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Comment by Gareth321 | Hacker News Reader

I strongly agree, and it frustrates me when people and companies claim that advertising their own products "doesn't count." I cancelled my YouTube Premium plan because of ads. These are all the ads they permit on Premium, despite advertising everywhere that Premium removes all ads:

* Ads in YouTube feeds for other google products and services.

* Ads underneath videos for products from the channel owner.

* Sponsorships within videos from the channel owner.

* Advertising overlays (supported IN THE APP BY GOOGLE) for products and services from the channel owner.

* Email advertisements for Google products and services.

* Community post advertisements from channel owners which show up in the YouTube feed.

I contacted support to enquire and they state these are not considered advertising.

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I don’t mind the in video sponsors. Some are good (ok map men ones are good), but crucially it’s not really something YouTube could directly block. They could put terms and conditions in place, but you’re driving product placement and it becomes a slippery slope.

Howver recently I’ve noticed adverts for “membership” for channels, and that is getting me close to picking my youtube habit. Same with Spotify and advertising concerts, but that seems to have gone away for me after I complained.

Sadly even the bbc does adverts on iPlayer. You used to be able to instantly skip them, but then in a big (internal) fanfare some idiot decided they could make them not skippable and increase some metrics and then get a promotion.

YouTube actually does block sponsor spots in videos if you have Premium. They call it "Skip Ahead" and don't really talk about sponsor spots, but practically speaking it's 9/10 just the "skip sponsor segment" button.

I remember about 10-15 years ago YouTube actually did try to ban sponsor spots in videos, but the backlash from creators was strong enough that they walked that back to "ok well we'll allow sponsor spots but you can't just insert the sponsor's own ad, it's gotta be your ad read and B-roll".

Most of the UI features that YT added over the last few years can be thought of as a way to skip sponsor ads. e.g., thumbnail previews on the seek bar, the little histogram on the seek bar, auto-chapter detection, and playing at 2x when you click and hold on the video.

that's not blocking though. It's allowing you to skip over the areas people commonly skip in videos where they take the data from everyone. I get them at sponsor slots of course, but also intros often. Because it's not removing it entirely, I would not consider that blocking.

The parent’s characterization is fine. 9/10 times (more in my own experience) it is the functional equivalent of a sponsor blocker. That it technically isn’t that specifically is immaterial, because if it works, that’s because people are skipping the sponsor segments in large enough quantities for it to easily become that.

That said, I don’t think YouTube owes it to Premium subscribers to add a sponsor block. That’s part of the video’s content as it was provided to YouTube, and YouTube never advertised YouTube Premium as something which will block in-video sponsor reads. This is part of how YouTubers make a living & a Premium sub doesn’t replace the money they receive for those the way it does for YouTube’s own ads.

It’s such a great feature, and I see why YouTube gates it to Premium.

Once you’ve transitioned from an ad-watching customer to a paid one, YouTube actually turns into something that treats your product experience and satisfaction as important.

It’s fascinating how it switches that off for non-paying users. Not a lot of companies’ services do that so obviously and blatantly.

In other words, when YouTube is being watched for free, they have that typical engagement incentive: keep you watching as long as possible, watch as many ads as possible, etc.

When you’re paying? Who cares, skip the content if you want. Use Gemini to summarize it, we don’t care if you watch the video.

Try watching YouTube without logging in through a VPN with an ad blocker. You get 5s black screens and "Experiencing Interruptions?" popups.

If they don't want people watching videos without logging in, they should gate them behind a login screen rather than fucking with their users.

I was getting that when logged in, without VPN (but still ad blocking.)

I wasn't sure which of the parameters was causing it. Looks like ad blocking is the one, then.

That’s because you’re not a YouTube customer. You want to consume their product without paying and without viewing any ads.

They are very logically making that difficult for you. They are exercising their right to refuse service to you.

Aka a leech. Even torrent sites look down on that behavior.

Are you sure that wasn't the VPN's fault?

That is quite deliberately YouTube’s fault. It only occurs with an ad blocker (VPN is irrelevant here, though it might be rolled out only in some countries), and the “experiencing interruptions?” thingy links to an article basically telling you to disable your ad blocker.

They make it slightly easier to find the end of a sponsor segment, while still requiring me to manually interact with the video. As an ad blocker I score that either F+ or D-.

Yes it tends to work one at a time, but some videos have two sponsor segments and it doesn’t work the second time. I assumed it skipped to where people often skip to.

I'm pretty sure that skip ahead is deliberately broken to satisfy advertisers.

Sponsorblock has zero issue jumping to the precise moment after the sponsor vs jump ahead always leaves just enough time to still hear the name of the sponsor.

100%. YouTube makes the skip button appear a few seconds after the start of the sponsored segment, and ends the skip a few seconds before the end of the sponsored segment.

That's their choice, and it's deliberate – it gives enough of a window for advertisers to get their message across, while still selling Premium users the notion that they've 'avoided' the ad.

What ads do you see for channel membership? I run a channel and put some of my videos behind a membership gate. I mention the premium videos in some of my free videos but otherwise don't see options in the YouTube UI to actively promote my membership in any other way. Is it putting graphics or something inside the video to tell you to click the membership button?

>* Ads underneath videos for products from the channel owner. > >* Sponsorships within videos from the channel owner.

I actually agree this is a bit annoying, but also the alternative is Google banning Youtubers from finding their own advertising partners, which I'm sure people would hate.

More importantly, it would lead to more “product placement” and other underhanded product/brand promotions.

And the real annoyance with YouTube Premium is that the UI is still full of engagement dark patterns.

no it wouldn't, such things are straight up illegal in most places? You have to clearly disclose ads + have clear distinction between ad content and rest of content. A bunch of youtubers have gotten in trouble for this?

I'm sure content creators would hate it because they would make less money. Billions of YouTube users around the world would be very happy.

To be clear, I'm not opposed to the practise, as long as that's clear up front. YouTube advertises Premium as an ad free experience, and in reality it's full of ads.

Do they not have a little sponsor skip thing? Where like if many people skip a segment, itll pop up like hey, wanna skip? I mean, thats about all they can do besides forcing youtubers to disclose exact segment lengths which would concretely hurt them whereas this provides a little sort of breathing room, or just straight up ban them, both of which would dramatically hurt the platform.

I understand they have an opt-out feature now. With positive interaction one can skip one sponsored segment (which works most of the time). The problem is that it's not automated. It required digging one's phone out of their pocket, or reaching for the remote. That's still really annoying. To point: it's still full of ads, even if they have the skip button now.

YouTube could tell content creators not to include sponsorships. The terms are long and onerous. Of course content creators would be upset and they would make less money. Ultimately my issue is that YouTube advertises an ad free experience with Premium and it still has a LOT of ads.

YouTube Premium now has "skip ahead" which is basically this. Or you can install SponsorBlock and get a much better version for free.

I'm in favour of people making money from their work. Maybe I'm old fashioned that way. IMDB, Duolingo and Wikipedia have encouraged the model of using unpaid labour.

YouTube isn't paying people properly, despite its vast revenues. At least with sponsorship the people themselves make some money.

Wikipedia predates Youtube by five years.

Unpaid cooperation of human to generate knowledge or entertainment predates YouTube by tens of thousands years.

YouTube is part of Alphabet, one of the biggest corporations in the world. It can easily afford to pay people. It isn't co-operation, it's a corporation which takes the work of other people and makes lots of money off them, without paying them properly (or at all in many cases). Wikipedia's content is used by LLMs and other such outlets who also profit off unpaid labour.

It is a basic right of people to be able to afford to live. It's easy to work for free when you have family money but you cannot support yourself when you don't.

> I'm in favour of people making money from their work.

That's completely fair. YouTube offers content creators many ways to do this. For example, they can put content behind a paywall. They can ask for donations. They can ask for memberships. Members get all kinds of fun perks. The part I have an issue with is YouTube advertising an ad free experience with Premium and then allowing content creators to fill their videos with ads.

> YouTube isn't paying people properly

I hope we can both agree that the solution to this is YouTube paying people properly, and not allowing content creators to shit all over viewers. That's pitting the little guys against each other while Google laughs all the way to the bank.

>I hope we can both agree that the solution to this is YouTube paying people properly

The solution is proper competition to google. Because Youtube is pretty much the one true monopoly out there. But as we all know, video hosting alone is very,very, very expensive. It really is something you need to be a billion dollar company to do, and Youtube wasn't profitable until like... 2 years ago?

So I tolerate the user ad reads as the best compromise because nothing else would work. I don't think Youtube is a model where Google is being greedy so much as practical. At least not in how it monetizes creators (there's plenty of hostile means they do to creators as is, but the monetary structure seems fine).

There are alternative streaming platforms, but many of them have become associated with certain political viewpoints.

There is also a very limited range of content on Odyssee, Bitchute and all the rest. If you want to find music tutorials for example, you're unlikely to.

You have to put in a disproportionate amount of work to get anything back. Almost no one makes money off a single video, but instead you make a string of videos and get a following. (The cases of a single video making money are few and far between.)

You don't get hourly pay for it, it's vaguely commission based and you do all your own promotion. They can demonetise you at a whim and refuse to pay you (I've seen this happen to craft channels and other content that wasn't remotely controversial.)

I'm not saying this is the way to go, but damn do I miss the old internet where passionate people presented information for free, at worst showing an affiliate link for an information-related book.

People need to be able to make a living and when this is taken away, the living expenses don't disappear. Most people can't pay for their electricity or food with voluntary work.

The people who were doing this on the early internet were not trying to make a living off of it, they were just doing it because they enjoyed it and wanted to share what they built with the world. If you could cover your server costs then that was considered a win.

There are plenty of people giving away their labour for free, which makes it harder for people who need to be able to make some money in order to support themselves.

People making passion projects for free don't owe anyone a business model.

They aren't always making passion projects. They're told unpaid labour is good for their CV/resumé, or that they're helping society (sometimes the case, but sometimes not).

Massive corporations such as Alphabet do have the resources to pay YouTubers, especially given how much tax they avoid in most countries.

Do you only watch videos from creators who are not trying to make money?

If they couldn't make money, 80% of the content worth watching would not be produced.

Premium works for me. Is it perfect, no. But there's that saying about perfect being the enemy of good.

> To be clear, I'm not opposed to the practise, as long as that's clear up front. YouTube advertises Premium as an ad free experience, and in reality it's full of ads.

I think it's clear. I don't want YouTube going in and editing movies and creator videos removing any form of advertising. Maybe you want them deleting that content. But the average person realizes what Premium means by no ads. Being obtuse or willfully ignorant isn't reasonable.

This would destroy YouTuber culture AND rid us of ads on there. This is my own personal heaven. Nirvana. Eden. Promised Land. Paradise.

Let’s freaking do it.

I worked on Prime during the rollout of Prime Video and shortly after (maybe a year or so) pre-roll for other Prime Video content was inserted. I brought it up in a meeting with our org (but the Amazon Video team wasn’t present) and one of our business guys shrugged it off as not interrupting content, blah, blah, blah. I said the agreement was ad-free content, not uninterrupted content. The conversation stopped and nothing was done.

I worked on backend subscription management and the implementation of benefits. The team that business guy worked on was the group eventually at the center of the predatory subscription issue (I can’t say whether they were still around when that happened or not).

Cheap corporate sellouts are the problem with every big company.

Pro tip. Ublock origin gets you that mostly ad-free experience you were hoping for. Donate the money you save from the YouTube premium sub to ublock origin instead.

Thanks! It's great on Mac/PC but sadly it doesn't work on iPhone, Android TV and Apple TV. I have solutions for those now too.

Mind sharing them with the rest of the class?

Sure! On Android TV, SmartTubeNext is fantastic. Installation instructions are in the GitHub repo. For Apple TV the best option I have found is MuTube. It's basically a YouTube repack without ads and with SponsorBlock. The catch is that it requires sideloading or an Apple developer account. Sideloadly etc can automatically refresh certificates while on wifi, but I ended up purchasing a dev account because it works for all the Apple devices in my home. Which leads me to the iPhone. There are many YouTube sideloads. I use uYouEnhanced. As above, you can use Sideloadly or sign the app yourself. An LLM or coding harness can walk you through the process (or do it for you). With an Apple dev account, signed apps last for a year, so I don't need to worry about refreshing the certs.

SmartTubeNext automatically updates itself, but the Apple TV and iPhone apps don't. Surprisingly, it has not been an issue. They keep working fine without updates for the year. I just update once a year when I refresh the certs.

Also, SponsorBlock. Can't recommend it enough. It even works on """smart""" TVs if you're controlling youtube from your phone.

uBlock Origin + SponsorBlock is the only way YouTube is even remotely watchable these days. Even still, it's not really worth it. I frequently find it better to spend my time doing anything else.

It's mostly AI generated drivel on their home page now.

Oh absolutely - we banned “casual” YouTube use at home 5 years ago and we don’t regret it one bit. Still use it when looking up a concrete video on a specific topic or when a web page directs me to a tutorial or something there, but don’t use it for regular “entertainment” (I’m bored, let’s hit YouTube).

Some people can’t seem to live without YouTube though.

Is there a viable solution for YouTube on a Google TV nowadays? They've started doing 60 second ads which are absolutely egregious.

SmartTube

Just get one of those Fire things. What's it called again? Ah yes

Get a Fire Axe. Put it in the TV. Enjoy life.

Sadly they don't accept donations, but send it to your favorite channel's Patreon or similar.

I cancelled my Spotify subscription when they wouldn’t stop trying to advertise podcasts to me.

> I cancelled my YouTube Premium plan because of ads.

That would make a great title for a write-up of your experience.

"Ad free" meaning we do not insert ads seems like a reasonable standard to me. The alternative of policing creator content is kind of untenable since it destroys the economics for the creators and there's so much grey area.

YouTube Premium now has integrated sponsor block. At least that's something.

And any ads underneath a video is at least not shown in the Roku YouTube player, nor are ad overlays as far as I know, since I've never seen one.

It helps but I understand that it's not automatic. Is that correct? If so it significantly undermines the functionality. SponesorBlock automatically removes ads. Meaning I don't have to scramble to open my phone or find the remote every time I don't want to hear/see an ad. That opt-out UX likely means most people ultimately watch the sponsored content.

It could be that this is a phased approach so as not to anger their creators too much.

For me personally it is as easy as pressing one button on the remote. But I don't put on videos in the background very often.

Worth noting is that there are thousands of high quality YouTube channels without any sponsored content. So those are effectively completely ad free with Premium.

Sponsorship within videos at least gives money to the uploader. YouTube has forced that by demonetising videos or paying peanuts.

I mean, the stuff that's in the video is not really under Google's control.

Are you suggesting that the burden should be on channel owners to upload variations of their videos that don't include sponsor blocks? That's a bit onerous. My commercial agreement is with YouTube, not with the video creator.

If you don't like ads from creators, don't watch those channels?

YT Premium does provide the "skip ahead" functionality that almost always jumps over sponsor blocks.

I will say I've been a YT Premium subscriber for years and I've never seen any ads for other Google services in my feed, and I don't get advert emails either.

If google can't provide an ad-free product, they shouldn't be selling an ad-free product.

> I mean, the stuff that's in the video is not really under Google's control.

It is completely within Google's control. They have a hundred pages of terms of services, dictating everything the content creators may and may not do and say, down to individual words, symbols, and opinions. If Google wanted to, they could tell content creators to stop adding sponsorships. I understand you'd make less money.

> If you don't like ads from creators, don't watch those channels?

I stopped paying YouTube and I use SponsorBlock now. You're not entitled to my time or attention or money.

The problem is ultimately that Google advertises an ad free experience, which it's not. I'd be willing to pay for an ad free experience.

> You're not entitled to my time or attention or money.

Ahhh but you're entitled to someone else's hard work in producing the content you watch, and god forbid they'd be entitled to compensation for that work.. Got it..

Rules for me, not for thee..

You're free to put your content behind a paywall. YouTube makes this very easy.

All creators that are on Nebula already upload sponsor-free versions there.

Nebula is mostly irrelevant. Even Nebulas creators wouldn't survive without youtube revenue.

Maybe so, the point is there is a non-zero number of creators who already do sbarre thinks is too onerous.

> Are you suggesting that the burden should be on channel owners to upload variations of their videos that don't include sponsor blocks?

No, just mark the sponsored segments, so YouTube can skip over (like SponsorBlock does). And they already pay more per view from Premium users vs ad-supported ones, so it just makes sense to skip ads in the video as well.

That being said, I think paying creators directly is more sustainable in the long term.

I'd pay $20 / month for a Youtube subscription with no ads or sponsored content. Unfortunately even with sideloading on iOS there's no alternative live youtube vanced.

Brave seemingly blocks YouTube ads on iOS.

FYI I use (https://github.com/arichornlover/uYouEnhanced) on my iPhone (I sign with an Apple dev cert) and it's great. It blocks ads and has SponsorBlock built in.

And then on the flip side you have people who won't blink an eye with Apple doing it. Shame, really.

That's like complaining you purchased netflix subscriptiomn without ads and saw a product placement ad in a movie. I guess you want netflix to not show the movie, start cutting up the movie or ask that the movie be remade without any products.

YouTube sponsor segments are not subtle “place a Coke can facing the camera” integrations. They are dedicated ad segments with scripted (typically by the advertiser) promotions, often entirely unrelated to the video or channel.

To the end user they are indistinguishable from other video ads on the platform except the ad read is often (not always) done by the creator.

I don’t have hard data on the ratio but it’s not uncommon for a 10 minute video to have 1-2 minutes of full-interrupt ad segments embedded in the video.

What sucks is it’s never enough

It always gets more expensive for a lesser enshittified version, removed/fucked with features to keep a bloated product team employed

I'd add to this the relentless promotion of Shorts.

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