5 ms·

Show HN: Remove sponsored content in YouTube videos

61 points by rpastuszak 3y ago

voynich 3y ago
Cool. I've been using SponsorBlock for a while, but I feel like machine learning would rule in this space. Thanks for sharing this.
- rpastuszak 3y ago
  Thanks! SponsorBlock is definitely a better option here. There's a way of making this thing perform really, really smooth if you excuse the pun, but it requires some upfront cost, e.g. fine tune an LLM or use something like ULMFit. GPT is great for prototyping these sorts of things but I think we've become a bit narrow-focused recently due to the entire ChatGPT hype. Give the site/article a read for more context if you haven't!
Entinel 3y ago
> And, that being able to compensate someone for their work is such a complex process that it requires either a bunch of unknown middlemen, or an overengineered ponzi scheme. Being able to compensate someone for their work is a complex process. Most Youtubers and or media publications would not exist if they asked for a fee upfront.
- wussboy 3y ago
  Agreed. But would this be so bad? Would your life and mine be demonstrably worse with fewer Mr Beast videos? Whole generations have existed without YouTube videos. Perhaps we could exist as well? I’m not trying to be “get of my lawn”. I’m saying much of the content we have now could not exist and humanity would be no worse off.
  - Entinel 3y ago
    I'm going to flip this question around. Would we be worse off if fewer people were unable to start businesses out of Youtube channels? I'd think so. A lot of novel art and education has come out of realizing Youtube could be a full-time job. You jump to MrBeast as the junk food of Youtube but I can honestly say I have never seen a MrBeast video but I frequently look at things like FreeCodeCamp or even the more educational end of entertainment like Tom Scott or extensive product review channels like Project Farm. I'm glad they exist and I'd happily watch a sponsor spot for them.
- rpastuszak 3y ago
  100% agree with you but there are different levels of complexity and the one I'm talking about is truly ridiculous. Example: OpenRTB + VAST chain (standards used for targeted advertising) required to display an ad on the site involve dozens of parties the user has no knowledge about. In fact before an ad is displayed on the page, there's no way of knowing who and how will be involved in processing your data. The consent is implied and opt-out is enforced poorly to put it mildly. That's the complexity I'm talking about.
  - falcolas 3y ago
    Ironically enough, sponsored content quite cleanly omits all this complexity and lets content makers earn money.
    - rpastuszak 3y ago
      The complexity here is to have to: 1) write, 2) present, and 3) edit a video segment selling a product you probably wouldn't bother mentioning to people if you had other options. It's not technical. The alternative (for instance) would be an automatic system distributing the $$ I pay YT among the creators I watch. That's significantly less complexity for the end-user and the content creator.
      - Entinel 3y ago
        This still requires you to pay which brings us back to step 1. You are also implying that the content creator does not use the product and would not mention it otherwise which is not always true.
      - falcolas 3y ago
        > an automatic system distributing the $$ I pay YT So youtube red instead? They split the creator portion of your subscription between the creators you watch (assuming they've setup the ability to get paid by YT). Worth quite a bit more than ad views too, last I heard.
  - Entinel 3y ago
bjourne 3y ago
Cool! How does it work?
- rpastuszak 3y ago
  The page and the repo contain more context (give it a read, even if just for the buttery puns!). But, in short: It's quite crude. I extract captions from YT videos using a private YT API (web scraping was a huge pain ;/), then I massage them a little bit and use GPT to process the timestamps. A waaaay better approach is possible, but I'll need to see if it's worth pursuing first. PS. SponsorBlock has a huge timestamp DB so I'm considering reaching out to the authors to see if we can create an agent using their extension and aiding their crowdsourcing effort.
  - FloatArtifact 3y ago
    Awesome project! I'd love to see that
tjpnz 3y ago
It's unfortunate that many of the creators I love have had to resort to sponsored spots. In my experience the companies offering such deals are shady at best, with many engaging in what I would consider outright fraud.
- onion2k 3y ago
  Are you subscribed to their content? Do you pay them any other way? If not then how do you propose they pay for the team that makes the videos?
  - endisneigh 3y ago
    They don’t need to be paid. Information should be free. They create and we consume after all. If they stop creating we will move on to the next creator. /s
  - rpastuszak 3y ago
    The question I ask myself is: why is this so complicated? Advertising in any shape and form should not be the default here. We've just dug ourselves so deep in this mindset that it's hard to see another way. My approach is to ad block, sponsor block, and then have a budget I allocate to the creators that let me. 1 usd here and there can make a difference.
  - tjpnz 3y ago
    The creators I subscribe to aren't typically large enough to hire (much less have the need for) a team. I've given them money either through watching ads or in some cases through Patreon. I realise the first pays very little, and that the second takes an unreasonably large cut. But it shouldn't have to be the only way.
    - onion2k 3y ago
      The creators I subscribe to aren't typically large enough to hire (much less have the need for) a team. You'd be amazed who has a team behind them. Lots of seemingly tiny creators have an editor and a writing partner. Even small channels have people for camera work, sound, and graphics. Bigger channels have huge teams (for example, Linus Tech Tips has 15m subscribers and has more than 80 people working on it.)
jriggs 3y ago
Youtube knows what videos have promotional content. I'm seriously hoping for a search filter that natively removes them from results....plugins don't work for me since I watch primarily on a smart TV. For now I have resorted to blocking channels with promoted content, that's the great thing about yt, there's always another channel out there with similar content
- tjpnz 3y ago
  I'm seriously hoping that YT will start offering their content creators an equitable cut and that goes for Patreon too. While a technology solution might hide the problem it's certainly not going to solve it.
  - rpastuszak 3y ago
    That would be the dream. We just keep piling up the layers of complexity, build systems that put middlemen between creators and people enjoying their work. At this stage, I think the issue is more cultural than technical.
mschild 3y ago
I find clearly marked sponsored content on YouTube a non-issue. Yeah there are scummy or questionable sponsors but overall I get why they exist and in comparison to the alternative I think its an acceptable solution. There's people and companies on YouTube that produce outstanding content and I have no issue supporting them (YouTube Premium). I get that's not an option for a lot of people though so barring the invasive tracking for ads on YouTube, this is the next best thing.
- debian3 3y ago
  Could say the same about ads on a website, yet most people that I know use an ad blocker. For sponsor, I use SponsorBlock. I would say it's my second most favourite extension after Ublock Origin. I'm always amazed when it just skip over those section. For low quality video, it even start the video at the conclusion/recap, so you get all the info you need without spending too much time.
  - juujian 3y ago
    Interesting, I feel there is a difference, but I cannot quite put my finger on it. Ads on most websites feel more obtrusive. Maybe it's because on websites, there is a spatial separation, but in videos it is temporal? I can look at the video without the sponsored content constantly trying to grab my attention. It is just a certain window of time, where the content also does not continue, so it is relatively easy to tune out? Never mind the fact that I can skip over it if it is terrible sponsored content?
    - notahacker 3y ago
      Seems an odd way of looking at it. The "sponsored content" typically aims to monopolise your attention for 30 seconds of your life. The ad is typically just a box a few hundred pixels wide which either sits in a column I'm not actually reading or is easily scrolled past. "Ad blindness" is a thing It's like I don't get upset by crappy stock photos or navigation bars, but would give up on a website that took 30 seconds to load...
  - 3y ago
nwoli 3y ago
Appreciate the whimsical animations and hand drawn style :)
- rpastuszak 3y ago
  Thanks! The you might also enjoy my articles on sonnet.io as well as my page with doodles https://potato.horse https://potato.horse
JosephRedfern 3y ago
I personally wouldn't want to blanket-drop sponsored content from the videos I watch, but this seems really nicely put together, and a version which let me exclude "sketchier" sponsors but keep everything else (or perhaps lets me skip ones I've seen before) would be great. This comment: > Just look at the poor leftist Youtubers felt a little out of place, though?
- agloe_dreams 3y ago
  Yeah, way out of place. I was all for the copy and silly design until exactly there. Makes the thing seem like it has some bizzare agenda instead.
  - rpastuszak 3y ago
    No agenda just a stupid joke, fixing it now! I just feel bad for some of the creators who I know hate doing this stuff.
- neom 3y ago
  "Just look at the poor leftist Youtubers pushing NordVPN and tell me faces don't scream Stockholm syndrome" - I don't even understand what this means... I watch plenty of apolitical youtube that is sponsored by Nord (Mentour Pilot), am I missing something here?
  - cjbgkagh 3y ago
    If I were to guess I would suggest that he might be referring to the modern pro-censorship leftists and NordVPN could be seen as a work around for that censorship. I think a lot of demand for VPNs is from right-wing people who don't want their posts about climate change, vaccines, immigration etc. to be tied to their home IP address. I think the modern view is now 'if you have nothing to hide you have nothing to fear' where before it was important that personal anonymity was maintained as a default even by those who don't need it so that a dissenters (those that do need it) could maintain anonymity and not have that behavior to be considered grounds for suspicion.
  - 3y ago
FredPret 3y ago
Great, now I can finally freeload off of the people creating content I love.
- rpastuszak 3y ago
  Please read the article first. That's not the intent here. The goal would be to funnel the money to the creators instead of using a bunch of middlemen. And, the main goal now is to make people thing about the ridiculousness of the current state of things. I'm speaking as someone who spent a decade working on helping publishers monetise their content without the unnecessary bullshit. I share your sentiment. One of my proudest career achievements was to get uncle Murdoch pay me to build an ad blocker (ended up quitting the job and taking a break to work on my mental health, but I still thing it was a valuable fuck you experience).
  - FredPret 3y ago
    Youtube deserves money for the ridiculous value add it does. My content creators deserve money because they are unreal entertainers. If Squarespace wants to fund all this, why not. Sometimes my favourite, Simon Whistler, will make the ad funny and worth watching. Worst case scenario, fast forward a bit.
    - rpastuszak 3y ago
      > Youtube deserves money for the ridiculous value add it does. Correct, but do you think that the people making the platform valuable (creators) are getting a fair cut there?
      - FredPret 3y ago
        If Youtube isn’t paying them enough, perhaps they should consider sponsorships!
- gambiting 3y ago
  I support YouTube creators I watch on patreon, yet obviously that doesn't remove their sponsored content in their videos. This is a brilliant solution to this.
xnx 3y ago
Love the idea of AI-based version of SponsorBlock. Could be a great fallback feature for SponsorBlock when it doesn't have crowdsourced data for a given video. This would be a great addition to a podcast app.
- rpastuszak 3y ago
  100% this. Here's the dream: I want a cheap, open model I can fine tune and create a SponsorBlock agent (pretending to be the extension user) "watching" videos and submitting their timestamps, so they're ready before the first person submits their manual version. Here's a better dream: have a default, sustainable way of paying those people without involving layers of middlemen.
  - xnx 3y ago
    Mechanical Turk is a layer for sure, but maybe not a very thick or expensive one.
endisneigh 3y ago
The people first said we don’t want to be tracked! Create content without tracking and we will pay. Then, they said we don’t want any advertisements in our videos! Give us a subscription and we will pay. Finally they said, we will pay when we feel like it! Give us videos! You create, we consume. For free. Forever.
- weberer 3y ago
  >Give us a subscription and we will pay. The problem from the video creator's perspective is that Youtube often decides to "demonetize" your video for breaking one of their "community standards" rules, which are vague, constantly changing, and seemingly randomly enforced. If that happens, their video gets no payout from Youtube. Its no surprise they would take sponsorships into their own hands in order to get a more fair and consistent paycheck.
  - Hamuko 3y ago
    Don't they still get YouTube Premium revenue even if the video is demonetised?
    - nodja 3y ago
      Yes, but premium revenue is decided by watch time, long videos get more revenue usually, with videos at around 90min length being 50/50 payout from ads and watch time. Assuming ads only at the beginning and end of videos and the video target the "average" audience, and average view duration of 30mins. So you're looking at a 50% reduction in income minimum, much more if you make short videos that target audiences with higher $/cpm like finance or health, in those youtube premium is probably only around 5-10% of revenue.
- marak830 3y ago
  Or alternatively feed static advertisements without tracking or overlay and I'm personally okay with that. I've disabled my blockers on sites that do that, but it's a very small percentile.
blinding-streak 3y ago
> Just look at the poor leftist Youtubers pushing NordVPN Ummm what? Bizarre, unnecessary commentary. Installing a browser extension is about trust. And you just lost a ton of it.
- mlpnlp 3y ago
  You can book the author for sessions on "Mental health" and "Linguistics incl. NLP" at https://sonnet.io/posts/hi https://sonnet.io/posts/hi
  - rpastuszak 3y ago
    natural language processing (not the pick-up artist pseudoscience). I studied linguistics and psychology and work for mental health oriented orgs.
    - mlpnlp 3y ago
      Sorry, I assumed the worst. Kudos to you!
- tivi 3y ago
  They made a usefull tool for free, i'm sure they're fine with you to continue watching ads.
  - rpastuszak 3y ago
    100% agree with the latter part, 50% with the former. The tech itself is not that useful, but there's potential (the solution to the bigger issues is not technical, but societal).
- rpastuszak 3y ago
  The joke here is that people criticising capitalism (good) are forced, due to the issues with the current system, to support it. I did my best to make the site not seem too serious, I even call the extension half-assed and I really do mean it. I don't care if people download the extension. It's about the discussion surrounding it and people taking a step back to realise how stupid the situation is. I suppose my comment is an elaborate way of saying: thank you for reading this and engaging. I mean it in a sincere way.

61 points by rpastuszak 3y ago

Cool. I've been using SponsorBlock for a while, but I feel like machine learning would rule in this space. Thanks for sharing this.

rpastuszak 3y ago
Thanks! SponsorBlock is definitely a better option here. There's a way of making this thing perform really, really smooth if you excuse the pun, but it requires some upfront cost, e.g. fine tune an LLM or use something like ULMFit. GPT is great for prototyping these sorts of things but I think we've become a bit narrow-focused recently due to the entire ChatGPT hype. Give the site/article a read for more context if you haven't!

Entinel 3y ago

> And, that being able to compensate someone for their work is such a complex process that it requires either a bunch of unknown middlemen, or an overengineered ponzi scheme. Being able to compensate someone for their work is a complex process. Most Youtubers and or media publications would not exist if they asked for a fee upfront.

wussboy 3y ago
Agreed. But would this be so bad? Would your life and mine be demonstrably worse with fewer Mr Beast videos? Whole generations have existed without YouTube videos. Perhaps we could exist as well? I’m not trying to be “get of my lawn”. I’m saying much of the content we have now could not exist and humanity would be no worse off.
- Entinel 3y ago
  I'm going to flip this question around. Would we be worse off if fewer people were unable to start businesses out of Youtube channels? I'd think so. A lot of novel art and education has come out of realizing Youtube could be a full-time job. You jump to MrBeast as the junk food of Youtube but I can honestly say I have never seen a MrBeast video but I frequently look at things like FreeCodeCamp or even the more educational end of entertainment like Tom Scott or extensive product review channels like Project Farm. I'm glad they exist and I'd happily watch a sponsor spot for them.
rpastuszak 3y ago
100% agree with you but there are different levels of complexity and the one I'm talking about is truly ridiculous. Example: OpenRTB + VAST chain (standards used for targeted advertising) required to display an ad on the site involve dozens of parties the user has no knowledge about. In fact before an ad is displayed on the page, there's no way of knowing who and how will be involved in processing your data. The consent is implied and opt-out is enforced poorly to put it mildly. That's the complexity I'm talking about.
- falcolas 3y ago
  Ironically enough, sponsored content quite cleanly omits all this complexity and lets content makers earn money.
  - rpastuszak 3y ago
    The complexity here is to have to: 1) write, 2) present, and 3) edit a video segment selling a product you probably wouldn't bother mentioning to people if you had other options. It's not technical. The alternative (for instance) would be an automatic system distributing the $$ I pay YT among the creators I watch. That's significantly less complexity for the end-user and the content creator.
    - Entinel 3y ago
      This still requires you to pay which brings us back to step 1. You are also implying that the content creator does not use the product and would not mention it otherwise which is not always true.
    - falcolas 3y ago
      > an automatic system distributing the $$ I pay YT So youtube red instead? They split the creator portion of your subscription between the creators you watch (assuming they've setup the ability to get paid by YT). Worth quite a bit more than ad views too, last I heard.
- Entinel 3y ago

bjourne 3y ago

Cool! How does it work?

rpastuszak 3y ago
The page and the repo contain more context (give it a read, even if just for the buttery puns!). But, in short: It's quite crude. I extract captions from YT videos using a private YT API (web scraping was a huge pain ;/), then I massage them a little bit and use GPT to process the timestamps. A waaaay better approach is possible, but I'll need to see if it's worth pursuing first. PS. SponsorBlock has a huge timestamp DB so I'm considering reaching out to the authors to see if we can create an agent using their extension and aiding their crowdsourcing effort.
- FloatArtifact 3y ago
  Awesome project! I'd love to see that

tjpnz 3y ago

It's unfortunate that many of the creators I love have had to resort to sponsored spots. In my experience the companies offering such deals are shady at best, with many engaging in what I would consider outright fraud.

onion2k 3y ago
Are you subscribed to their content? Do you pay them any other way? If not then how do you propose they pay for the team that makes the videos?
- endisneigh 3y ago
  They don’t need to be paid. Information should be free. They create and we consume after all. If they stop creating we will move on to the next creator. /s
- rpastuszak 3y ago
  The question I ask myself is: why is this so complicated? Advertising in any shape and form should not be the default here. We've just dug ourselves so deep in this mindset that it's hard to see another way. My approach is to ad block, sponsor block, and then have a budget I allocate to the creators that let me. 1 usd here and there can make a difference.
- tjpnz 3y ago
  The creators I subscribe to aren't typically large enough to hire (much less have the need for) a team. I've given them money either through watching ads or in some cases through Patreon. I realise the first pays very little, and that the second takes an unreasonably large cut. But it shouldn't have to be the only way.
  - onion2k 3y ago
    The creators I subscribe to aren't typically large enough to hire (much less have the need for) a team. You'd be amazed who has a team behind them. Lots of seemingly tiny creators have an editor and a writing partner. Even small channels have people for camera work, sound, and graphics. Bigger channels have huge teams (for example, Linus Tech Tips has 15m subscribers and has more than 80 people working on it.)

jriggs 3y ago

Youtube knows what videos have promotional content. I'm seriously hoping for a search filter that natively removes them from results....plugins don't work for me since I watch primarily on a smart TV. For now I have resorted to blocking channels with promoted content, that's the great thing about yt, there's always another channel out there with similar content

tjpnz 3y ago
I'm seriously hoping that YT will start offering their content creators an equitable cut and that goes for Patreon too. While a technology solution might hide the problem it's certainly not going to solve it.
- rpastuszak 3y ago
  That would be the dream. We just keep piling up the layers of complexity, build systems that put middlemen between creators and people enjoying their work. At this stage, I think the issue is more cultural than technical.

mschild 3y ago

I find clearly marked sponsored content on YouTube a non-issue. Yeah there are scummy or questionable sponsors but overall I get why they exist and in comparison to the alternative I think its an acceptable solution. There's people and companies on YouTube that produce outstanding content and I have no issue supporting them (YouTube Premium). I get that's not an option for a lot of people though so barring the invasive tracking for ads on YouTube, this is the next best thing.

debian3 3y ago
Could say the same about ads on a website, yet most people that I know use an ad blocker. For sponsor, I use SponsorBlock. I would say it's my second most favourite extension after Ublock Origin. I'm always amazed when it just skip over those section. For low quality video, it even start the video at the conclusion/recap, so you get all the info you need without spending too much time.
- juujian 3y ago
  Interesting, I feel there is a difference, but I cannot quite put my finger on it. Ads on most websites feel more obtrusive. Maybe it's because on websites, there is a spatial separation, but in videos it is temporal? I can look at the video without the sponsored content constantly trying to grab my attention. It is just a certain window of time, where the content also does not continue, so it is relatively easy to tune out? Never mind the fact that I can skip over it if it is terrible sponsored content?
  - notahacker 3y ago
    Seems an odd way of looking at it. The "sponsored content" typically aims to monopolise your attention for 30 seconds of your life. The ad is typically just a box a few hundred pixels wide which either sits in a column I'm not actually reading or is easily scrolled past. "Ad blindness" is a thing It's like I don't get upset by crappy stock photos or navigation bars, but would give up on a website that took 30 seconds to load...
- 3y ago

nwoli 3y ago

Appreciate the whimsical animations and hand drawn style :)

rpastuszak 3y ago
Thanks! The you might also enjoy my articles on sonnet.io as well as my page with doodles https://potato.horse https://potato.horse

JosephRedfern 3y ago

I personally wouldn't want to blanket-drop sponsored content from the videos I watch, but this seems really nicely put together, and a version which let me exclude "sketchier" sponsors but keep everything else (or perhaps lets me skip ones I've seen before) would be great. This comment: > Just look at the poor leftist Youtubers felt a little out of place, though?

agloe_dreams 3y ago
Yeah, way out of place. I was all for the copy and silly design until exactly there. Makes the thing seem like it has some bizzare agenda instead.
- rpastuszak 3y ago
  No agenda just a stupid joke, fixing it now! I just feel bad for some of the creators who I know hate doing this stuff.
neom 3y ago
"Just look at the poor leftist Youtubers pushing NordVPN and tell me faces don't scream Stockholm syndrome" - I don't even understand what this means... I watch plenty of apolitical youtube that is sponsored by Nord (Mentour Pilot), am I missing something here?
- cjbgkagh 3y ago
  If I were to guess I would suggest that he might be referring to the modern pro-censorship leftists and NordVPN could be seen as a work around for that censorship. I think a lot of demand for VPNs is from right-wing people who don't want their posts about climate change, vaccines, immigration etc. to be tied to their home IP address. I think the modern view is now 'if you have nothing to hide you have nothing to fear' where before it was important that personal anonymity was maintained as a default even by those who don't need it so that a dissenters (those that do need it) could maintain anonymity and not have that behavior to be considered grounds for suspicion.
- 3y ago

FredPret 3y ago

Great, now I can finally freeload off of the people creating content I love.

rpastuszak 3y ago
Please read the article first. That's not the intent here. The goal would be to funnel the money to the creators instead of using a bunch of middlemen. And, the main goal now is to make people thing about the ridiculousness of the current state of things. I'm speaking as someone who spent a decade working on helping publishers monetise their content without the unnecessary bullshit. I share your sentiment. One of my proudest career achievements was to get uncle Murdoch pay me to build an ad blocker (ended up quitting the job and taking a break to work on my mental health, but I still thing it was a valuable fuck you experience).
- FredPret 3y ago
  Youtube deserves money for the ridiculous value add it does. My content creators deserve money because they are unreal entertainers. If Squarespace wants to fund all this, why not. Sometimes my favourite, Simon Whistler, will make the ad funny and worth watching. Worst case scenario, fast forward a bit.
  - rpastuszak 3y ago
    > Youtube deserves money for the ridiculous value add it does. Correct, but do you think that the people making the platform valuable (creators) are getting a fair cut there?
    - FredPret 3y ago
      If Youtube isn’t paying them enough, perhaps they should consider sponsorships!
gambiting 3y ago
I support YouTube creators I watch on patreon, yet obviously that doesn't remove their sponsored content in their videos. This is a brilliant solution to this.

xnx 3y ago

Love the idea of AI-based version of SponsorBlock. Could be a great fallback feature for SponsorBlock when it doesn't have crowdsourced data for a given video. This would be a great addition to a podcast app.

rpastuszak 3y ago
100% this. Here's the dream: I want a cheap, open model I can fine tune and create a SponsorBlock agent (pretending to be the extension user) "watching" videos and submitting their timestamps, so they're ready before the first person submits their manual version. Here's a better dream: have a default, sustainable way of paying those people without involving layers of middlemen.
- xnx 3y ago
  Mechanical Turk is a layer for sure, but maybe not a very thick or expensive one.

endisneigh 3y ago

The people first said we don’t want to be tracked! Create content without tracking and we will pay. Then, they said we don’t want any advertisements in our videos! Give us a subscription and we will pay. Finally they said, we will pay when we feel like it! Give us videos! You create, we consume. For free. Forever.

weberer 3y ago
>Give us a subscription and we will pay. The problem from the video creator's perspective is that Youtube often decides to "demonetize" your video for breaking one of their "community standards" rules, which are vague, constantly changing, and seemingly randomly enforced. If that happens, their video gets no payout from Youtube. Its no surprise they would take sponsorships into their own hands in order to get a more fair and consistent paycheck.
- Hamuko 3y ago
  Don't they still get YouTube Premium revenue even if the video is demonetised?
  - nodja 3y ago
    Yes, but premium revenue is decided by watch time, long videos get more revenue usually, with videos at around 90min length being 50/50 payout from ads and watch time. Assuming ads only at the beginning and end of videos and the video target the "average" audience, and average view duration of 30mins. So you're looking at a 50% reduction in income minimum, much more if you make short videos that target audiences with higher $/cpm like finance or health, in those youtube premium is probably only around 5-10% of revenue.
marak830 3y ago
Or alternatively feed static advertisements without tracking or overlay and I'm personally okay with that. I've disabled my blockers on sites that do that, but it's a very small percentile.

blinding-streak 3y ago

> Just look at the poor leftist Youtubers pushing NordVPN Ummm what? Bizarre, unnecessary commentary. Installing a browser extension is about trust. And you just lost a ton of it.

mlpnlp 3y ago
You can book the author for sessions on "Mental health" and "Linguistics incl. NLP" at https://sonnet.io/posts/hi https://sonnet.io/posts/hi
- rpastuszak 3y ago
  natural language processing (not the pick-up artist pseudoscience). I studied linguistics and psychology and work for mental health oriented orgs.
  - mlpnlp 3y ago
    Sorry, I assumed the worst. Kudos to you!
tivi 3y ago
They made a usefull tool for free, i'm sure they're fine with you to continue watching ads.
- rpastuszak 3y ago
  100% agree with the latter part, 50% with the former. The tech itself is not that useful, but there's potential (the solution to the bigger issues is not technical, but societal).
rpastuszak 3y ago
The joke here is that people criticising capitalism (good) are forced, due to the issues with the current system, to support it. I did my best to make the site not seem too serious, I even call the extension half-assed and I really do mean it. I don't care if people download the extension. It's about the discussion surrounding it and people taking a step back to realise how stupid the situation is. I suppose my comment is an elaborate way of saying: thank you for reading this and engaging. I mean it in a sincere way.