Honestly, I do not understand why one should use this. I have recently seen some high quality YT videos, each of a length of 30-60 minutes. In those videos where some sponsors mentioned which took only one or two minutes. Seems perfectly OK for me to support the creators. I guess if many people block sponsor content, this kind of vids will die.
If you watch YouTube enough you'll basically become aware of all the sponsors pretty quickly (and may even be a customer of some already!), so any exposure beyond that is a waste of time for all involved - if I didn't buy the product after seeing it 10 times, I won't buy it after seeing it the 11th either.
People forget that over-advertising can be more damaging than no- or under-advertising. Take Ryan Reynolds and Mint Mobile. I genuinely love his acting (to each their own for sure) but after being constantly bombarded with commercials for Mint Mobile, I legitimately am tired and lately avoid not just him, but Mint Mobile, Ryan Reynolds, and anything associated with him.
The problem with YouTube is not that they have ads...it is that the platform sprays for effect while claiming to care about what they are doing when any reasonable user can tell that they are simply flooding the pipes with ad content.
> The problem with YouTube is not that they have ads...it is that the platform sprays for effect while claiming to care about what they are doing when any reasonable user can tell that they are simply flooding the pipes with ad content.
From what I heard, Google’s sells ad space via an auction system. They collect information about a viewer then when said viewer watches a video/visits a website, all the ad space on the video/website goes on auction with the viewer’s characteristics attached in real time. Advertisers will look at the viewer characteristics and decide if they want to bid. The winner of the auction gets the ad spot and has their ad shown. All this is of course fully automated and over in just a few milliseconds.
What this means is, advertisers have full control over what ads you get. Ad space goes to the highest bidder. If you have money, you can spam a specific demographic to death with your ads. Google does not in anyway try to protect the quality of life of its users.
Google’s system is both amazing and disappointing at the same time. It’s an amazingly efficient way to maximize the value of ad space but disappointing in the Google doesn’t do any kind of advance user behavior modeling to see what ads the user would be most receptive to (i.e. would not frustrate the user, high probability of engagement with what’s advertised, …) instead they leave it to the “free market” (i.e. the advertisers) to figure that out.
I'm actually relatively chilled about ads. I like to see who is advertising what from a macro POV but one thing online was super bad at was spamming ads at you. The most egregious was Crunchyroll back in the day where you might see the same ad back to back 3 times in a row for every ep you watched.
Maybe the fix is actually to adjust and make the ad lower energy and more bland to target the subliminal more, assuming the online ad networks don't sort themselves out
That's why when you see an advertisement and recognize it you should make a deliberate effort to remember why you dislike the brand. If the advertiser gets to wish for awareness, I'm entitled to be the monkey's paw.
I don't agree. I watch YouTube tech, math, and science content every day and that's not my experience.
There are a small set of products that seem to be everywhere for a while, occupying a minority of sponsor segments. But in most sponsor segments I see one-off products that I'll never see again on any channel.
On the rare occasions where they show something that looks really useful to me, I'd have to take a note because it's so unlikely to be a product I will encounter again.
I don't take those notes, so I've seen a lot of great-looking products that I'll never buy due to forgetting they exist by the time they would be useful to me. When I need something I tend to browse for what's available and/or look at reviews with a skeptical eye, as I'm sure many people do.
So the sponsor segments aren't that effective for me. But I wouldn't call them repetitive, except for a few products that come up a lot.
Really? They will die? Are you suggesting that long form video didn’t exist before YouTube sponsors?
Innovation requires disruption, which requires competition, which YouTube has none of. If you want long form video content to survive in the medium to long term it needs to be possible to make a living in a diversity of ways and not be dependent on just one provider. So in that sense supporting the existing system only serves to reinforce the failure of long form content, as eventually a system without substantial competition will move to reduce cost and eventually focus only on the more profitable short form content (which is what’s happening).
The current war between YouTube and its users wouldn’t be possible if there were any viable alternatives at all.
I would think if you really cared about long form creators you’d support platforms that paid properly and didn’t keep 45% of their revenues. Even Apple only keeps 30% and they get deeply criticized, but whenever YouTube comes up people come out defend them. And all of this happens before subscription revenue, and it doesn’t include any of the other revenue Google takes off the top like landing page ads, sponsored promotion, etc.
Long form is in danger because of YouTube’s shift towards short form video. We should be pushing for competitors and not allowing them this insanely dominant position to an entire Internet content type.
Despite the name, it actually blocks a lot more than just sponsors. It can be set to automatically skip intros, outros, recaps, like and subscribe reminders, non-music sections of music videos, and other "fluff".
It significantly boosts the signal to noise ratio, and makes YouTube a much better experience.
That sounds very useful on the non-ad improvements, and oddly enough I might try it for these areas. The sponsor mentions don't really bother me and I just skip them if they're not relevant. Sometimes it's kind of neat to see one and think "Oh, this creator got sponsored by <big deal tech product>, that's cool, get paid!", or if they're sponsored by bs snake oil companies, then I may discount the creator's input a great deal on account of them not having any discernment.
It's a small data point about the content, so it can sometimes be helpful if I'm trying to decide who to pick amongst forty different 2hr lectures on the same thing.
So what are we paying premium for if the creator pushes their own ads? Anyhow, when I was watching TV year's ago, I hardly ever stayed on a channel during the ads break. I won't sacrifice my time being sold on mostly rubbish which I wouldn't buy anyway (vpn, brilliant etc.)
>I guess if many people block sponsor content, this kind of vids will die.
Then so be it. I miss when people uploaded videos for the sake of it, not to make money by way of exploiting the users' cognitive vulnerabilities. I remember the days when I could search for a video on how to replace my dirt bike's carburetor and it was less than two minutes, didn't include any ads, and was straight to the point, all first person POV; you wouldn't even see the guy's face. Nobody was trying to get rich off it. It was all about sharing it with other people.
> In those videos where some sponsors mentioned which took only one or two minutes. Seems perfectly OK for me to support the creators.
There is no good reason to force ads on anyone. I dont care if the creator needs to make a living out of youtube. Thats their problem and they should use stuff like patreon instead.
I don't care to sit through sponsor reads, nothing more to it than that. When I'm viewing on a client that doesn't support sponsorblock, I'll manually seek to the end of the segment. Supporting the creator is great; I pay for YouTube Premium, though thanks to uBlock Origin I wouldn't see the add if even if I stopped paying. To a couple creators, I send a regular donation. If I could spend another $10/mo to make up for any revenue my sponsorblock usage loses other creators, I'd do that, but I'm less enthusiastic about regularly listening to sales pitches for the same products over and over again.
Also: I'm not sure how common it is for YouTube sponsorship contracts to have payment contingent on the view count for the section of the video with the sponsored segment, and I'm not sure if the way sponsorblock skips such segments is visible to YouTube's analytics. With at least some of the most prolific sponsors of creators I watch (Audible, Brilliant, etc) the payout is based on how many viewers sign up for a trial through the affiliate link. And YouTube has no incentive to make it easy for creators to share their detailed analytics with third-party sponsors, since independent sponsorships cut YouTube out of the deal. YouTube would prefer creators replace their independent sponsor reads with mid-roll ads.
Sponsorblock can also skip theme songs, recaps, and other parts of content you may not want. I also enjoy being able to show my children certain content from regular YouTube without having them subjected to the ads or me scrolling around.
I have it configured to not skip ads on a few creators who:
1- Makes good, useful content that I watch often.
2- Doesn't abuse sponsorship sections. Sponsor segment at the beginning of a video? Auto-skip. Half the video is about the sponsor? Auto-skip. Constantly gets sponsorship from spam/fraudy/irrelevant companies? Auto-skip.
For all the channels that doesn't fall into these categories: tough luck.
Besides skipping sponsor segments, it has many other useful features such as marking/skipping intros and outros, filler/jokes, and marking the timestamp of the video highlight which is useful if you want to skip 20 minutes of filler and jump to the part the thumbnail promises.
1. The computer doesn't know whether you skipped the ad, and won't feel bad when you do.
2. The computer does track whether you watch the ad segment, and that information makes it back to the advertiser. Personally, I wouldn't want to support "creators" spying on me in this way.
In either case, the creator has no costs for you watching, and youtube has lower costs if you skip the sponsored segment. If you choose not to watch the video in the first place, it can only hurt their sponsorship.
> In either case, the creator has no costs for you watching, and youtube has lower costs if you skip the sponsored segment.
I'm pretty sure the youtuber gets money from google for views even if you don't view their sponsored content section (if someone knows better please let me know) and Google makes money by collecting data on what you watch, how often, when, using what device, from what IP address, etc.
Pretty much yeah. Just remember back to the first few years of youtube. Nobody was making any money from that but they were still doing it out of passion/hobby.
I would be happy to see a serious study about this. What you call piracy has been the norm for centuries and millenia for spreading culture and reinterpreting music/shows produced by other people.
In the vast majority of the world (including in the global north), the budget you have for culture is low (if any) and when you have people with a computer, copying stuff is very common. For example El Paquete in Cuba was well documented, but even growing up in France i remember so many examples of just sharing with friends (before the Internet but still).
Even for the newer generations, Youtube & Spotify started as pirate services hosting a myriad of copyrighted content. I don't know about Spotify, but i still see people watching whole movies/shows pirated on Youtube rather often when going to places with shared computers.
Sharing is the norm. Restricting sharing is delusional desire for control. Still, it's important that people making art & science make a living, although it's not just them who need to make a living in this crazy world and we'd be all better off with UBI or abolition of private property (one can dream). So you may find it interesting that HADOPI, the law that criminalized non-profit file-sharing in France actually ordered a study on piracy and media consumption back in the early 2010s, and their own study acknowledged that there was no economic loss from piracy (as people don't reduce their budget due to pirating) and the bigger pirates were also the bigger buyers.
I dare you to find a single person who "does not pirate" in any sense of the world and actively respects copyright laws. If only, someone who doesn't sing "happy birthday" song because that's actually copyright infringement. Or doesn't watch music videos on Youtube because they might be pirated. I bet that person doesn't exist, or at least that they are not the "vast majority".
this is a misleading reply because you ignore the speed and scale at which the internet allows sharing to happen. In the past, the speed of sharing was limited by communication at the time, either word of mouth, the speed of printing books etc.
If what you describe truly was the norm, then creating any sort of content for any reason would generate negative returns. This was and is rarely the case. I do not see it as unfair for content creators to be paid and to demand that you consume their content on their terms, within reason.
> If what you describe truly was the norm, then creating any sort of content for any reason would generate negative returns.
Piracy doesn't always hurt creators, and often it helps them make money. The people who pirate the most, also spend the most money on the things they pirate (https://torrentfreak.com/pirates-are-valuable-customers-not-...). Just because something is pirated that does not mean there was a loss of income for the creator. I've pirated things and enjoyed them enough that I purchased them later, and I've purchased physical copies of things and later pirated digital copies. I've also pirated things I'd never have purchased at all which means there was never any chance of any of my money going to the creator.
The vast majority of people today pirate all the time. Posting a meme that contains a copyrighted character or image, or listening to a song on youtube from anything other than an official channel, sharing a webcomic over social media, creating a GIF from a movie or TV show, streaming a video game playthrough, and downloading a youtube video to edit into a reaction video are all technically violations of copyright law. Copyright law is so draconian that what most people consider totally normal activities online are violations.
> I do not see it as unfair for content creators to be paid and to demand that you consume their content on their terms, within reason.
I agree that creators have a right for a chance at payment for their work. I disagree that I have no right to choose how to consume that content. Most of the restrictions on how media is intended to be consumed comes from the corporations who own the copyright and not the creators themselves.
When creators make it known that they want their content consumed in a certain way I'll take it into consideration. Musicians who ask that you only ever listen to their albums in their entirety and never listen to a single track I ignore. When Dave Chappelle asked fans to not watch Chappelle's Show I agreed and didn't.
> this is a misleading reply because you ignore the speed and scale at which the internet allows sharing to happen.
You are misleading because i explicitly talked about the Internet and widespread file-sharing in my comment. Most people would love to pay a fair price for high-quality DRM-free content and that's why for a while Spotify and Netflix won. Now that Netflix raises prices and doesn't license all the interesting shows anymore, people are going back to piracy because they can't afford 5 10$/month subscription for every streaming service out there.
Historically in France, a "global license" was proposed instead of HADOPI. It was like those streaming services, but run as a public service to ensure artists don't get scammed by corporations. Guess who opposed that proposal? Those same corporations, who keep exploiting the artists and milking the consumers.
I've been pirating all along. I still buy a lot of stuff, eg. CDs at concerts. Make it convenient and ethical for me to pay within what i can afford and i will. In the meantime, i'll keep pirating because i can't spend more on culture than i spend on food, often for content of dubious quality.
> Luckily these people are the minority or there would be no content to begin with
Most authors write books without making any money for years. They write because they enjoy writing. Not because they need it to make a living. So your statement is easily invalidated by reality
They don't need to make a living. They're already making a living by doing some other job, probably a boring job. They're writing because they enjoy writing, and there might be a financial payoff, but it's certainly not something they're banking on. It's just like aspiring actors; they work as restaurant servers to make a living, hoping to become a big star. It's not really a good career move; if you want a low-risk high-paycheck career, you do something unglamorous and boring, like writing software, or some other office job that requires a college degree.
May I then suggest that all software developers also should forego their paychecks and work for free, since they love programming and should do it in their spare time while having another day job? For example in a restaurant.
Total nonsense. Before all this advertising nonsense, the web used to be literally full of people who had enough intrinsic motivation to create without compensation. People used to literally pay to have their own website in order to get their ideas out there.
Open source is literally proof of this. I make software in my free time simply because I enjoy it. I publish it out there in a variety of licenses with zero expectations. I got a GitHub Sponsors profile with zero sponsors and I'm not even mad about it.
When your job depends on it you tend to work really hard at believing that advertising is necessary and actually it's good, actually actually relevant ads are helpful! After all, if it wasn't then what am I doing with my life?
In the case of advertisers that'd be mostly lying and manipulating people while hurting them by enabling a dangerous system of surveillance that threatens themselves and their families along with the rest of us. If I were an advertiser I'd probably want to lie to myself too.
>People used to literally pay to have their own website in order to get their ideas out there.
Somewhat; at first, this was the case, though I'd say many of them were simply using their university's computer resources. Later on, banner ads happened and then we had sites like Tripod, where people could build their own simple website and not pay anything for it. Somehow, these sites did just fine (for a while) by hosting banner ads. These days, somehow it supposedly costs a small fortune to run a simple website even though computers are FAR more powerful than they were in 1999 and computer hardware generally costs much less.
In most cases sponsored content has the same problem as traditional ads but because it is coming directly from someone people see as more reliable viewers might fall for it quicker. With the added disadvantage of those ads having no real regulation and opaque quality checks, if any by the creator.
One example that comes to mind is how a lot of financial creators pushed crypto products.
I really don't care about sponsor block (I mean I don't mind these parts of the videos), but adblock on YouTube is absolutely essential. And these apps usually when they have adblocl this includes sponsor block.
