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.

Why are you entitled to make money from YouTube though? Monetisation is part of the reason the site has become a low quality content farm. Now it’s just an industrial clickbait and ragebait machine. Even the educational channels just pump out poorly researched crap or convert Wikipedia articles to video format. Back in the days it was just a fun little site for people to upload whatever they felt like and it was great, the content was organic.

Counterpoint: why do you feel entitled to free content?

Normally if you don't agree to the price of something, you don't pay for it and you don't get it. With content people feel okay with both getting the content for free _and_ denying the creator any income.

Then when the creators dare to bring it up, there's invariably a comment like this downplaying their contribution.

It's truly adding insult to injury.