Show HN: Remove sponsored content in YouTube videos
butter.sonnet.io
butter.sonnet.io
There's people and companies on YouTube that produce outstanding content and I have no issue supporting them (YouTube Premium). I get that's not an option for a lot of people though so barring the invasive tracking for ads on YouTube, this is the next best thing.
For sponsor, I use SponsorBlock. I would say it's my second most favourite extension after Ublock Origin. I'm always amazed when it just skip over those section. For low quality video, it even start the video at the conclusion/recap, so you get all the info you need without spending too much time.
It's like I don't get upset by crappy stock photos or navigation bars, but would give up on a website that took 30 seconds to load...
A sponsor segment is an advertiser targeting the whole audience of a video by directly working with the video creator. Trustworthy creators will select sponsors which make sense for their audience and don’t detract from their credibility or brand.
An ad, though, is a break in the content where the host basically takes each of their audiencemembers, and separately auctions off the right to talk to them to a shady back room full of random hawkers.
Each audience member gets a random ad which the content creator has no control over or awareness of, nor any relationship with other than financial.
(Speaking as someone with experience in psychology, publishing and ad tech here, so that's my primary focus/perspective.)
Here's my personal ideal for a platform like YT:
- Take a service fee cut (e.g. 30%)
- allocate the remaining 70% of money to the people I watched
(optional) let me allocate some of my budget to a random pool of other creators so I can support their growth/someone else's free access to content.
This can work. An example would be Guardian relying on donations, where many people pay so others can access their content. (look for their case studies to learn more)
The fee is charged to users if I understand it correctly? So essentially YouTube premium? That can work, but not everyone can afford to spend money on a subscription and if you block access to the platform it's arguably you will be able to grow to the size and diversity YouTube has. Floatplane is an alternative where you can directly subscribe to creators but that's not cheap if you watch a wide variety.
Ironically, the biggest obstacle for me pushing the alternatives were the publishers' sales teams: people with decent salaries, with mortgages to pay, whose life depended on ads or sponsorships. Even the adtech companies I worked with were happy to pay for my work, esp. during the cookiegeddon times (2019).
> I'd argue the consent is you clicking on the video to watch it.
Fair argument but in practice, given the amount of UX work done so I do watch the sponsored content, it takes a toll on you. The only solution would be to stop using YT at all.
This comment:
> Just look at the poor leftist Youtubers
felt a little out of place, though?
But yeah, it's clumsily delivered and a random political swipe probably doesn't help people trust a browser extension...
But it doesn't change anything though. Unlike ads that are paid on actual display count, a sponsored segment is paid to the content creator by the sponsor and... that's it. For content creators it literally doesn't change anything whether you watch the sponsored segment or skip it, automatically or manually.
You don't support a channel more by watching the sponsored content. I just watch it when content creators make it fun to watch.
I’ll drop it because people are reading a bit too much into it! Thanks for the comments.
Worst comes to worst they'll get you fired and swatted. They'll survive though.
You create, we consume. For free. Forever.
The problem from the video creator's perspective is that Youtube often decides to "demonetize" your video for breaking one of their "community standards" rules, which are vague, constantly changing, and seemingly randomly enforced. If that happens, their video gets no payout from Youtube. Its no surprise they would take sponsorships into their own hands in order to get a more fair and consistent paycheck.
So you're looking at a 50% reduction in income minimum, much more if you make short videos that target audiences with higher $/cpm like finance or health, in those youtube premium is probably only around 5-10% of revenue.
I've disabled my blockers on sites that do that, but it's a very small percentile.
Ummm what? Bizarre, unnecessary commentary. Installing a browser extension is about trust. And you just lost a ton of it.
I suppose my comment is an elaborate way of saying: thank you for reading this and engaging. I mean it in a sincere way.
Being able to compensate someone for their work is a complex process. Most Youtubers and or media publications would not exist if they asked for a fee upfront.
Whole generations have existed without YouTube videos. Perhaps we could exist as well?
I’m not trying to be “get of my lawn”. I’m saying much of the content we have now could not exist and humanity would be no worse off.
Example:
OpenRTB + VAST chain (standards used for targeted advertising) required to display an ad on the site involve dozens of parties the user has no knowledge about. In fact before an ad is displayed on the page, there's no way of knowing who and how will be involved in processing your data. The consent is implied and opt-out is enforced poorly to put it mildly. That's the complexity I'm talking about.
I should've used more examples but tried to keep it terse. Thanks for pointing this out.
The alternative (for instance) would be an automatic system distributing the $$ I pay YT among the creators I watch. That's significantly less complexity for the end-user and the content creator.
So youtube red instead? They split the creator portion of your subscription between the creators you watch (assuming they've setup the ability to get paid by YT). Worth quite a bit more than ad views too, last I heard.
You'd be amazed who has a team behind them. Lots of seemingly tiny creators have an editor and a writing partner. Even small channels have people for camera work, sound, and graphics. Bigger channels have huge teams (for example, Linus Tech Tips has 15m subscribers and has more than 80 people working on it.)
/s
My approach is to ad block, sponsor block, and then have a budget I allocate to the creators that let me. 1 usd here and there can make a difference.
Here's the dream: I want a cheap, open model I can fine tune and create a SponsorBlock agent (pretending to be the extension user) "watching" videos and submitting their timestamps, so they're ready before the first person submits their manual version.
Here's a better dream: have a default, sustainable way of paying those people without involving layers of middlemen.
There's a way of making this thing perform really, really smooth if you excuse the pun, but it requires some upfront cost, e.g. fine tune an LLM or use something like ULMFit. GPT is great for prototyping these sorts of things but I think we've become a bit narrow-focused recently due to the entire ChatGPT hype.
Give the site/article a read for more context if you haven't!
I'm speaking as someone who spent a decade working on helping publishers monetise their content without the unnecessary bullshit. I share your sentiment.
One of my proudest career achievements was to get uncle Murdoch pay me to build an ad blocker (ended up quitting the job and taking a break to work on my mental health, but I still thing it was a valuable fuck you experience).
My content creators deserve money because they are unreal entertainers.
If Squarespace wants to fund all this, why not. Sometimes my favourite, Simon Whistler, will make the ad funny and worth watching. Worst case scenario, fast forward a bit.
Correct, but do you think that the people making the platform valuable (creators) are getting a fair cut there?
But, in short: It's quite crude. I extract captions from YT videos using a private YT API (web scraping was a huge pain ;/), then I massage them a little bit and use GPT to process the timestamps.
A waaaay better approach is possible, but I'll need to see if it's worth pursuing first.
PS. SponsorBlock has a huge timestamp DB so I'm considering reaching out to the authors to see if we can create an agent using their extension and aiding their crowdsourcing effort.