance that you will see an ad you are interested in that you will check out, which will contribute to the ad's effectiveness, and can be measured. If you automatically block ads, the effectiveness becomes 0 in all cases.

That's cool, but content creators don't get to decide what ads I see or don't see, or what ads I mute or fast forward through.

Would you ever use a DVR to skip television commercials? To me, it feels similar.

If we assume you watch free-to-air TV (not that I do, personally), or at least used to. Do you walk away from the TV while an ad is playing? Or perhaps you have a DVR setup that lets you skip ahead if you're watching on a slight delay.

Is that any different to skipping a sponsorship segment?

Listen, man. You care about trackers. I don't care about trackers. You care about these malicious attacks. I'm not that worried about them. You care about these intrusive things. I just don't go to those websites.

I care about the time spent on sponsored segments. You don't care that they're there.

All this is just different preferences. You're not better than me. I'm not better than you.

Tracking aside, ads are essentially malware for the mind.

I have been using this for a while, and beyond the sponsorship for whatever earbuds-junk or loot-box scam, this also skips those annoying intro sections so many Youtubers add just to pad their watch-time.

100% recommend

I’d suggest paying for things like https://watchnebula.com/ or a creator’s ad-free patreon version of videos is maybe a better path than trying to game the ad system? Or at least in conjunction with it.

Happily paying for Nebula as a creator-owned platform. I don't feel the slightest shred of guilt for cutting Google as a middleman nor for using an ad-block.

Super happy it's a thing and have thoroughly enjoyed some of the Nebula originals.

How much does Nebula cost? I got to the "enter your card to start your free trial" step, and I still have no clue how much they charge.

On the linked page, under the "start free trial" button, there's this:

> 7-day free trial

> then $5 per month or $50 per year

You can get a much better deal than that. Sign up for Curiosity Stream using a promoted bundle link and you get Nebula free with it. It's only $12/year this way.

Here's one from the LegalEagle guy: https://curiositystream.com/legaleagle/

That's true, but my comment was more pointing out that the price is there (it's not prominent though)

You are not supposed to buy nebula through the nebula website. You are supposed to buy it through a creator referral link in a bundle with CuriosityStream.

The price on the website has to be higher as to encourage you to use a referral, and to always make you get a "deal" from the sponsorship.

If Nebula existed before I created SponsorBlock, there is a high chance that I would have never created it. Though, I am happy that I ended up making it though, as there are other annoyances to skip like "interaction reminders" and intros.

I think paying for sponsor-free videos is the best way out.

With a million labelled examples, it ought to be possible to use machine learning to detect sponsorships.

A simple version using the auto-generated captions should be pretty straightforward - I'm sure a machine learning model can figure out how to detect "This video is supported by..."

Some channels make a lengthy sketch with sponsor "reveal" at the very end

Check out https://ai.neuralblock.app/

All the data is public, so anyone can try!

I still think this will remain human-made for the foreseeable future, as an AI will probably never be able to make the millisecond-precise segments that it currenty has

A relatively popular fork of youtube-dl called yt-dlp has options to use SponsorBlock to either remove or timestamp sponsored content during the download process.

I personally wouldn't use the remove feature, but being able to flag and timestamp all sponsored/ad sections in my archives is a delightful feature to have.

Thank you ajayyy for such a great tool.

Wow, I immediately downloaded the extension and went to a Linus Tech Tips video because they are notorious to have this kind of ads and wow it worked perfectly from the get go.

Very impressive extension I have to say!

If you're on Android, YouTube Vanced now has built in support for SponsorBlock. It's great.

I pay for YouTube Red in part due to the promise of no advertisements. Sponsorship segments reduce the value of the subscription significantly. I'm surprised YouTube does not have a policy banning such segments.

Isn't that what is called YouTube premium now?

Someone needs to build similar functionality into a podcast player.

Go on, ping the developer and let them know.

Earlier is better to expand something like this to $everything, like what happened to youtube-dl, precisely because the codebase is less mature and it's easier to rip things to bits earlier than later.

Integrating this into youtube-dl would be great.

Youtube-dlp, a fork of youtube-dl has intergrations to use this database already.

https://github.com/yt-dlp/SponSkrub

It would be cool to have a mode for Brave Browser that tips the creator BAT when a sponsorship segment is skipped.

Oh thank god. I don't mind any sort of ad honestly, so long as I have a low friction way to pay to get rid of it. That's YouTube Premium for me on YouTube so I'm happy with that since I interact once and then all ads go away.

This will do just fine.

The link to the database on their homepage is broken(1). Any idea where it's at?

https://sponsor.ajay.app/database

Here's an older copy while it is temporarily down: https://cdnsponsor.ajay.app/database/sponsorTimes.csv

Sorry, doesn't look this one is loading either. I'll check afterwards i guess when the traffic is less.

Youtubers start putting banners at random times merging the ad with the content like in football games/UFC whatever, if this SponsorBlock gets popular that is.

Glad to see someone made this. I've long thought about creating a podcast app which does the same, but never got around to actually building it.

I was looking to make something similar for podcasts using music finger print matching to detect the motif that is played before the mid break

I have wanted something like this for podcasts built into AntennaPod. Thanks for letting me know about this.

Unfortunately it seems AntennaPod won't add it at this point in time.

https://github.com/AntennaPod/AntennaPod/issues/4159

https://forum.antennapod.org/t/ability-to-skip-ads-in-the-po...

This stands no chance with Tim Dillon's audience - the ads he does are better than the show!

HN: You can skip the ad reads!

Cum Town Listener: Why?

Variety of opinions, that's Life in the big city.

Just came to say: nice try mr Adsense

I needed this

I understand people don't like ads, but at some point doesn't someone have to pay creators for content? This feels just like stealing: I don't know how you can justify it: sponsor spots don't track you and they don't slow down your computer. Yes they are a minor inconvenience but they make the content you watch possible.

YouTubers who have both sponsor spots and adverts are the ones to be blocking...

For these sponsored contents it doesn't really matter though. The content creator has already been paid, so whether you watch the segment or not, they won't lose or make money.

They will if the practice becomes common place. Advertisers will know what percentage are just skipping automatically and reprice the spots value accordingly.

That's not true. Many get money based on how many clicks an affiliate link gets or how much an offer code is used. At the minimum this data is used to determine if the company decides to continue buying ads from the creator.

I could see it escalate into an arms race: if the new norm for watching videos will be to automatically skip sponsored segments by some popular software, the sponsorship offers will either dry up, or the resulting sponsorships will be designed to be more difficult to skip (eg. by making content creators incorporate them throughout the video in many small chunks, or as overlaid audio/video, ...).

Similar to what happened to web ads in communities that tend to run adblockers: more and more obnoxious advertising (intersitial ads, animated ads, etc.), advertising incorporated into content (ads-as-content like on Reddit), cross-site tracking and retargeting.

I tend to manually skip sponsored segments (especially for snake oil like VPN services!), but I'm not sure if writing automated software for this is the right thing to do in the long term.

That's a too simplistic view and not how sponsorships work. The sponsor expects a return on the investment. If a sponsorship does not generate revenue, that content creator will stop getting sponsorships because their audience is worthless.

It's not stealing because the creators will get paid anyway. Second, said creators have minimal expenses because YT pays for the hosting. Third, ad and sponsorship blocking represents only a small fraction of users. It's a fraction to, say, people sharing their netflix account.

>It's not stealing because the creators will get paid anyway.

This isn't always true. As several sibling comments already mentioned, this "native advertising" of embedded sponsor spot via the Youtube personality as spokesperson -- is often "paid based on performance" which means the affiliate url links mentioned in the ad are measured for clicks resulting in new customers.

I'm not commenting on morals of using a plugin but just correcting a misconception about arrangements of payment for content creators.

I would have never clicked on an affiliate link. So no harm done by that logic.

The problem with sponsor spots is that they're the same every single video, there's just not enough diversity on the market.

Is it bad to be skipping a sponsor segment because you've seen it dozens of times? Is it bad if you're already a happy user of the advertised product? Etc.

I don't think manual skipping is bad. If you take the time to manually skip you probably weren't going to buy the product anyways. It's automatic skipping that I have an issue with. It doesn't give the creator even a chance to pitch the product and their affiliate code (which makes them money)

i pay for youtube premium, i don't want ads, if you bake it in your video i'm still seeing ads i don't want. And it's ads about VPN that are allways the same. I don't want that.

That is the bit that makes me a little uneasy for running uBlock Origin with basically no exceptions, but then again, ad tech continues to prove to be so abusive again and again that I quickly get over it.

I figure that $1 a month on Patreon is worth hundreds of times more to a creator than the ad revenue I'm depriving them of, and buying any merch probably thousands of times.

Does it make much of a difference if I manually skip it? Those sponsor segments are always for terrible products.

To me the issue is the constant races to create more and more annoying ads. I do not mind ads which are relevant and not too annoying, but every time advertisers find a new medium they abuse it as much as they can to squeeze every cent out of the channel even if it ruins it for everyone.

I watched a video by a successful streamer giving advice to new streamers on how to build a career in that industry. He said that all these ads and partner programs aren't even worth it, unless you're one of the top 1%. The pay is relatively low (the platform takes a large cut) and you often have to sign over exclusive rights. He said that donations (using external services) and most importantly Patreon are the best way to go. So I just block all ads and sponsor segments, and donate a few bucks here or there.

It's an error to see "ads or creators don't get paid" as the only option here.

OECD per-capita spend on all publishing runs about $100/person, roughly the same as per-capita ads spend within the same countries, itself a tax of sorts.

A natural gateway exists --- not a perfect one, but good enough at the level of the ISP provider.

Aggregation, not disintegrations, is the general trend in payment systems. Both buyers and sellers benefit from predictable flows, income or revenues.

Regionally-pro-rated payments allocate costs according to ability to pay, which for information goods is a net social benefit.

Rolling an information access fee into fixed line and mobile internet service, with an indexing of content accessed and a tier-and-bid based reimbursement schedule for publishers, seems to me the most viable path forward to something vaguely resembling a content tax, without actually going through a content tax mechanism. It would ensure universal access to readers and the public, compensation for creators, and the ability for those actually engaged in the process of creating new works to access the materials they need, legally and lawfully, answering in part the "why should I pay for information I don't use" objection: the inforation you do use is itself predicated on information you don't access directly yourself. The other answer to this rather tired objection is that you live in the world created by information access or denial of access, and in general, access to high-quality, relevant, useful information should be a net positive.

I'd proposed this years ago (and many others have similar suggestions), though noting ISPs as a logical collection tollgate is a new realisation.

https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/1uotb3/a_modes...

How is this stealing? They can charge for the video if they don’t want people to see it for free. People have the right to not watch ads.

> I understand people don't like ads, but at some point doesn't someone have to pay creators for content?

No, the role of "content creator paid by impression and dependent on people not being able to skip intrusive segments of videos that they watch" has no intrinsic right or need to exist. There are lots of other ways for civilization to develop.

Personally I pay for YouTube Premium. So as far as I'm concerned covers my support for the creators of the video I watch. Ad free is the selling point of YouTube Premium after all.

And this post got censored off the frontpage of HN.

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