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192 points bgstry | 22 comments | | HN request time: 0.652s | source | bottom
1. rPlayer6554 ◴[] No.26886888[source]
I understand people don't like ads, but at some point doesn't someone have to pay creators for content? This feels just like stealing: I don't know how you can justify it: sponsor spots don't track you and they don't slow down your computer. Yes they are a minor inconvenience but they make the content you watch possible.
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2. londons_explore ◴[] No.26886974[source]
YouTubers who have both sponsor spots and adverts are the ones to be blocking...
3. bassdropvroom ◴[] No.26886985[source]
For these sponsored contents it doesn't really matter though. The content creator has already been paid, so whether you watch the segment or not, they won't lose or make money.
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4. ◴[] No.26886988[source]
5. dageshi ◴[] No.26887027[source]
They will if the practice becomes common place. Advertisers will know what percentage are just skipping automatically and reprice the spots value accordingly.
6. rPlayer6554 ◴[] No.26887038[source]
That's not true. Many get money based on how many clicks an affiliate link gets or how much an offer code is used. At the minimum this data is used to determine if the company decides to continue buying ads from the creator.
7. q3k ◴[] No.26887056[source]
I could see it escalate into an arms race: if the new norm for watching videos will be to automatically skip sponsored segments by some popular software, the sponsorship offers will either dry up, or the resulting sponsorships will be designed to be more difficult to skip (eg. by making content creators incorporate them throughout the video in many small chunks, or as overlaid audio/video, ...).

Similar to what happened to web ads in communities that tend to run adblockers: more and more obnoxious advertising (intersitial ads, animated ads, etc.), advertising incorporated into content (ads-as-content like on Reddit), cross-site tracking and retargeting.

I tend to manually skip sponsored segments (especially for snake oil like VPN services!), but I'm not sure if writing automated software for this is the right thing to do in the long term.

8. DeusExMachina ◴[] No.26887126[source]
That's a too simplistic view and not how sponsorships work. The sponsor expects a return on the investment. If a sponsorship does not generate revenue, that content creator will stop getting sponsorships because their audience is worthless.
9. Cthulhu_ ◴[] No.26887184[source]
It's not stealing because the creators will get paid anyway. Second, said creators have minimal expenses because YT pays for the hosting. Third, ad and sponsorship blocking represents only a small fraction of users. It's a fraction to, say, people sharing their netflix account.
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10. Nextgrid ◴[] No.26887197[source]
The problem with sponsor spots is that they're the same every single video, there's just not enough diversity on the market.

Is it bad to be skipping a sponsor segment because you've seen it dozens of times? Is it bad if you're already a happy user of the advertised product? Etc.

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11. disiplus ◴[] No.26887247[source]
i pay for youtube premium, i don't want ads, if you bake it in your video i'm still seeing ads i don't want. And it's ads about VPN that are allways the same. I don't want that.
12. stephen_g ◴[] No.26887269[source]
That is the bit that makes me a little uneasy for running uBlock Origin with basically no exceptions, but then again, ad tech continues to prove to be so abusive again and again that I quickly get over it.

I figure that $1 a month on Patreon is worth hundreds of times more to a creator than the ad revenue I'm depriving them of, and buying any merch probably thousands of times.

13. tomjen3 ◴[] No.26887319[source]
Does it make much of a difference if I manually skip it? Those sponsor segments are always for terrible products.
14. jeltz ◴[] No.26887341[source]
To me the issue is the constant races to create more and more annoying ads. I do not mind ads which are relevant and not too annoying, but every time advertisers find a new medium they abuse it as much as they can to squeeze every cent out of the channel even if it ruins it for everyone.
15. jasode ◴[] No.26887401[source]
>It's not stealing because the creators will get paid anyway.

This isn't always true. As several sibling comments already mentioned, this "native advertising" of embedded sponsor spot via the Youtube personality as spokesperson -- is often "paid based on performance" which means the affiliate url links mentioned in the ad are measured for clicks resulting in new customers.

I'm not commenting on morals of using a plugin but just correcting a misconception about arrangements of payment for content creators.

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16. rPlayer6554 ◴[] No.26887589[source]
I don't think manual skipping is bad. If you take the time to manually skip you probably weren't going to buy the product anyways. It's automatic skipping that I have an issue with. It doesn't give the creator even a chance to pitch the product and their affiliate code (which makes them money)
17. Raed667 ◴[] No.26888170{3}[source]
I would have never clicked on an affiliate link. So no harm done by that logic.
18. eska ◴[] No.26890430[source]
I watched a video by a successful streamer giving advice to new streamers on how to build a career in that industry. He said that all these ads and partner programs aren't even worth it, unless you're one of the top 1%. The pay is relatively low (the platform takes a large cut) and you often have to sign over exclusive rights. He said that donations (using external services) and most importantly Patreon are the best way to go. So I just block all ads and sponsor segments, and donate a few bucks here or there.
19. dredmorbius ◴[] No.26893033[source]
It's an error to see "ads or creators don't get paid" as the only option here.

OECD per-capita spend on all publishing runs about $100/person, roughly the same as per-capita ads spend within the same countries, itself a tax of sorts.

A natural gateway exists --- not a perfect one, but good enough at the level of the ISP provider.

Aggregation, not disintegrations, is the general trend in payment systems. Both buyers and sellers benefit from predictable flows, income or revenues.

Regionally-pro-rated payments allocate costs according to ability to pay, which for information goods is a net social benefit.

Rolling an information access fee into fixed line and mobile internet service, with an indexing of content accessed and a tier-and-bid based reimbursement schedule for publishers, seems to me the most viable path forward to something vaguely resembling a content tax, without actually going through a content tax mechanism. It would ensure universal access to readers and the public, compensation for creators, and the ability for those actually engaged in the process of creating new works to access the materials they need, legally and lawfully, answering in part the "why should I pay for information I don't use" objection: the inforation you do use is itself predicated on information you don't access directly yourself. The other answer to this rather tired objection is that you live in the world created by information access or denial of access, and in general, access to high-quality, relevant, useful information should be a net positive.

I'd proposed this years ago (and many others have similar suggestions), though noting ISPs as a logical collection tollgate is a new realisation.

https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/1uotb3/a_modes...

20. qshaman ◴[] No.26895051[source]
How is this stealing? They can charge for the video if they don’t want people to see it for free. People have the right to not watch ads.
21. nfoz ◴[] No.26895827[source]
> I understand people don't like ads, but at some point doesn't someone have to pay creators for content?

No, the role of "content creator paid by impression and dependent on people not being able to skip intrusive segments of videos that they watch" has no intrinsic right or need to exist. There are lots of other ways for civilization to develop.

22. kcb ◴[] No.26896138[source]
Personally I pay for YouTube Premium. So as far as I'm concerned covers my support for the creators of the video I watch. Ad free is the selling point of YouTube Premium after all.