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.

> blunt instrument like this is likely to kill off sponsorships as a whole

That's the dream. Ads are a poison and a blight.

Removing them is something many users, including me welcome. If one wants money for their videos, they're welcome to actually allow getting payments i.e. patreon, the "Youtube sponsorship"-thing.

And I'll agree with you the day we all decide to pay a monthly fee that is big enough to support various websites and creators.

Why? As a HN-er/content creator, I don't see why it would be taken for granted that people need to be paid for their hobbies. In fact many people post online for enjoyment.

If you're a HN-er you should know the culture of HN is very old school and fringe mentality. E.g:

- Flip phones are celebrated in some threads because people don't want smart phones (extreme minority in real life)

- Disabling JS and pushing sites to go back to just raw HTML CSS (with some even not understanding why we need JS, extreme minority irl. IRL site owners care about attracting customers and the things they want to do can't be done with raw HTML CSS much of the time)

- Kagi taking off. IRL most people still do and will continue to Google

- People acting like if ads were disabled forever the population would totally pay for things they like (IRL people don't, there's a reason piracy is big. People want the things they want for the cheapest cost possible)

HN is a very specific type of tech-centric bubble