17 ms·
An open-source browser extension to auto-skip sponsored segments on YouTube
- martin_a 7y agoI think this is helpful and will give it a try. Greedy content producers will not stop including sponsors in their videos. "This video could not have been made without $sponsor..." Yeah, yeah, what a BS: Lots (like several 100k) of subscribers, Patreons, ads on the videos, affiliate links in the description and sometimes sponsored hardware with a well visible brand logo and you still come around and tell me you couldn't make ends meet without even more sponsorships? Especially with all the more-or-less shady VPN providers, "JLCPCB" on electronics videos or Skillshare on the rest of the videos, YouTube feels more and more like linear television.
- mathw 7y agoAnd for all the channels which really are relying on that revenue? Are you paying for YouTube Premium? Are you signing up to support the creator on Patreon? Are you paying channel memberships? What's left to fund your favourite content when none of this happens?
- asaddhamani 7y agoDoes some part of my YouTube premium membership fee go to the content creators?
- Brozilean 7y agoI remember seeing something about a very low percentage of viewers being YouTube premium, but accounting for something like 40+% of revenue.
- Mirioron 7y agoThat depends on how much ads pay, how many users watch ads/use adblock, how much they watch etc. Videos that get few ads or low-priced ads might indeed have the membership be a large portion of the revenue. Generally it's more in the 10-20% range though.
- krilly 7y agoAFAIK I know demonetized videos (which are 'unsuitable' for YouTube ads) generate zero revenue, so I think that's a no. It would go to creators who create exclusive series for YouTube premium, though.
- Mirioron 7y agoYes. I believe the split is the same as with ad revenue - 55% to the content creator and 45% to YouTube.
- ajayyy 7y agoAlmost. They say "a majority" but don't specify the exact amount. So, over 50%.
- Mirioron 7y agoThe standard split YouTube does with their creators is 55% to the creator and 45% to YouTube. I believe they would use the same split for YouTube membership revenue.
- ajayyy 7y agoYea, but for Premium it is different. At least, back when it was called YouTube red, they just promised a majority.
- doctoboggan 7y agoYes. In my YouTube studio analytics I can see the percentage of revenue that comes from YouTube premium subscribers.
- Nextgrid 7y ago> Are you paying for YouTube Premium? This will help Google stalk you even more (since you're now providing confirmed personal details like billing address and card details) so I would not recommend anyone doing so. Go with Patreon if you want to support creators.
- dageshi 7y agoThe entitlement of people who think they should get everyone else's time and effort for free is quite astonishing. "I have deigned to click on your video, you may entertain me! Expect nothing in return! It is my right!"
- Wordball 7y agoThis but unironically
- michaelmrose 7y agoIf you put out content that requires no payment you may not get paid.
- dageshi 7y agoIt does require payment though, via ads/google red/paid promo's/patreon, you're just choosing to ignore it because it suits you?
- leppr 7y agoA paywall is a way to signal that you require payment. Some people do that with Patreon and unlisted YouTube videos. There's no arguments to force unwilling viewers to watch ads. The kind of people that install this extension are also presumably the kind of people that never follow ads, so allowing them to skip those ad segments doesnt result in a loss for advertisers. That they end up watching ads too is a simple effect of the ad market's inefficiencies. The number of convertions from sponsored segments shouldn't move much from this extension, so the payout for video creators should also remain constant. Its a win/neutral situation for everyone.
- michaelmrose 7y agoRequiring payment would be a pay wall popping up requesting the user to submit payment either for that particular content or the privilege of viewing a suite of content before viewing. Then all the people pirating your content via torrents or more likely watching something else would know what social convention they were flouting or submitting to. Only on tech or creator related discussions are people even aware of the absurd idea that there is an obligation to watch ads or a requirement to subordinate your property, your computer that is, to some yahoo on youtube in order that he can earn money. Where no law is present and enforceable we cannot rely on social conventions we wish existed. Just because you could make more money if people followed such a convention doesn't create any sort of obligation on their part nor in any meaningful way do terms and conditions bind them beyond being able to in theory take away an account they as consumers not creators don't care much about.
- jraph 7y agoThis had to happen, right? It reminds me of Adblock Radio [1, 2], which blocks ads on radios using several techniques (it has nothing to do with the Adblock browser extension). Maybe they could share some knowledge, especially on things based on sound analysis? Seems hard to do for sponsored content though (nobody would be able to talk about $PICK_A_POPULAR_VPN on YouTube anymore, ah ah). [1] https://www.adblockradio.com/ https://www.adblockradio.com/ [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21057684 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21057684
- Nextgrid 7y agoWell this wouldn’t happen if creators were more picky with their sponsors and there was more variety. As it stands, there’s only a few legitimate sponsors (so you would’ve already heard of them from other videos) and the rest is dubious garbage like VPNs and pay-to-win mobile games).
- ajayyy 7y agoExactly. I made this only because I couldn't stand how deceptive many modern sponsors are. If that didn't happen, I wouldn't have wasted time making this. - sponsorblock dev
- DonCopal 7y agoThe problem is you'd need to download the audio from YouTube first to analyse it. Or even the video if it would somehow detect it from image. Not only is this slow, but also against the terms of service. With a podcast you already have the audio.
- wandererx2a 7y agoI like the idea of crowdsourced effort to build useful datasets. Nevertheless, with growing popularity, I can imagine a whole lot of potential abuse of the voting API, e.g: blacklisting competitors channels.
- ajayyy 7y agoYea, I'm scared of it too now. I never expected growth this fast.
- Nextgrid 7y agoFinally something to deal with the deluge of questionable VPN providers using fear-mongering to sell their stuff. I'd love to use this if there was a Safari version.
- ajayyy 7y agoI'd love is someone ported it to be a user script. It is definitely possible. - sponsorblock dev
- rinchik 7y agoIs this extension even relevant? I haven't ever seen those on youtube. uBlock + pihole do the job. Smart TV, on the other hand, manages to bypass my pihole (as if adds were burned into the vid), that's where I need to figure something out.
- wmf 7y agoThis isn't about the ads that are inserted by YouTube. This is trying to block parts of the main video that are ads.
- rinchik 7y ago"parts of the main video that are ads" - well, i'm not sure what those are. Is it something that happens when they record a program from a TV and then upload that video to youtube without removing TV ads?
- notatoad 7y agoit's the sort of thing that happens at 4:10 in this video: https://youtu.be/jxICCEoiq74?t=240 https://youtu.be/jxICCEoiq74?t=240
- archie2 7y agoSome YouTubers do ad reads during their videos from sponsors.
- hombre_fatal 7y agoImagine a Youtube video where the host takes a break to read off an advertisement and that you'll get a 10% discount if you use their code during the checkout process. And then they resume with their content. They often will pre-record these segments with a consistent "now with a quick word about our sponsors" jingle which can be statically detected and removed from the video.
- Mirioron 7y agoThey are sponsor segments like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a8apEJ5Zt2s&t=33s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a8apEJ5Zt2s&t=33s
- throwGuardian 7y agoSo much tech targeting content creation revenue generation!! Why? Can't we just let those generating free content do their thing without going after their livelihood?
- ajna91 7y agoIt's an unstable equilibrium, not win-win but win-lose. It's only win-win if you think being subjected to tracking, ads, etc costs you nothing. Many people would disagree.
- Mirioron 7y agoThese are sponsor segments that are part of the video. There is no tracking involved that isn't also part of the video, because it's part of the video itself. This is not about privacy, but rather about being annoyed by ads.
- meowface 7y agoThat is why I use ad blockers, though. I don't care about the tracking, generally; I care about seeing ads. This is why most people use them. There's nothing wrong with not wanting to see ads.
- throwGuardian 7y agoHow are the ads narrated within the video tracking you?
- CGamesPlay 7y ago> It's only win-win if you think being subjected to tracking, ads, etc costs you nothing. No: only if it costs you less than the value of the content you're receiving. So yeah, it's win-lose: you get the content (which you consider valuable enough to spend your time on) and the content creators lose their revenue.
- FBISurveillance 7y agoI'm a happy uBlock Origin user but this one just seems unfair to content creators.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- tartoran 7y agoI wonder who could tell if the sponsored content was seen or not seen by any viewers... As far as I can tell the content creator gets their share once they reference the sponsor segment.
- Mirioron 7y agoI don't know whether sponsors do this, but creators themselves can see a breakdown of viewership as a percentage at different parts of the video. If enough people skipped it then it would show up.
- crazygringo 7y agoWhy? There's zero way for sponsors to know whether the sponsorship segment was skipped over or not, I assume? They'll continue paying the same, no?
- StavrosK 7y agoThere is a way to for sponsors to tell whether the segment was skipped or not, it's what they're all using: Counting how many purchases they got from a specific ad.
- wongarsu 7y agoIf this gains wide adoption it just becomes a part of the decision for sponsorship agreements. I can guesstimate if the viewers from a specific youtuber use this tool by how quickly data appears after a new video. If I estimate that 20% of viewers skip the sponsorship segment then the sponsorship is worth at most 80% of full price.
- 7y ago
- crazygringo 7y agoAh ha -- this isn't to skip ads, it's to crowdsource the time segments in YouTube videos where sponsored content is part of the video itself, to skip the segment itself. I love it technically... but sadly I have hard time believing it will ever work in practice, though maybe I'm just a cynic. :( Simply because it needs a dedicated base of people always keeping up with all the videos coming out each day who actually will go to the work of rewinding, tagging, fast-forwarding, tagging again, continuing when all they really want to do is just sit back watching a video. Crowdsourcing for things like adblockers or Wikipedia work because the content changes slowly and is evergreen. But popular YouTube videos rotate very quickly and then sink into a long tail. I'd love to be proven wrong, however. :) (One way of possibly increasing adoption, however: I'd love if the extension automatically ended videos when they jump into the "subscribe now!" trailer at the end, especially for talk show segments, and immediately jumped to the next video in the playlist if there is one. They're always the same length for each show, so very easy to keep up-to-date.)
- faissaloo 7y agoI've been using it and it's made my YouTube experience much better.
- tetris11 7y agoSame. I have been using it for a few months now, both as a user and a contributor (of times). It has not let me down once, and genuinely makes YouTube tolerable again
- ALittleLight 7y agoPerhaps this is just phase one, to build a dataset out of YouTube videos and sponsored promotions. Phase two could be training a classifier on the dataset. Then, the classifier watches a few minutes ahead of the user, skipping any in-content ads.
- gpm 7y agoIt would have to be quite the classifier, since the advertisers would be able to test against it and try to break it. False positives would heavily impact usability.
- StavrosK 7y agoI thought this is to skip ads, but no, it is to skip sponsored content inside the video file. I loaded a Veritasium video to check (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fDek6cYijxI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fDek6cYijxI), the video started playing, I looked at the bar and saw no yellow markers, and figured the extension is useless for me. Then I clicked "unskip" and realized it had already skipped over the Veritasium sponsored content straight to the start of the video. Magical.
- swinglock 7y agoWhat about privacy? Will this extension send a query to a server, identifying each video opened on YouTube?
- faissaloo 7y agoI thinks so but the database is downloadable so you could always send in a patch.
- ajayyy 7y agoYea, you could self host the server. But I want to work on easier ways soon. - SponsorBlock Developer
- phiresky 7y agoCurrently yes, though there's discussion of adding k-anonymity: hashing the video id and querying by a prefix of the hash short enough so each request will return on average data for maybe ~16 videos https://github.com/ajayyy/SponsorBlockServer/issues/25 https://github.com/ajayyy/SponsorBlockServer/issues/25
- al_chemist 7y agoI really hate this kind of nit-picking. You're afraid to give this information to student who said it's not stored, and yet you don't mind to give the same information to the biggest marketing machine who not only uses it, but also sells it.
- ar-nelson 7y agoI see a lot of people saying this is unfair to content creators. I understand that sentiment when it comes to blocking normal ads, since revenue is based on ad views; that's why I don't run AdBlock on YouTube. But when it comes to in-video sponsored sections, can the sponsors actually tell whether viewers watched that particular segment of the video? If not, this seems like the most ethical kind of adblock: creators still get paid, but you don't have to watch the (usually scammy) ads.
- meowface 7y agoThe problem is eventually this or something like this will probably catch on, and then sponsors will pressure YouTube into creating a system to provide metrics on who watches certain parts of videos. It doesn't sound that hard to do on a technical level, and I believe this is already available to creators in some way. Way less work than automagically detecting copyrighted audio and video, which they already do with Content ID.
- ajayyy 7y agoThis already exists. You can see realtime (per second of the video) engagement statistics. It shows drops in sponsored sections normally and it pickup back up right after.
- meowface 7y agoRight, but can sponsors themselves access this data via an API or something, currently? Asking the creator to email engagement metrics screenshots every week isn't too practical.
- danShumway 7y agoWhat is the practical difference between blocking an ad, manually skipping an ad, and watching an ad and then ignoring the product? In all three cases you're mostly worth the same to the creator: zero. This is especially true in worlds like podcasting, where promo codes are the primary tracking metrics to find out how successful the ad campaign has been. Advertising isn't magic. Your creator is getting paid because they are encouraging users to either spend more or to direct their spending at a specific product (regardless of that product's actual value). I don't see how you're supporting a creator just by listening to ads. The people who buy the products are supporting a creator, and they're subsidizing you. Even to an advertiser, ultimately, your ears aren't valuable. Your money is valuable. A conversion is valuable. There's this idea that if we all tolerate certain kinds of advertising, creators will get paid and nobody will have to lose -- but it just doesn't click with me, no matter how much I think about it. The money isn't free, it has to come from somewhere. Somebody has to have their spending habits manipulated against their will for this to work. The propaganda has to be effective for some people, or they wouldn't pay this much money to distribute propaganda. And it's very difficult for me to imagine a scenario where introducing multiple massive middlepeople into that transaction will make the transaction ultimately end up costing us less money than if we just payed creators directly for their content. We are paying for ads; or at least more vulnerable people are paying on our behalf. I strongly suspect we would collectively pay less as a society if we just gave creators money.
- bigmit37 7y agoThis seems excessive if it’s going to hurt content creators. Content creation is not easy and some YouTubers need the sponsor money to continue creating work for the channel as ad money pays very little. Most channels I have visited tell you they are sponsored by so and so, which was making it easy to know which videos were sponsored and I’m assuming those are the ones this NN will pick up. Now the sponsors could potentially ask creators to become more creative and more deceptive. On the other hand something like this inevitable and I will check out the project.
- meowface 7y agoI like the channels that let me do this myself. The video ends, there's a clear transition (important), and then the spiel starts. I just turn it off. This is fine. The bad ones are the ones that dedicate the first 3 minutes to some horrible mobile game (JonTron, etc.), or do mid-video cuts (New Rockstars, etc.), or, by far worst of all, do a very smooth and clean transition into the ad before you even knew the video was over, so for the first seconds you don't even realize you're watching an ad (Kurzgesagt). I know creators need to get paid, so for all but the last, I don't mind them too much and just skip ahead (but will definitely be using this extension). Ads that are hard to distinguish from content are abominable, though.
- ajayyy 7y agoThis extension was built because of Kurzgesagt. I love them, but it really frustrates me that this happens. Wendover is 100x worse, but I stopped watching his channel all together for that very reason over a year ago.
- samstave 7y agoI recently switched to Brave Browser and been keeping everything on Lockdown. Added this. Brave has made my experience so much better in general - looking forward to seeing how this works for me.
- chippy 7y agoOne of my first memories as a child in the early 80s was a conversation in the school playing ground about VHS players that could automatically skip adverts. We thought the idea was so awesome