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SponsorBlock – skip sponsor segments on YouTube

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Re: SponsorBlock – skip sponsor segments on YouTube

#381

Post by carbotaniuman »

lupusreal wrote: post #337
cqqxo4zV46cp wrote: post #335

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The easiest people to advertise to are HN knowitalls that consider themselves infallible, completely logical beings. Advertising works on you. You’re just, at best, describing a scenario where you aren’t being advertised things that you currently find appealing. You’re currently on a social network that’s basically just YC’s advertising board.

That's a quippy response I've heard here before, but it doesn't check out. You, without any knowledge of my personal experience, are asserting that everything I know about my experience is wrong and I am deceiving myself by thinking I know anything about myself. But in truth, this is nothing more than your attempt to deceive me, plain and simple gas-lighting. > You’re currently on a social network that’s basically ju…

But you've heard of YC :P

Re: SponsorBlock – skip sponsor segments on YouTube

#382

Post by owjofwjeofm »

sidewndr46 wrote: post #339
dkarras wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

you're not the target. advertisements work. the people managing ads are very meticulous about their spend vs. return. if you are seeing an ad of something for any noticeable duration of time, that means it works. by that I mean they get positive return from showing the world their ad. if it generates negative returns, it will be pulled pretty quickly. they are humans just like you and me, we don't like losing money.…

This is the same myths that everyone in advertising propagates. Such a belief purports that the effect of all advertising is measurable. It clearly is not. For example, someone sees your ad and decides your company is reprehensible. They were not a customer and they decide to never interact with your company. It's not possible to measure this. Anyone claiming it is holds what amounts to a religious belief. The "gener…

much of it is measurable, and the measurable part gets acted on. that's part of why they give the sponsorship a special link or code with a discount, if people sign up with that link they track it, and probably attribute the revenue/profit from that sign up to that advertising campaign. If more profit is generated from that link than it costs the company for the sponsorship (including the cost for the time of the employees working in marketing), the company continues that advertising campaign. it doesn't measure everything though yes, but is enough to seem likely to me that online advertising campaigns do work

also i would propose that you should spend $100 on advertising (including cost of time reaching out to people etc) to generate $100.10 in profit(not revenue) if the return comes fast enough. you can estimate the opportunity cost of spending that money by seeing what interest rate somebody would loan you money for, if that .10% ROI is more than the interest rate on the money, then it's worth doing, even though it's only $0.10. then if you do need to do something else with the money you can take out that loan. I guess it might be harder to calculate opportunity cost of your employees time since it might take a while to hire more employees, but you can estimate that based on their hourly salary. also hard to calculate opportunity cost of your brand reputation from doing more advertising. and yeah hard to calculate opportunity cost of your own time but you can just estimate a hourly rate and good enough. most of the math is clear though and companies go on that. (disclaimer: i am not an expert on any of this)

Re: SponsorBlock – skip sponsor segments on YouTube

#383

Post by owjofwjeofm »

joshvm wrote: post #150
PeterStuer wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let me state upfront I do understand the desire to make money from a channel, and much of the YT content I enjoy would not exist if that was not possible. But allow me to make a few hopefully nuanced remarks. First of all it is not just the VPNs. Briliants, RSLs etc. that annoy, it is all sponsor reads. Even those channels that try to be creative with it, there's only so many times you can be funny about it, and then…

I've mentioned this in the past but I mind sponsorship a lot less when it's highly relevant for the channel. For example a lot of engineering channels are sponsored by JLPCB who provided machining services or PCBs for the project video - that makes sense. Coffee influencers selling me NordVPN on a video about grinder particle size distribution does not.

but if the sponsorship is relevant it could be a conflict of interest for the editorial

Re: SponsorBlock – skip sponsor segments on YouTube

#384

Post by powersnail »

matsemann wrote: post #325
voidUpdate wrote: post #284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I go to buy a new car, I'll look at the brands I have experience with, like what my friends and family drive. If I can actually see what its like and have people I trust endorse it, I'm more likely to support it

And people subconsciously trust people they interact with often, like content creators whose videos you watch. Most people think they're above being influenced by ads, but they're not.

If my friend/family is paid to say good things about a brand, I also wouldn't trust their praise of said brand. I mean, I've had a family member sucked into a product selling pyramid scheme, so I have experienced exactly this scenario.

That is not to say that it doesn't work. The fact that the family member got into the pyramid scheme in the first place is proof that some people are susceptible to it. But also, none of us (the family) gave in to her advertisement, so obviously that's proof that a lot of people also aren't susceptible to it.

Re: SponsorBlock – skip sponsor segments on YouTube

#385

Post by shiroiushi »

autoexec wrote: post #367
nj5rq wrote: post #364

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Such a belief purports that the effect of all advertising is measurable. It clearly is not. For example, someone sees your ad and decides your company is reprehensible. They were not a customer and they decide to never interact with your company. It's not possible to measure this. Anyone claiming it is holds what amounts to a religious belief. What on earth? You obviously haven't worked on anything related to sales…

> Everybody thinks they are somehow "immune" to advertisements because they are "smarter than the rest", but the sale statistics are plain and simple. My guess is that those people are the most susceptible to their influence. Even when you know the tricks being employed to manipulate you, it doesn't always make the manipulation less effective. It's like an optical illusion where you know what you're seeing is wrong,…

>Ads are not about education or product awareness. Everyone already knows what Coca-Cola is, but they still spend 4 billion a year in advertising

This isn't true. Some ads really are about education and product awareness. If a new product comes to the market, how is anyone going to find out about it if there's zero advertising? Word-of-mouth can be useful at times, but that only works when someone's already bought and tried the thing, so how did they find out about it?

But yes, for many, many products and services (like Coca-Cola), everyone who hasn't been living under a rock already knows about it, so that advertising isn't strictly necessary. The point of Coca-Cola ads isn't to make you aware of it, it's to keep it in your brain, and to establish some kind of emotional connection in your brain when you hear or see Coca-Cola, to make you more likely to buy it when you have a choice. Basically, that type of advertising could accurately be called "brainwashing", or "psychological conditioning".

I think it's entire reasonable to be disgusted by the latter form of advertising, while not being completely opposed to the former. An ad that says "hey look! We just invented this handy new gadget that'll make it much easier to fix your bicycle when it breaks on a long ride! Click here to see how it works." isn't so objectionable to me, unlike most other ads.

The problem, however, is most ads are total BS, and there's really no practical way to filter out only the ones that 1) aren't brainwashing, 2) aren't for crap I don't need and would never need or want, 3) aren't for something that's really a scam, and 4) aren't plainly obnoxious and irritating, so I have to resort to using ad-blockers, which block all ads.

I really kinda miss the old Google search, where they used to put some small, text-only ads on the side, that were directly related to whatever you were searching for. Those were actually useful: search for "fix bike chain" and you might see an ad for a tool to fix bike chains, for instance. Sometimes you'd find something new and useful that way. And if you didn't, it was just some easily-ignored additional text on the side, not flashing colors, videos, pop-ups, or other attention-stealing BS.

Re: SponsorBlock – skip sponsor segments on YouTube

#386

Post by 4ggr0 »

strogonoff wrote: post #344
4ggr0 wrote: post #310

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 ex…

Among the channels or podcasts I follow that do sponsored blocks, some occasionally promote interesting services I haven’t heard about before, some (well, let’s be frank, there’s probably only one in the world that really hits it home: Map Men) can do even the most basic generic VPNs in a manner that can be equally or more entertaining than the rest of the video, making one literally wait to see the entire ad (even w…

true, if the sponsorship is done well, then i will gladly watch it, even if i don't care about the product.

i also love creators who timestamp their videos including the sponsorship block so that you can very easily skip it. or if they put a colorful border around the video while the sponsorship so that you can see when the ad ends when skimming through the video.

Re: SponsorBlock – skip sponsor segments on YouTube

#387

Post by shiroiushi »

voidUpdate wrote: post #324
zelphirkalt wrote: post #322

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But people are usually funnelling all their traffic through a single point of failure anyway: Their ISP. If your ISP is known to be bad, then it could be better to choose a good VPN service.

And you'd better hope its a good VPN service since now you're sending all your traffic through that single point instead

If you're doing something possibly illegal, you're probably far safer trusting your traffic to some company in a far-away country than your own local ISP. Think about living in China, for instance: the local ISP obviously can't be trusted, but some company in Norway isn't going to care that you're posting anti-CCP stuff on social networks, and is far beyond the reach of China's law enforcement. (Of course, if VPN usage itself is illegal in your country, that could cause you problems regardless.)

Re: SponsorBlock – skip sponsor segments on YouTube

#388

Post by saywhanow »

voidUpdate wrote: post #306
wzdd wrote: post #299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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

If I’m sailing the high seas and my ISP gets irritated, that’s a problem. If my VPN provider does, next.

Re: SponsorBlock – skip sponsor segments on YouTube

#389

Post by tivert »

dkarras wrote: post #245
voidUpdate wrote: post #240

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…

you're not the target. advertisements work. the people managing ads are very meticulous about their spend vs. return. if you are seeing an ad of something for any noticeable duration of time, that means it works. by that I mean they get positive return from showing the world their ad. if it generates negative returns, it will be pulled pretty quickly. they are humans just like you and me, we don't like losing money.…

> you're not the target. advertisements work. the people managing ads are very meticulous about their spend vs. return. if you are seeing an ad of something for any noticeable duration of time, that means it works.

This sounds like reasoning from an assumption of supreme competence (e.g. "there's no bubble, because if there was all those saavy Wall Street traders would have popped it by now;" or more commonly "if Apple does a thing, that must be the best thing, because Apple only does the best things."

Advertisement does work to a degree, in aggregate, but "if you see an ad then it must be an ad that works," is going too far.

Re: SponsorBlock – skip sponsor segments on YouTube

#390

Post by satvikpendem »

drdaeman wrote: post #377
richardreeze wrote: post #372

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's as simple as "if ads didn't work, YouTube, Facebook, Google, et al wouldn't exist"

If ads would have actually worked as preached by the industry, ad blockers wouldn't exist. ;) But it's Google's and Facebook's best interest to make people believe that they do, no matter the reality. What they actually do is increase sales by some measurable margin (not always great, but not zero either), while causing all sorts of negative effects (spam, scam, misinformation, all those "influencers" and "engagement…

Have you actually ran any Google or Facebook ads? I have, for my target market, and I made more money in return than I spent on ads, so obviously it works, by definition of these companies existing, independent of whatever the companies say themselves.
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