Hacker News Reader

Comment by hdgvhicv | Hacker News Reader

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.

View on HN

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?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com