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.

The thing that sucks is I pay for YouTube Premium to remove ads then youtubers always have sponsored segments. It makes my $20/mo useless because I'm spending time watching ads still. I don't have a solution I'm just stating my perspective on it.

That said, SponsorBlock has been around for years. I've been using it for as long as I can remember. Basically any decent-sized channel's videos already have the sponsored segment skipped. I'm not sure why someone just posted it but we're well beyond SponsorBlock "taking off".

Same feeling here. It's gotten twice as expensive, which is insane by itself. But worse is the jarring rotation of sponsored advertisers.

it's reminiscent of NASCAR. Or, like being a kid forced to watch advertising during TV breaks, wondering why the TV screen istrying to sell me cigarettes.

It's maybe a bit social-media-toxic to say that some youtubers are my "favorite people" in that i look forward to their takes on the topics they cover. I lose interest though when that youtuber presents to me an unprompted ad for my testicular health.

I have no solution for creators consumers or google :(

I always wondered why YouTube themselves didn't start restricting sponsored segments. I don't necessarily agree with the idea (not a big fan of how restrictive youtube already is) but I always thought it was odd they were ok with their premium offering being devalued by sponsored segments.

They could stop sponsored segments, but they couldn't stop creators and users from going to other platforms where they allow sponsored segments. They have far less control than e.g. Apple with the app store (where they literally can stop other app stores from ever coming into being, barring regulation that changes that).