SponsorBlock – skip sponsor segments on YouTube

As a YouTuber, I’m conflicted about this. My main channel (non-tech) is small, but is monetised, and YouTube see fit to throw me a _very_ variable amount of money every month. CPMs are down right now so revenue has tanked along with it, it’ll pick back up at some point, but the variability is itself the pain point. My videos are relatively expensive and time consuming to make, but people seem to find them useful, and even enjoyable. The occasional (relevant) sponsor read or similar has been a huge help in providing some stability in the past, and I know for many channels it’s the main source of income since YPP revenue share can be so volatile.

I do worry that if this takes off it will just result in those sponsors pulling their budgets for this type of advertising, and it’ll be another nail in the coffin for creators. Sure many of us also do patreon etc but that’s never really sat right with me personally (and see also the post on HN just today about Apple coming for a revenue split there for another creator-hostile storm brewing).

On the other hand, I totally get the hatred of “the usual suspect” sponsors (VPNs, low-quality learning platforms etc) that get done to death because of their aggressive sponsor budgets and not-unreasonable deals. Those get shoehorned into a ton of videos and it’s a shame, but a blunt instrument like this is likely to kill off sponsorships as a whole, not just those bad ones.

Let me state upfront I do understand the desire to make money from a channel, and much of the YT content I enjoy would not exist if that was not possible. But allow me to make a few hopefully nuanced remarks.

First of all it is not just the VPNs. Briliants, RSLs etc. that annoy, it is all sponsor reads. Even those channels that try to be creative with it, there's only so many times you can be funny about it, and then it turns into just another piece of formulaic slop.

But another reason why sponsor reads annoy me is that it breaks the youtube premium deal. I pay YT for an ad free experience. YT pays you more for my view than a 'free' watcher, and then you shove in ads anyway. Now I do get your argument that "it's not enough", but that does not change my end of the deal.

Idealy ad reads would be autoskipped for premium subscribers. If that meant premium being a bit more expensive, I would be fine with that personally.

I wish YouTube Premium (and honestly, Spotify too!) had a feature where I could voluntarily commit X additional dollars per month to be directly distributed to the creators I watch according to their share of my total watchtime, with some kind of manual opt-out button for individual videos/creators that I explicitly do not want to support. I am already a member of several Patreons but wish I could cast a bit of a wider support net for the people I watch enough-to-want-to-support-them-but-not-enough-to-join-their-Patreon, yknow?

Is that not just youtube "memberships" though? The creator can choose the cost and have multiple "tiers" - I don't think there's anything stopping them having a $1 "tip jar" tier.

Sure, it's not quite the same, but at some point of similar-enough the number of people who actually use each feature becomes vanishingly small and/or the cost of managing the extra option outpaces the income, and it's just not worth it.