Why YouTube Sponsors Are Almost Always Terrible | Hacker News Reader

Why YouTube Sponsors Are Almost Always Terrible

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I'm shocked YouTube hasn't banned them or at least designed a way for creators to integrate a sponsor segment directly into their video from the YouTube platform, without having to add it to the final cut of the video. If this existed, creators could update the sponsor across all of their videos AND YouTube could get a cut of the revenue.

It seems like YouTube is leaving money on the table while simultaneously creating a worse experience for paying customers of YouTube premium.

The entire point of having sponsor segments negotiated with a third party is to bypass YouTube's cut and reduce exposure to the risks associated with putting all your eggs in the YouTube basket. An income stream uncorrelated with the vicissitudes of the demonetization policy du joir. A deal that you don't have to pray won't be altered any further. If YouTube tried to do this, the creators would revolt, and with good reason.

And there would be no way to ban them. Not really. The best you could do would be to push them underground, turn them into secret "product placement" agreements and the like. Plenty of popular styles of YouTube videos are "ads" of some form or another (product reviews, movie trailers, etc). How could you police that in a way that didn't cause more problems than it solved?

I wouldn't want them to try, any more than I want my ISP to try and intercept and replace ads on websites so they can take a cut. I want YouTube to be as close to a neutral pipe as possible. The content of the videos themselves is a matter between the creators and the viewers.

This We are interrupting the advertisement to show you more advertisements cracks me up every time.

It was a response to Youtube playing stupid games with demonetizing and changing thresholds for payouts; they thought, that they can push creators around. They were wrong.

I absolutely cannot fucking stand in-video advertisements/sponsorship segments. I wrote a chrome extension a while back that just feeds the transcript to an LLM and gets the start/end time of the sponsored segment, then just skips it in the video.

SponsorBlock?

For those who don't know, SponsorBlock skips segments based on crowd-sourced timestamps. You can also (optionally) mark/skip intros, outros, like/subscribe begging, etc.

https://sponsor.ajay.app/

https://github.com/ajayyy/SponsorBlock

No, it's called Sponsor Slice. I'm debating even putting it on the chrome store, it was a fun little side project for me, but I think it will be expensive to run (using gpt-4.0-mini). Also I don't think people will like the idea of sending me the ID's of the videos they are watching, but who knows, maybe if they dislike sponsored segments as much as I do they would be willing.

https://www.sponsorslice.com/

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