Kagi is a similar boat - the product is what you pay for, not what they can get users to put up with.
Netflix also attempted to give a paid option, but now we have an "ad-supported" plan. I think that same logic of maximizing profit means that even if there are some people paying for ChatGPT, the amount of free money that is sitting on the table means that we will see "ad-supported" ChatGPT pretty soon once the low-hanging fruit for quality enhancement start to dry up, which is kind of already happening.
Yeah, sure, "ad-free plan". As long as you don't watch (what feels like) the majority of videos on the platform.
I pay for premium, but I'd gladly pay 4x as much if Youtube also required creators to mark sponsored segments and let them all get skipped automatically if you paid for youtube "double premium double ad free" or whatever.
You are right, that you still need to hit that button. It would be need to trigger it automatically. As far as I can tell, creators already tag the relevant segments as sponsored for other legal reasons.
From what I've seen, the timeline usually doesn't call out exact sponsor segments and the only tagging applies to the entire video.