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SponsorBlock – skip sponsor segments on YouTube

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221–230 of 412 posts

Re: SponsorBlock – skip sponsor segments on YouTube

#221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wasn’t gonna buy the thing being advertised to me, so why not save us all some bandwidth and time? Or if you think that I was gonna buy it but I didn’t know it, then you’re admitting you want to manipulate me, which only strengthens my argument for my right to block it. Advertising is creating consensus without consent. It’s information warefare, propaganda, psychological manipulation… whatever you want to call it,…

Somebody is buying though. Advertising absolutely works.

It works on an easily manipulated minority, which means everyone else has to suffer, right.

Re: SponsorBlock – skip sponsor segments on YouTube

#222
post #8

The creator of this extension also makes DeArrow [1]. It replaces the clickbait thumbnails and titles with less annoying ones. I highly recommend it. [1] https://dearrow.ajay.app/

I found this extension significantly less useful than SponsorBlock. The "less clickbait" titles are all invariably written in a worse fashion and are overtly wordy and annoying. The non-clickbait thumbnails looked worse and were mostly random screencaps of unrelated portions of the video because most people didn't bother picking a proper screenshot. My barometer for this was Tom Scott's channel which generally has titles that are mostly all fine yet a lot of them were "rewritten" for no reason that I could discern

SponsorBlock is significantly more useful but you still see the same kind of annoying people there too. There's a channel called "11foot8" that puts out videos of the local 11'8" (+ 8" after they raised it semi-recently) where trucks disobey the height warning and get destroyed. Most of the videos are around 1 minute long yet there are people picking "highlight" moments in SponsorBlock to skip to the relevant portion. These are mostly videos about a minute long so it baffles me the kind of people whose attention span is that short to want to skip 10 whole seconds to get to the "action". These are the kind of annoying people that rule DeArrow. I didn't want to deal with that anymore

Re: SponsorBlock – skip sponsor segments on YouTube

#223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Aren’t you, as a YouTuber, in the same position as many creators that do the same on other mediums? There are people out there who write amazing blog posts but now the traditional advertising world is basically dead and people have to figure out other ways to make it work. Or they have to accept that what they do is not a full time job but rather a hobby and they need to find other ways to earn a living. Writing is n…

>Writing is no longer viable for many. I don’t see why YouTube should be this special case. >Writing is no longer viable for many. I don’t see why YouTube should be this special case. because Youtube is owned by a trillion dollar corporation but mostly powered by content creators. Substack isn't. It's really that simple. most wringing isn't viable because there's no money in it, literally. There still is money in vid…

I’m not asking why it is. I’m asking why it should be.

Re: SponsorBlock – skip sponsor segments on YouTube

#224
post #164

Was looking for this exactly. I understand that you have to make money somehow if you want to dedicate yourself to YouTube, but I always found sponsor segments to be worse than native advertising, and just plain gross to watch.

> worse than native advertising Hard disagree. Sponsored segments are better in a few ways: * They're a return to the days where ads didn't need to be targeted at people but instead were targeted at content. "If you're watching this educational video you might like Brilliant" is a heck of a lot less intrusive than "I noticed you were searching for shoes the other day, so here's a Nike ad". * The creator has to own it…

I presume native advertising on youtube has more strict vetting (i.e. needs to comply with advertising regulations unlikely to be out and out scam etc) then creator sponsored content.

Some sponsored content seems like borderline scams to me I see a lot of creators shilling for stuff like "not a bank" banking apps etc.

Re: SponsorBlock – skip sponsor segments on YouTube

#225
post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A more likely future is less video You mean I could get a f...ing text again about things, which I could just read at my own speed, skip back and forth by just moving my eyes, use the search function, skip pieces of it, etc etc, in just two minutes instead of ten minutes watching a video clip for the most trivial statements? What a baaad world that would be...

The videos aren't going to be replaced with text, they're going to be replaced with nothing. Text died because it is too hard to get paid for, banner ads paid peanuts to begin with and are now trivial to block. Video ads paid really well which is why people started making video content, if video ads also die, then there is simply going to be no content.

There's going to be less content, which will likely still be more than enough content.

Re: SponsorBlock – skip sponsor segments on YouTube

#226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As I understand it YouTube Premium viewers result in significantly more revenue than ad based viewers do [1] but represent a tiny fraction of viewers [2] and can't be targeted separately. I.e. if most people were willing to pay in just one way, even if that were just YouTube Premium, then there wouldn't be such a strong incentive for channels to rely on sponsored segments but most people prefer not paying anything an…

I would buy premium in a heartbeat if it actually filtered out all ads and sponsored content. Not just the segment, the entire video should be cut if its creation was influenced by “impressions” or what ever filler content is measured in. The current deal gives me no value, it just distributes more money to promote quantity crap over quality. Someone needs to figures out how to take my money and distribute them to pe…

Yeah I have premium and TBH expect creators over XYZ size to spend a few minutes to timestamp/chapter their sponsorships and youtube to enable autoskipping. Or have youtube crawl through transcripts and figure it out.

The problem is the people willing to pay for premium likely much more valuable customers for sponsorships to target.

Re: SponsorBlock – skip sponsor segments on YouTube

#228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I’m sort of amazed this has to be explicitly stated: Because most YouTube creators (even the hobbyists) are at least partially motivated by money, and if you take away all the money they will likely make less content or stop altogether. I understand that it’s fun to get things for free, but that’s usually not sustainable.

Less content frequently better content. Hobby as content job may just not be sustainable in another form. Tons of hobbyist creators jumped on the full time content mill job and burn out. Maybe in another world they have their hobby on the side and put out 1/10th content slowly, without the incentive to make filler to keep bills paid. TBH sometimes when work and passion mix, passion takes a back seat. It would be different if youtube algo doesn't incentivize this type of content milling, but it does.

Re: SponsorBlock – skip sponsor segments on YouTube

#229
I don't mind when youtubers have their own in-video ads tbh. Yes, a lot of them are often advertising really stupid shit (because it prolly gives the most money), but at least on most videos it doesn't break the flow as heavy as the normal youtube ads and it ain't as annoying. So I'd give them these few seconds of brainwashing me to deliver content that I like. That's fine.

I just stopped viewing people that use too many ads. Simple as that

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