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Comment by heavyset_go | Hacker News Reader

> For YouTube, the _right_ thing to do is to pay for the premium option which removes ads.

Even if you pay for premium, you'll still get sponsored ads in the content.

Yeah and when you pay for a cinema ticket you still have to see the actors drinking conveniently angled cans of coke

There's a difference between product placement and intrusive ads that interrupt content for minutes at a time. YouTube Premium customers paid to get rid of the latter.

YouTube Premium customers paid to get rid of ads placed by YouTube. A simple solution for channels that embed ads in their videos themselves (or have any other kind of content that you don't like for any reason) is to simply unsubscribe.

Yes but that is like not visiting a site after you found out it uses tracking or like peeing in your pants for warmth. It only work if you never see videos you haven't already subscribed to beforehand.

All of that started because people were ad blocking in the first place. More competition and less eyeballs meant CPMs have been crashing for decades now.

Sure, you can do it (piracy is okay too) but let the creators support themselves somehow.

No ad blocking is going to get rid of that though, until you run something analyzing the actual video/audio content and not just the source of streams or how they're loaded.

There's an extension called SponsorBlock that does exactly that. It uses user-submitted timestamps.

This exists and was posted on HN recently[1]. If an extension developer can detect when sponsored ads play on YouTube, so could Google.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26886275

SponsorBlock doesn't detect sponsored segments. Users mark the segments and submit them to a database.

If Google did try to automate it, you can be sure that people would just move to integrating the sponsorship into the content. Those are the worst kind of videos and I don't want to encourage more of them.

There are some programs/videos that are only available on premium and do not include sponsored content.

There are? Name some.

I know Cobra Kai started out that way, but has now been solved off to Youtube as they abandoned that model.

They certainly don't mention exclusive content as a region to pay for Premium.

That's on the creator, and no ad blocker will stop sponsored content.

SponsorBlock will. It does require someone to flag the ads first though but so does most ads on adblocker lists.

Google could certainly detect when sponsored ads start in YouTube content and skip them to honor their "no ads" agreement with YouTube Premium customers.

That, or they could pay content creators fairly so that they don't have to shill for NordVPN in every video they release.

I'm not confident any automated system could properly detect a sponsored segment. Some creators are quite sly with how they're worked in.

> pay content creators fairly so that they don't have to shill for NordVPN in every video they release.

I'm with you on that.

> I'm not confident any automated system could properly detect a sponsored segment. Some creators are quite sly with how they're worked in.

SponsorBlock does it, and Google could make it part of their policy for content creators to mark sponsored ad segments in their videos so that they can be skipped.

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