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SponsorBlock – skip sponsor segments on YouTube

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301–310 of 412 posts

Re: SponsorBlock – skip sponsor segments on YouTube

#301

I still don't understand a lot of youtube advertising. Like for me, if I'm being advertised something, I instinctively don't trust it, because they're having to pay people to say good things about it rather than people who have used it telling me it's a good thing. And there are still so many sponsorships from places like BetterHelp, which has been known to be a scam for a while now, and Raid Shadow Legends, which is…

This makes you an outlier - and HN is the kind of place where you will find many such outliers. The majority of people, however, are extremely responsive to advertising & marketing, or it would not exist. My business used to be ecommerce platform development and consultancy, and I ended up seeing a lot of how the sausage is made - advertising is a bigger spend than product for most successful retailers, and it’s all…

> The majority of people, however, are extremely responsive to advertising & marketing, or it would not exist.

This doesn't follow. Plenty of things are not effective for what they're claimed to do but still exist, have active communities of supporters, make lots of money for their practitioners, are a large part of popular culture, etc etc.

Re: SponsorBlock – skip sponsor segments on YouTube

#302
post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your content creators were always going to increase monetization strategies, whether you gave them the nod or not. That's the beauty of capitalism hard at work. I personally couldn't use YouTube without Sponsorblock as a matter of principle, I hate ads. Doesn't matter how many times you try to categorize and dress them up.

What's the alternative to ads? I pay for YouTube premium, and I just mute the sponsor segment ads in videos. I get good information and entertainment from those video creators, so I would like them to get paid to continue doing it.

Some alternatives include merchandise, sponsorships (Patreon etc), tipping, and organic engagement / sharing so that more people can find them and give them money.

Re: SponsorBlock – skip sponsor segments on YouTube

#303
post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From my ad industry insights, that's only partly true. What you mentioned last is called brand advertising IIRC, which is not conversion oriented, but aimed at exposing you to a brand (like, a car manufacturer) so that at some point _later_ in your life, you contribute to a decision to buy from them. Now, huge companies do run focus groups and such to ensure their brand advertising has the right (psychological) effec…

> From my ad industry insights, that's only partly true. What you mentioned last is called brand advertising IIRC, which is not conversion oriented, but aimed at exposing you to a brand (like, a car manufacturer) so that at some point _later_ in your life, you contribute to a decision to buy from them. Top of funnel advertising is definitely conversion oriented, just on a longer timescale.

Fair, conversions are the ultimate goal. What I meant by conversion-oriented (possibly not the correct term) is ads where you measure their success based on sales, signups etc, as opposed to focusing on the number of impressions (views).

Re: SponsorBlock – skip sponsor segments on YouTube

#306
post #299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The thing about nordVPN (and VPN services in general) is they always talk about how funneling all your traffic through them makes it more secure and it means that governments cant spy on you and whatever. But sending all your traffic through a single point of failure seems like a bad idea from a government protection view, and how is it any more secure than https? The only thing that I've seen it be good for is makin…

> how is it any more secure than https? Using a VPN doesn't expose the domain names you're viewing (via SNI) or the IP addresses you're connecting to to your ISP. It also (therefore) doesn't expose to the ISP the volume of traffic you're sending to a particular site, when you connect to it, or how long you stay there. Whether your ISP is part of the threat model you're interested in mitigating is up to you personally…

Instead it exposes them all to the VPN company instead. You've just moved the attack point to another company

Re: SponsorBlock – skip sponsor segments on YouTube

#307

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…

When content creator chooses and delivers ads (like the sponsored blocks on YouTube), as opposed to a network (like Google ads), it is actually worthwhile to me because 1) what they promote can be useful (since I subscribe to this channel in particular), 2) it is not fueled by a creepy shadow profile of me, 3) even if it is not useful, what they choose to promote (and how they do it) reveals something about them (scrupulousness, greed, creativity, what they think of me the viewer).

Re: SponsorBlock – skip sponsor segments on YouTube

#308
post #237
post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 grea…

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.

If you hand out free cupcakes and then people take them, you can’t really then complain about people taking the cupcakes without paying. The reason creators monetise their videos on YouTube instead of charging for them on Patreon is because they know people won’t pay for them. Why would they? There are mountains of other videos they can watch for free and if they aren’t inclined to pay, the videos probably aren’t worth paying for.

This is the free market at work. If you don’t make the videos for free, someone else will, unless they can’t because the production value is too high.

Re: SponsorBlock – skip sponsor segments on YouTube

#309
post #305

uBlock Origin, Consent-o-Matic to automatically decline cookies, SponsorBlock and Argentinian VPN for $2/month YouTube premium makes the internet usable again.

What is specific with Argentinian?

Some countries have way cheaper YouTube Premium prices, so you can just sign up in that country using a VPN. I think that these days Argentina might not be the cheapest anymore, though.

Re: SponsorBlock – skip sponsor segments on YouTube

#310

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…

When content creator chooses and delivers ads (like the sponsored blocks on YouTube), as opposed to a network (like Google ads), it is actually worthwhile to me because 1) what they promote can be useful (since I subscribe to this channel in particular), 2) it is not fueled by a creepy shadow profile of me, 3) even if it is not useful, what they choose to promote (and how they do it) reveals something about them (scr…

> what they choose to promote (and how they do it) reveals something about them

maybe the YTers you watch are different, but that's not the case for me at all. Barely anyone promotes things which relates to their channel in the videos i watch. Hello Fresh, Manscaped, Squarespace, RAID: Shadow Legends, World of Tanks are the sponsor segments i mostly see, none of them relate to the video which they're in.

honorable exception is Miniminuteman who sometimes sells handmade jewellery made by a different creator and the jewellery even relates to the content of the videos.

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