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.

It greatly depends on the audience, but for many cases, unfortunately, it's more likely the case that you are dreaming.

Typical income flows for streamers include:

1. Passive advertising from video and stream platforms (which many adblockers do block)

2. Active advertising via sponsorships (which SponsorBlock wants to block)

3. Live stream donations

4. Video/stream-independent donations, most usually via Patreon

5. Paid "premium" or behind-the-scene programmes (partly overlaps with video/stream-independent donations due to their obvious weaknesses)

6. Merchandises

And not all streamers can do them at once. Live stream donations only work for some genres of streaming and it is easy to stress audiences. Usual donations may or may not work, but it is usually thought to be weaker than live stream donations due to its passiveness (unless you come up with very different perks, but then your income is completely independent from streaming).

Many high-profile channels rely greatly on merchandises because it does have significant margins if you can keep launching enough of them, but they are especially risky when your channel and/or stream is not large enough. So smaller channels have traditionally relied on passive advertising, but its flaws are well known and discussed to the death by now. (If you need a list though, higher processing fees, prevalence of adblocking, generally too low income to be sustainable, extreme platform dependence etc.) This leaves active advertising as a compelling option for smaller streamers, at least for now.

While I do loathe most kind of advertising, active advertising like this is something I can (barely) tolerate because it is meant to be performed by streamers themselves, unlike passive advertising which rarely relates to the streamer or content itself. And I'm afraid that there doesn't seem to be any other viable option remaining. I can always skip an ad portion of a video if I do find it annoying anyway.

If blocking ads means for-profit video creators go out of business then so be it. There will always be those who do it because it is something they enjoy and usually that kind of content is more worthwhile anyway.