Sponsorblock is not as blunt a tool as people make it here. You can only block specific type of ads and you can whitelist whole channels which I do for some niche channels I subscribe to. In Android, I use Tubular [1], the NewPipe fork that integrates Sponsorblock and ReturnYoutube Dislike. My only additional request in this awesome app is if we can download the video after snipping out the sponsor block sections.
>and you can whitelist whole channels which I do for some niche channels I subscribe to
Honestly, these are ads that actually support the content I watch. So that's why I keep the adroll by default. AFAIK Google isn't getting any cut of it and that makes me feel good.
I don't understand this sentiment. Are you buying a product with a tracking code? If not, it's not supporting anyone, and watching a recording of a sales pitch you're not interested in is just wasting your time.
> Are you buying a product with a tracking code? If not, it's not supporting anyone
Not all ads are equal. Most ad segments are performed with a direct transaction: advertiser hands YouTuber money, YouTuber puts ad in their content. There may be additional parts of the deal such as tracking codes, but that's not how it works.
The YouTuber gets the ad money, even if the video is not watched. Though that does not mean you should skip the ad, because the videos have heatmaps and no one would advertise if the segment was always "cold". Though what the OP is saying is you can send strong signals (to both the advertiser AND the YouTuber) as to what ads you're willing to watch and not. In fact, in this way, it is a great tool for making a more efficient market as it increases information quality. But only under the assumption it is both pervasive and not used bluntly.
If you're not interested in the advertisement, then you're creating a less efficient market by signaling that you are. So you ought to skip past it or block it in that case. And if you're not interested in any advertisements, the market is more efficient when you block them all. Or just run adnausium if you're basically just trying to help creators scam advertisers.
Remember in all advertising funded models that you are always the product. The market is for "high quality" (i.e. profitable) viewers, not high quality videos.
You're missing a critical part: there's additional information we can communicate. And that's what this is all about, what information is being communicated. The inefficiency is lack of perfect information.
If you indiscriminately watch or block that is a signal. Watch communicates potentially more because there's a secondary effect of some of those people buy the product. But by indiscriminately watching or not watching, we provide information about an interpolation along what was binary before. It is more complex to read, but now we can communicate that we don't dislike this add more than our willingness to support the channel. And on top of that, again our conversion rate. In a way, the discriminating information tells us something about the likely conversion rate. This is just more information, though that doesn't mean we are good at measuring it.
> The market is for "high quality" (i.e. profitable) viewers, not high quality videos.
Yes, but profits aren't the only thing people care about. At least not all people. Money is still a proxy for something more abstract.
To make it clearer, there are in fact ads that I do enjoy. This is true for all of us because an ad is so vaguely defined. During a political campaign I appreciate some ads because I want to know the candidates positions, when they are debating, and so on. Too much of it pisses me off, but that's different.
I also like ads that make me aware of certain things that provide utility to my life, but maybe not yours and this can be based on timing.
So stop rejecting this and recognize that these are all attempts at communicating these other factors. It's another variable in a system of equations.
Right, I said run it if you want to help creators scam advertisers. That's more or less what you're going for if you're not interested in something, but you believe your "I watched the ad" signal helps the creator negotiate with advertisers.
It's reducing the advertiser's returns on their investments. Reduce it to zero or negatives and they will stop advertising. That's world changing technology.
There's no bigger waste of bandwidth than ads, by the way. Ads are noise that's deliberately added to the signal just because it makes somebody somewhere money. These are actually the most charitable words I can use to describe ads.
What's the point of this? Nobody's getting a cut unless you use the affiliate link, and it's in the description anyway. You're just watching your favourite creator say how much they love ExpressVPN through gritted teeth.
CC's get paid for the sponsorship on top of any affiliate links. The RAID ads are the most obnoxious thing ever, but you dig through and realize even a tiny 2k sub channel can get a few hundred out of it (at this level you are getting maybe a few dozen dollars a month in YT ads) and you completely realize why they "sell out". I can only imagine the kind of cash moderate sized YouTubers (the 100-300k range) can get (i know a 400k YouTube disclosed half their revenue came from ad rolls, and their revenue was enough to live humbly.
>You're just watching your favourite creator say how much they love ExpressVPN through gritted teeth.
Which one of us likes every aspect of our job? Or every order/request of a customer? Gotta do what you gotta do.
I do pay so the point is moot. But for the exercise:
Google has probably already well overextended it's reach and made thousands off data without my consent. And will probably make more without my consent from Gemini. They have so many cash glows that I couldn't care less about plugging one of the holes up. They've long burned their good will points.
Meanwhile, I am an aspiring indie dev and I've overtime gotten rough ideas of how and what other creators on YT are paid. I honestly feel bad knowing some of these people arguably work 5 times harder than I do selling their brands while making maybe half (if they are a really established creator, maybe 500k+ subs) of what I make just walking to my computer and typing into a codepad. Some can barely afford their rent despite this hard work, and potentially hundred of hours of entertainment given to me. And those are "big" (but not Huge) creators. Someone with 50-100k subs may still not be able to do their work full time, or they do it on the very edge of viability.
I can't do much. I subscribe to some crowd funds, but not all. being able to at least watch their ad rolls is some form of appreciation in my mind. So call it guilt or call it an odd emotional attachment.
I just want to try and pay it forward, knowing I may be on that seat one day.
Attention is not a valid currency or payment method. Their service is literally free of charge. They did it that way hoping we would look at the ads. We're not obligated to do so. They have only themselves to blame for their risky business model that gambles on the idea that people might look at irrelevant content they didn't ask for.
They need to charge us up front if they want us to pay. If they send us ads, we'll delete them before they're shown. Nothing they can do about it. And we won't lose a second of sleep over it.
Why not just donate to the creators you like instead of letting them or a third party psychologically manipulate you into giving money to that third party who in turn pay some small part of that money to fund the creator.
I try (tried) to. Money's tight now, but on the heyday of 2022 I was giving at least $5/month to 10 different creators. I'd say only 2 of those were even for a specific reward, 3 of then explicitly had no rewards.
But I'm subbed to 30 channels and probably "watch every video but am not subbed" to 10-15 others. I'm not quite at a point where I can support everyone I want to support.
Yes I use it in Desktop/laptops, but integrating it in Android through termux was a pain. I recently found out about [Seal](https://f-droid.org/en/packages/com.junkfood.seal/) which seems to provide a front end for yt-dlp in Android. Might try this out soon.
I first found Seal which uses arai2 under the hood. After getting used to Seal, I had to start using yt-dlp with aria2 on linux as well. The only nitpick is that you can't get multiple parallel downloads with Seal.
I use Seal all the time when people send me links to videos on social media, since, lacking the apps and accounts, I can't reliably or conveniently get them to play at the present stage of enshittification of those platforms. Seal is great! Definitely give it a try.
I also use Tubular on Android. The one caveat is that Youtube changes seem to break the app on a regular basis so you do need to periodically return to the Github repo to update it.
I can also highly recommend the app sponsored by Louis Rossmann: Grayjay.
It can do everything that Tubular does and much, much more. It also uses a plugin architecture so you don't have to wait for an update of the app when Youtube blocks it again. https://grayjay.app/
It's also on the Play Store but without any plugins due to Google policy.
As a YouTuber, I’m conflicted about this. My main channel (non-tech) is small, but is monetised, and YouTube see fit to throw me a _very_ variable amount of money every month. CPMs are down right now so revenue has tanked along with it, it’ll pick back up at some point, but the variability is itself the pain point. My videos are relatively expensive and time consuming to make, but people seem to find them useful, and even enjoyable. The occasional (relevant) sponsor read or similar has been a huge help in providing some stability in the past, and I know for many channels it’s the main source of income since YPP revenue share can be so volatile.
I do worry that if this takes off it will just result in those sponsors pulling their budgets for this type of advertising, and it’ll be another nail in the coffin for creators. Sure many of us also do patreon etc but that’s never really sat right with me personally (and see also the post on HN just today about Apple coming for a revenue split there for another creator-hostile storm brewing).
On the other hand, I totally get the hatred of “the usual suspect” sponsors (VPNs, low-quality learning platforms etc) that get done to death because of their aggressive sponsor budgets and not-unreasonable deals. Those get shoehorned into a ton of videos and it’s a shame, but a blunt instrument like this is likely to kill off sponsorships as a whole, not just those bad ones.
The thing that sucks is I pay for YouTube Premium to remove ads then youtubers always have sponsored segments. It makes my $20/mo useless because I'm spending time watching ads still. I don't have a solution I'm just stating my perspective on it.
That said, SponsorBlock has been around for years. I've been using it for as long as I can remember. Basically any decent-sized channel's videos already have the sponsored segment skipped. I'm not sure why someone just posted it but we're well beyond SponsorBlock "taking off".
Same feeling here. It's gotten twice as expensive, which is insane by itself. But worse is the jarring rotation of sponsored advertisers.
it's reminiscent of NASCAR. Or, like being a kid forced to watch advertising during TV breaks, wondering why the TV screen istrying to sell me cigarettes.
It's maybe a bit social-media-toxic to say that some youtubers are my "favorite people" in that i look forward to their takes on the topics they cover. I lose interest though when that youtuber presents to me an unprompted ad for my testicular health.
I have no solution for creators consumers or google :(
I always wondered why YouTube themselves didn't start restricting sponsored segments. I don't necessarily agree with the idea (not a big fan of how restrictive youtube already is) but I always thought it was odd they were ok with their premium offering being devalued by sponsored segments.
I have YouTube Premium and on my phone I sometimes get a "Jump ahead" button that pops up on the bottom right corner when the video is in fullscreen. It doesn't just appear during sponsored segments but also during "less exciting" moments of a video like the introduction.
They could stop sponsored segments, but they couldn't stop creators and users from going to other platforms where they allow sponsored segments. They have far less control than e.g. Apple with the app store (where they literally can stop other app stores from ever coming into being, barring regulation that changes that).
If youtube stopped allowing sponsored segments that puts pressure on the market to produce such a thing. Even now creators are trying to come up with alternatives. Nothing has panned out, but something like stopping sponsored segments could very well tip a large number of people who want to get paid to find another way to get paid.
So what, even despite high-profile creators such as Practical Engineering constantly pushing for Nebula (the largest of them), it's still a fraction of their YouTube following.
People getting their own sponsors means Google doesn't need to increase rates to compensate creators. Who wouldn't take a deal for a 3rd party to pay part of your "employee" compensation if they were given a chance? Google still has plenty of sponsors going directly to them anyway.
> It's gotten twice as expensive, which is insane by itself.
No. Look, I'm not happy to pay more, but YT is really great. It's completely obviated the need to watch broadcast or cable TV for me (yes I know, sports...). They haven't enshittified it at all, and since I'm a music lover, I love that they include YT music (although I sorely miss its predecessor). There is the sum-of-human-knowledge and then some !! on youtube. it's absolutely worth what they charge. In fact, I dont know how they can even order enough storage to keep the thing running. tl;dr the features and content has grown proportionately with the price increase.
really? There are entire posts dedicated to how many features Youtube cut removed, or messed up over the years. as a old school forum boomer I still hate that they changed from a nested comments section to "twitter feed of loose chains" over a decade ago.
I won't go on a whole rant on every little feature, but the service has definitely gotten worse. It just so happens that the tech core still works fine enough (smoothly watching videos on nearly any platform), and the business core is powered by user-generated content which is as good as you choose.
P.S. I sure do wish we got Youtube Premium Lite wasn't cancelled. I do just mostly want ad-free browsing. I can manage around offline/offscreen videos and no YT Music (also miss Google Play Music btw).
Cutting or removing features!= enshittification. To me that word means contracts with early cancellation fees, charging more for long form or educational content, pop-ups, rate limiting ( you get 10 vids per day on your free plan), charging to upload, billing authors for bandwidth used, and so on. I don't think you realize how good we have it.
> Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.
Removing features is absolutely part of enshittification.
If your creators are also on Nebula ( https://nebula.tv , no affiliation other than being a former user) it may be worth considering.
The various creators I used to follow on Nebula have no ads at all in the videos published in Nebula, compared to those they post on Youtube. Not sure if its applicable for all creators on Nebula though.
> I'm not sure why someone just posted it but we're well beyond SponsorBlock "taking off".
Are we, though? Regular ad blockers are still only used by a minority of web browser users. I would be surprised if SponsorBlock has larger market share than that.
That's fair I just mean I was recommended it by someone and have recommended it to others. Mostly just expressing people know about it and it's been around a while not necessarily intending to assert that it's ubiquitous.
> That said, SponsorBlock has been around for years. I've been using it for as long as I can remember. Basically any decent-sized channel's videos already have the sponsored segment skipped. I'm not sure why someone just posted it but we're well beyond SponsorBlock "taking off".
I was gonna post a similar comment but with the opposite conclusion: SponsorBlock has been around for years, and the people who are really annoyed by sponsors are mostly already using it. Most of the rest of the population either doesn't mind sponsor segments (me) or isn't willing to go to the trouble of installing addons. Of course, there's always going to be people who become aware of it due to threads like this and start using it, but I'd venture that that's too small a number for worries about this suddenly "taking off".
I think, to some degree, this was my sentiment as well just not stated as clearly. I meant to say basically "SponsorBlock has been around and I know of a couple people who use it so it's taken off but hasn't caused any kind of revolution" but have been dealing with somethings in life and I think just was short with my explanation.
being around for years =/= mass awareness. Just look at Hacker News ;)
There is no perfect solution because the interests are diametrically opposed. Many CC's don't WANT to be a business, but if you want to work full time you need to be. Businesses' main incentive is to get max customers or max revenue, while a concumer's incentive is to get as much as possible for as little money as possible.
Ironically enough, the RAID SHADOW LEGENDS (since we're talking about the "usual suspects) financial model may be the best of both worlds, at the expense of some well off people (and some unfortunate addicts): have whales bankroll 80% of the game and subsize the free players. But that probably can't happen with 99.99% of video creators.
This is why I started using SponsorBlock. I've been a YouTube Premium subscriber since it first became available (when it was called YouTube Red), but I'm still inundated with long-form "ads" for Made In cookware and other such nonsense.
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 it turns into just another piece of formulaic slop.
But another reason why sponsor reads annoy me is that it breaks the youtube premium deal. I pay YT for an ad free experience. YT pays you more for my view than a 'free' watcher, and then you shove in ads anyway. Now I do get your argument that "it's not enough", but that does not change my end of the deal.
Idealy ad reads would be autoskipped for premium subscribers. If that meant premium being a bit more expensive, I would be fine with that personally.
I wish YouTube Premium (and honestly, Spotify too!) had a feature where I could voluntarily commit X additional dollars per month to be directly distributed to the creators I watch according to their share of my total watchtime, with some kind of manual opt-out button for individual videos/creators that I explicitly do not want to support. I am already a member of several Patreons but wish I could cast a bit of a wider support net for the people I watch enough-to-want-to-support-them-but-not-enough-to-join-their-Patreon, yknow?
>I could voluntarily commit X additional dollars per month to be directly distributed to the creators I watch according to their share of my total watchtime, with some kind of manual opt-out button for individual videos/creators that I explicitly do not want to support.
They halfway do this. The numbers are opaque but part of your premium is given to creators you watch, and that cut is based on your watch time, among other factors.
ofc I dobut we'd ever get that granular a control on CC's. As said in another reply, memberships are sort of that solution.
Is that not just youtube "memberships" though? The creator can choose the cost and have multiple "tiers" - I don't think there's anything stopping them having a $1 "tip jar" tier.
Sure, it's not quite the same, but at some point of similar-enough the number of people who actually use each feature becomes vanishingly small and/or the cost of managing the extra option outpaces the income, and it's just not worth it.
This somewhat reminds me on the discussions around the Web Monetization API [1] a few years ago.
I still wish for a service that gives me access to all paywalled sites or a way to sending all websites I visit a little money in exchange for them not serving ads.
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.
I've actually bought/planned to buy a few things that I was introduced to via YouTube sponsorships, but it's never been any of the generic YouTube sponsor merchandise. It's always something highly relevant to the topic of the channel, or even the specific video. Usually some sort of specialty tool.
> But another reason why sponsor reads annoy me is that it breaks the youtube premium deal.
I totally get that, and I feel the same way when I see yet another read as a viewer and premium subscriber.
I don’t really have an answer (and if I did, I’d be doing it already), but I will say that my (subjective, based on my ad placement strategy and viewer profile) experience is that premium views are worth less than non-premium - although YouTube cleverly don’t actually give me enough data to _know_ that as a fact (and it would go against their stated position, which I guess they would never do).
Linus Sebastian has said the exact opposite of that whenever he's discussed the breakdown of where the money that Linus Media Group makes comes from. Premium views are worth more than free views.
A game streamer I sometimes watch also said something similar - that "youtube premium" views are tracked separately and worth significant multiples per view compared to those that get ads.
They also said it isn't variable in the same way for what ads can get assigned to your content, or for "limited monetization" content (which apparently pretty much sets the ad income to zero).
Just a guess: maybe it depends by which vertical they’re in? Not all channels earn the same so many be there are cases where non-premium users are more valuable than premium ones?
> blunt instrument like this is likely to kill off sponsorships as a whole
That's the dream. Ads are a poison and a blight.
Removing them is something many users, including me welcome. If one wants money for their videos, they're welcome to actually allow getting payments i.e. patreon, the "Youtube sponsorship"-thing.
It greatly depends on the audience, but for many cases, unfortunately, it's more likely the case that you are dreaming.
Typical income flows for streamers include:
1. Passive advertising from video and stream platforms (which many adblockers do block)
2. Active advertising via sponsorships (which SponsorBlock wants to block)
3. Live stream donations
4. Video/stream-independent donations, most usually via Patreon
5. Paid "premium" or behind-the-scene programmes (partly overlaps with video/stream-independent donations due to their obvious weaknesses)
6. Merchandises
And not all streamers can do them at once. Live stream donations only work for some genres of streaming and it is easy to stress audiences. Usual donations may or may not work, but it is usually thought to be weaker than live stream donations due to its passiveness (unless you come up with very different perks, but then your income is completely independent from streaming).
Many high-profile channels rely greatly on merchandises because it does have significant margins if you can keep launching enough of them, but they are especially risky when your channel and/or stream is not large enough. So smaller channels have traditionally relied on passive advertising, but its flaws are well known and discussed to the death by now. (If you need a list though, higher processing fees, prevalence of adblocking, generally too low income to be sustainable, extreme platform dependence etc.) This leaves active advertising as a compelling option for smaller streamers, at least for now.
While I do loathe most kind of advertising, active advertising like this is something I can (barely) tolerate because it is meant to be performed by streamers themselves, unlike passive advertising which rarely relates to the streamer or content itself. And I'm afraid that there doesn't seem to be any other viable option remaining. I can always skip an ad portion of a video if I do find it annoying anyway.
If blocking ads means for-profit video creators go out of business then so be it. There will always be those who do it because it is something they enjoy and usually that kind of content is more worthwhile anyway.
Sure, I totally get that. I’m no fan of being advertised to myself and as a premium subscriber I do find sponsor segments - especially poorly-places ones - just as annoying as everyone else when watching YouTube - which is why I said I was conflicted in my earlier comment.
However as I mentioned in another reply in this thread, removing routes to monetisation and devaluing content in general (by making it be effectively a loss-leader for value-add sponsorships or memberships) will only have the effect of making YouTube non-viable for many, and especially those who necessarily have higher production values to make better quality (I’m thinking more thoroughly-researched, more interesting, that sort of thing) content.
Making YouTube non-viable is the entire point. Google should not be the gatekeeper for the world's content, or get to decide who wins and loses in a rat race trying to keep up with algorithms built to keep users addicted to low quality advertizer friendly content.
The end game of ad blocking tech is to make ads a non viable source of revenue so creators will move on to ethical platforms like LBRY or peertube where creators are in charge again and users can pay them directly with no corrupt middle-men .
I would suggest being an early adopter on alternative platforms building a direct relationship with a more independent donation-motivated audience before everyone else does.
These are platforms with worse availability and worse affordances, ranging to nonfunctional once you're on a mobile device. Adblocking technology isn't going to make them better. Making them better is going to make them better, but the unit economics remain not in their favor.
A more likely future is less video rather than people move to PeerTube and shake an upturned hat for donations. Which doesn't bother me much, but is likely to invoke the FAFO gator on a lot of folks.
I would say less big budget video. If we're being honest, YouTube is essentially television at this point. Many YouTube views, maybe even most, don't go towards individual creators. They go to Studios and the Jimmy Kimmel's of the world.
If someone like boxxy is making videos with a potato cam on her bedroom floor, I don't think she necessarily cares much about the monetization.
That USED to be the entire draw and appeal of YouTube. Then monetization came and surprise! The platform changed to be more monetizable, i.e. watered down and corporate.
The problem is that "cheap video" still costs a lot of money to ship to consumers. Things like PeerTube get around this by just doing a bad job of it, but if you want things like traffic steering and adaptive bitrate (and you do, because if you don't have these things, you will annoy the audience and they will leave), you are going to Pay The Money.
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?
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.
>You mean I could get a f...ing text again about things
Tone aside, we already do that... it's also monetized and being AI-slopified as we speak. Much faster than video.
in this scenario where videos become non-viable, people would ujst paywall their text like many journalists have resorted to. There's no free lunch these days.
Exactly that. But surprisingly, although I'd consider it as a trivial insight, we're living in a world that just doesn't want to understand that.
And while YT is a lot about casual nonsense, there are other big tech walled gardens, where content fights against some corporate-controlled algorithms, but the content is our entire public discourse nowadays. :( And people still do not want to understand what a terribly bad idea that is...
I'm not trying to be offensive or hostile but, as much as I value the higher-quality content on youtube, if youtube went back to being just a place people posted videos of themselves doing stuff instead of what effectively amounts to studios making youtube content, I'd consider that a win.
Again, not that your content isn't likely appreciated by your audience and valuable. I just miss the days of youtube just being a fun video platform instead of another TV channel.
> I just miss the days of youtube just being a fun video platform instead of another TV channel.
It's another effect of the economy. Programmers are traditionally well compensated, so they can use their free time literally giving away knowledge for others. Because they don't need to monetize that knowledge to survive.
Video editing: not so much. If you want more people just having fun you need some part of the economy making sure they pay rent. Hence, hustle culture. It'd still exist if everyone was comfy, but many people would instead focus on leisure over minmaxing money.
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 no longer viable for many. I don’t see why YouTube should be this special case.
Why what should be? Why platforms with money pay people with no money? Why platforms with no money shut down?
It's not a very fun answer. Google gets a lot of ads to pay then to shove ads down the consumer's throats, and they can do this with no risk of users migrating. They "should" get more money because they more effectly do this than news websites, which have failed to appeal to advertisers effectively enough.
I don't really know what to do with that answer, though. Accept I'm the minority that will subscribe to paid avenues to support creators (or even care about other creator's well beings?) and move on?
No I’m asking why we should look at people who make video on YouTube differently than any other type of creator who publish elsewhere.
The original post I was replying to said:
> However as I mentioned in another reply in this thread, removing routes to monetisation and devaluing content in general (by making it be effectively a loss-leader for value-add sponsorships or memberships) will only have the effect of making YouTube non-viable for many, and especially those who necessarily have higher production values to make better quality (I’m thinking more thoroughly-researched, more interesting, that sort of thing) content.
And my answer was that this is no different than any other type of creator online.
> I’m asking why we should look at people who make video on YouTube differently than any other type of creator who publish elsewhere.
I don't know who's "we" here. But that's simply psychological. You will look at [person who make lots of money] differently from [person who can barely cover rent], if only because the latter may need more help you may be able to give.
There's no "should" here. And influencers aren't limited to YouTube. all my answers come down to "because they are backed by a trillion dollar corporation"
>And my answer was that this is no different than any other type of creator online.
Maybe instead of "but no one else makes money" to drag down, we should change the lens to "let's reward other mediums for being high quality and throrougly researched" to boost up other mediums of creation.
Especially in a time where we are already getting so much slop and misinformation (and we're not even close to the worst of the storm). I'm sure you seen enough of the internet to know most people will just accept the slop and at best take years of introspection before they realize why quality matters (others never do).
Assuming when you say thoroughly researched, you're looking for high quality educational information, the highest quality videos are generally from a camera pointed at a blackboard/whiteboard recording a lecture that an expert was already going to give. Not a lot of production value necessary.
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.
The point is that's fine, and it is perfectly sustainable for people to do things they enjoy for free. It'd perhaps not be sustainable for someone to play video games as a full-time job, but maybe that's okay (or even desirable from a societal resource allocation standpoint)?
> According to a recent report by decision intelligence company Morning Consult, which surveyed over 2,000 adults in the U.S., 57% of Gen Zers said they'd be an influencer if given the opportunity, compared to 41% of adults from all age groups.
If true, possibly the most damning rebuttal of UBI proponents that there is.
I don't see how. They are young adults and of course they want to be [flashy job]. Some may do it out of passion, some will inevitably realize the platform exploits them and moves on so they can have stability, or pay rent. Trust me, I'm a game dev, the 2000's version of this, succeeded by the band musicians of the 90's/80's.
UBI would bring out more passionate people and not force the passionate but disheartened to drop out. meanwhile, the passionate who do stick it will optimize for money. So they can pay rent. Or worse, the unpassionate marketers take over and the discipline is reduced to slop (we've probably been here for ~10 years now).
Because they're saying if they could sustain themselves, they'd have their job be to... eat at restaurants, play video games, travel, try on clothes, wear makeup, etc. Basically be an exact conservative caricature of socialists.
The irony is that its a caricature of rich nepo babies under consumer capitalism vs socialism. In a pure socialist society (good example of this is US government or military jobs) you still work and there wouldn’t be such striking wealth inequality on display.
Having previously worked for the US government and knowing multiple people in the US military, there's both significant wealth inequality, and significant downgrades in quality of life compared to the private industry.
Jobs can still pay on top of ubi which would be enough incentive to hold them. You may as well ask why any navy cook would strive to be general when peeling potatos is less stress. The answer is also higher pay.
> A majority (53%) of Gen Zers surveyed considered influencing a respectable career choice, and a similar percentage would be willing to leave their current jobs if they could sustain their lifestyle as an influencer.
There's some wiggle-room on what "their lifestyle" means, but I doubt that the positive answer is biased toward e.g. HENRYs, and in fact it's likely biased in the other direction. If UBI can match whatever their current lifestyle is (or even exceed it, e.g. paying for a personal living space instead of roommates), then these people are essentially saying that they'd be happy not to work.
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.
I think that's fine, though. Maybe we should have different platforms. Maybe we have a platform just for people who post stuff out of love for their craft, and don't expect any sort of compensation. And then we have a platform for people who want to monetize, and the platform itself has a subscription fee that gets distributed to creators based on views, or... something. Anything, really.
Maybe this could all be YouTube, but creators decide on a per-video basis whether they're uploading publicly or only to paid viewers. I dunno, there are so many other models.
The current situation with YouTubers asking people to subscribe to their Patreon or whatever is so weird, since often they have to distribute patron perks outside of YouTube, or via unlisted links, or whatever. I assume Google hasn't built in paid subscriptions option for fear of anti-trust regulation, but an integrated solution like that would likely be better for both creators and viewers.
> Maybe we should have different platforms. Maybe we have a platform just for people who post stuff out of love for their craft, and don't expect any sort of compensation
There are plenty of alternative video hosting sites if you seek that. So, why are you still on Youtube?
>but creators decide on a per-video basis whether they're uploading publicly or only to paid viewers. I dunno, there are so many other models.
Sure, works for Onlyfans. they even blend in both subscriptions AND PPV behind the sub. And we know how quality that content is (no offense to the models there. but come on, I've seen $100 for 2 pictures, behind a $20/month subscription. You're not 2000's Brittany Spears).
> I assume Google hasn't built in paid subscriptions option for fear of anti-trust regulation
They do. CC's can enable Memberships and upload videos specific to that.
The issue is that
1. the memberships are small for many right now. Conseuqnces of being late to the party.
2. what's offered isn't necessarily going to be even higher quality than a public video.
3. ad rev from non-subbed views is still signifigant. Making a paid subscription for certain videos can mean brining in less money.
4. That lower view count affects your algorithm for growing.
It's complex. And sadly, outside of the OF model most people simply don't want to pay for content. They get bored and they move to Tiktok and that's the real endgame should YT fall.
They do have that functionality[0]. The elephant in the room to me when discussing these things is that people aren't wrong when they won't pay for most "content". The overwhelming majority of it brainless filler-noise that a lot of people probably only look at because they don't know what else to do with their time. If actually pressed to come up with how much they'd pay for it, they correctly come up with $0 as the answer. Unfortunately, they don't then figure that it's not worth their attention either.
They receive my money, as I pay them the way they ask for it.
I am actually not responsible for their choices of how they spend it.
Everybody has to invest something to deliver their craft. A handyman needs tools and materials. A carpenter as well. They pay taxes. And so on. That’s the reality of doing business. If they are not business savvy enough to turn a profit. Not my responsibility.
That’s called free market capitalism by the way. Everybody is free to try to make money on their terms in any given environment. But nobody is entitled to actually make money. That’s how the market actually acts as an agent for economic and business evolution. Not the worst thing there is, given how well real existing socialism worked. I grew up next to the GDR. I know how "strong" their economy was. How successful their companies were.
Other aspects, like creating a social net to mitigate the worst effects of capitalism on the people is a topic for a different thread imho, though.
If you're a HN-er you should know the culture of HN is very old school and fringe mentality. E.g:
- Flip phones are celebrated in some threads because people don't want smart phones (extreme minority in real life)
- Disabling JS and pushing sites to go back to just raw HTML CSS (with some even not understanding why we need JS, extreme minority irl. IRL site owners care about attracting customers and the things they want to do can't be done with raw HTML CSS much of the time)
- Kagi taking off. IRL most people still do and will continue to Google
- People acting like if ads were disabled forever the population would totally pay for things they like (IRL people don't, there's a reason piracy is big. People want the things they want for the cheapest cost possible)
>IRL people don't, there's a reason piracy is big.
It is? That's not my observation. In fact, music piracy seems to be all but dead, thanks to the streaming services. Movie piracy is not, and seems to be increasing (hard to say though), because of people getting frustrated with the fragmentation of streaming; back in Netflix's heyday, it seemed like movie piracy was much smaller, because you could just pay $7/month to Netflix and watch whatever you wanted.
>People want the things they want for the cheapest cost possible
No, most people want convenience. That's why music piracy is basically dead. Piracy is usually a PITA, and it's easy to subscribe to Spotify or Apple Music and listen to everything you want. Piracy is usually a service problem, not an economics problem.
> Movie piracy is not, and seems to be increasing (hard to say though), because of people getting frustrated with the fragmentation of streaming
I feel that proves the point. When everything is all together for $20 people don't mind. when it's spread out, people are too lazy to sub/unsub to other $20 services as needed to watch content on demand. Someone that's a heavy enough power user to watch that much TV shouldn't mind paying $100+ to keep up. Premium cable was way more expensive and restrictive back in the day.
Meanwhile, all that conversation and none of these streaming services are even profitable. Because giving all your content away for rent isn't financially viable. But it's still too much for lazy consumers. So the entire thing collapses.
>No, most people want convenience. That's why music piracy is basically dead.
It's also why people completely raged when Netflix and GamePass increased prices. There definitely is a breaking point for many (past the ones who complain about every price hike on the internet but stay subscribed).
>Piracy is usually a service problem
Everytime I hear this, I simply need to point to the mobile industry to prove it wrong (or maybe right? Just not the way people think is "fair"). They fixed piracy by doing the classic Web dev action: Keep everything valuable on your server. The APK you pirate is worthless, as it is simply a thin client into their actual value.
>I feel that proves the point. When everything is all together for $20 people don't mind.
I think this proves my point, that it's a service problem. Put everything together in a single, easy-to-use service for a low price (like Netflix in 2012), and only the true die-hards will still bother with piracy. Ask them to subscribe to a whole bunch of services (with a high total cost) or try to figure out how to save money by strategically subscribing and unsubscribing to see the stuff they want, and have to deal with shows suddenly disappearing or moving to a competing service when they're half-finished watching them, and many will simply go back to torrenting because it's honestly easier than all that BS. But instead you think people are "lazy"... A lazy person doesn't do torrenting; it's really not that easy.
>Premium cable was way more expensive and restrictive back in the day.
Back then, 1) there weren't many alternatives. At the beginning of cable TV's reign, videotapes weren't even commonly available. And 2) back then, people had more disposable income because the cost-of-living was much, much lower (particularly housing). Technology is much better now too, so people expect to pay less.
>Meanwhile, all that conversation and none of these streaming services are even profitable.
Citation needed. Last I checked, Netflix is doing quite well, and even better after cracking down on the password-sharing.
>It's also why people completely raged when Netflix and GamePass increased prices.
Some people raged, but Netflix's subscriber count has increased and profits are up, so obviously those people either got over it, or were a small minority.
in all fairness, I'm sure Kagi is aware it's serving a niche right now. It's more a matter if that niche (maybe a few thousand consistent subscibers?) can support their infrastructure. You don't need to compete with Google to make a good living.
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 and dealing with ads and/or sponsored segments instead leaving those that do a bit stuck with the latter.
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 people working on actually valuable stuff.
>Someone needs to figures out how to take my money and distribute them to people working on actually valuable stuff.
why do you need a financial advisor to donate to Patreon or even Youtube memberships now? The models are about as easy to (un)subscribe from as you can get, while allowing granular control.
Do you really want some "index fund" where you trust someone else to use your money to fund "good creators"? That sounds like a capitalist's wet dreams. And a consumer hellscape.
>Do you really want some "index fund" where you trust someone else to use your money to fund "good creators"? That sounds like a capitalist's wet dreams. And a consumer hellscape.
Yes, I have a limited amount of time so I use curators (or algorithms) to narrow down what I might most like. For example, people used to pay HBO and other TV networks, or these days, Apple/Netflix/Amazon/Disney/etc.
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.
Direct payment is good, but Patreon-type models are unfair (for both consumers and creators), inefficient (in terms of both time and money spent by consumers), and unscalable (to anything but a tiny fraction of the economy).
We need direct microtransactions on the per-video/content-item level.
I absolutely hate advertising in all forms, and will aggressively block ads whenever I can.
I pay for YouTube Premium, though I have no idea how much (if any) of that goes toward creators. If a YouTube channel I enjoy has a Patreon, I'll subscribe.
Advertising is psychological manipulation. I get that there aren't many ways for independent creators to get paid for their work, only a selection of sub-optimal choices, but ads are gross.
I think this is a spot where YouTube fails to give a "fully valid" option as a platform. As a user right now I can have YouTube Premium, be a Patreon, and leave a Super Thanks on a video but still get served a sponsored segment. At the same time on the creator side I have no way to target YouTube Premium users or people paying directly to the channel with different content while keeping it as the same posting on the same platform (i.e. all as one video post on YouTube). As a result, no matter how you slice it, there is no way to have things be "right" even given ideal and fully willing creators and viewers.
This leaves the only realistic way for a channel to make reasonable money to be via ads and sponsored segments targeting the majority of non paying users at the expense of the rest.
instead of having a "sponsored" segment where you talk about some product (basically an ad) you could just make the whole video about that product, and thus sponsorblock wouldnt really be used - i mean, sorta like product reviews
Well, that’s your call, of course. And when it comes to regular YT ads I don’t really blame you, “the algorithm” and the way monetisation works encourages us to set up aggressive mid-roll placements etc that must be incredibly annoying if one doesn’t pay for premium.
One of the nice things about sponsor segments is that they don’t involve YouTube, so the creator gets more benefit from the deal, but of course done badly (and I assume this must be the case with many of the generic irrelevant VPN ads for example) they will harm retention and thus limit reach.
Your “whole video” suggestion is really “advertise smarter” IMO, which I completely agree with. Personally I’ve never done a “reading a 30-second script about how great product X is” type segment, but I have done videos where I try out “product X” in some way that’s relevant to my audience. It’s more product placement than direct advertising, but I guess even that is unpalatable to some.
Even sponsor segments mean you are being biased by third parties, which makes it harder for you to criticize them later if they are no longer something you would honestly endorse.
I did not click the video to waste time hearing about corpo sponsors you have been paid to shill. At most I will listen to information of non profit causes to donate to.
Use the sponsor segments to tell users how to donate to you. Sponsor block categorizes these differently and leaves them by default.
Those are called "fully integrated ads" and most of the time you don't see them because creators want more money for the whole video being an ad vs 30second of the 10 minute video. They also tend to involve a lot more back and forth with the creator and the sponsor about what is "allowed" in the video.
I agree. But to add, if youtube went all out and made ad blocking sufficiently difficult I probably would pay for it.
I fixed my dryer some time back. Watching a youtube video on how to probably saved me multiple hours then figuring it out all on my own. I use it to fix cars.
Never in my life have I been interested in any sponsor mentioned in a YouTube video. It's sad to see creators having to include these humiliation rituals in their videos just to keep their channels alive. To me, such tools are just a noise filter.
I think we need to rethink the whole "advertising as a way to support creators" model. Support comes in many forms, and decoupling knowledge of a thing from being paid for good work would likely result in higher quality outcomes.
It's possible there's something to the Nostr model (https://nostr.com/) that could be of use here. A key part of Nostr is the "zap" system. In addition to allowing users to just merely upvote posts, users can also choose to zap a post, which is just a method of sending Bitcoin to the poster's wallet.
Think of it like a tip system, as it directly and concretely rewards users for good content, by exchanging a token of direct value (money).
With a system like this, advertising is something you do to get recognized, while the zaps are something you receive as a reward for valuable work (by whatever metric your audience appreciates).
YouTube has something a bit more direct available for partnered channels via the "Super Thanks" comment option. It allows you to tie a dollar amount to your comment on the video.
>Sure many of us also do patreon etc but that’s never really sat right with me personally
Patreon is people explicitly and knowingly agreeing to give you money in exchange for a service they want. Why does forcing people to watch ads preferable to that? Maybe I am misunderstanding what you mean when you say it doesn't sit right with you, because that sounds like you don't like the concept. I can understand if it doesn't bring in enough, but it is by far the most honest transaction between you and your viewers. Whereas with ads, you make the viewer the product and that doesn't sit right with me.
> Sure many of us also do patreon etc but that’s never really sat right with me personally
I'm curious what it is about the Patreon model that doesn't sit right with you? To me it seems like it's both the most respectful monetization strategy to viewers, and provides the creator with a much more stable income than YT ads, YTP shares, or sponsors.
Agreed; I don't get the GP's aversion here. To me, ads -- especially ads embedded in the regular flow of a video -- are one of the most disrespectful things you can do to your audience. Asking for voluntary subscription payments (perhaps with some added perks beyond what you'd get as a free viewer) sounds like the best model possible. People will pay if they find your content valuable and can afford the expense. Sure, there are a lot of people who will freeload, but that's just life. If you don't find that acceptable, then you need to put more of your content behind a paywall.
If you can't make enough money to be satisfied with the Patreon model, and that makes you want to create less, maybe that's the correct outcome.
>I do worry that if this takes off it will just result in those sponsors pulling their budgets for this type of advertising, and it’ll be another nail in the coffin for creators.
I don't think I've ever purchased a product that I have seen advertised by a creator on YT that I hadn't already purchased before seeing it in a sponsored ad. That last bit I added because I used to use ExpressVPN and now I'm seeing some sponsored ads for it.
The deal has been made between the creator and the company already, it's been added to their video, so there should not need to be any noticeable affect from running sponsor block for people like myself who don't jump to buy advertised products when seeing them advertised by a creator I follow. Unless there is some kind of feedback that YT is giving the companies about who is viewing their sponsored ads, I guess, but I doubt that's happening. So my use of sponsor block (which I don't actually use - the right arrow button exists) shouldn't have any affect on sponsor finances that I can see.
I'm not against creators making money, but I don't want to see ads in videos placed by YT and I don't want to see them in videos by creators, but I understand they would like to make some money. I've given through Patreon to some creators, but I'm not going to do that for all of the dozens of creators I follow. If I could just press a button and tip a small amount to the creator when watching a video I really liked, using a payment method I've already set up, I'd start doing that in a heartbeat. But I don't know if such an animal exists.
Don't do your videos for money. You are interrupting users that pay for YouTube premium with ads in the middle of your videos. Set up a way to donate to you on YouTube, channel memberships are an option, they display next to the "subscribe button".
This is of course a valid suggestion, and there are many, many creators that do this. However I think the world would be a poorer place if we lost all the creators that do need to make _some_ money for their channels to survive, which IMHO is the natural endgame if we remove or block all routes to passive monetisation.
I do get the issue with premium, as a premium subscriber myself I too find it annoying to be interrupted by yet another 30-second (or increasingly, more) read for some shady VPN or whatever.
Channel memberships, like patreon etc., are an option, but have a vanishingly small rate of uptake, and people expect some sort of value-add in return (early access to videos, a discord, and so on). Without other routes to revenue this just devalues the content itself, which I feel may be part of the problem here - we no longer value attach value to quality content. Rick Beato made a great video on the effects of this (in the music industry) recently, and it’s not great - but it does feel like all media is going a similar way.
I often pay for Patreon to get uncensored videos. Youtube by itself already devalues videos in various ways and avenues like Patreon let creators provide what they actually want to provide, not just what YouTube allows them to.
That’s great, I’m glad that you’re supporting creators directly and getting value from it too. But unfortunately you’re in the minority in my experience, for every person who does this, there are hundreds who wouldn’t even consider it.
For creators making certain kinds of content the “uncensored” and “non-ad-friendly” topics are a great argument for direct sponsorship etc, I definitely agree.
Supporters get access via paid LBRY views or access to unlisted or privately hosted videos right away, and they are published a month later for free on public platforms.
I just don't personally find that sort of thing compelling. For the kinds of videos I watch, it doesn't matter to me if I watch it today or a month from now.
I think paywalled bonus content has the most value. A creator has a lot of control in that sense: if they are not making enough money, they can shift more of their free content behind the paywall. Certainly there's a point where viewers will get mad and leave, and/or what's available for free won't be enough to attract new paid subscribers, but there's still wiggle room.
If by "certain" you mean anybody covering anything from movies to songs to games to whatever else, yes. I mean "those" creators. It's extremely easy to fall afoul of YouTube's Draconian censorship. I'm not talking about sex games. I'm talking about YouTube demonetizing anything they want for arbitrary reasons.
I feel you're not recognising the issue and what Patreon solves, and why relying on YouTube for revenue is simply not an option for anybody.
Well, what I had in mind by “certain” is probably really “not me”. I’m fully aware how easy it is to fall foul of the ad-friendly guidelines, and have had more than one video demonetised for “reasons” myself. I’m also very aware that tying one’s entire revenue to a single platform isn’t a good strategy in _any_ business, it’s not limited to YouTube (but I can see an argument for it being worse there specifically).
I really do recognise the issue, being in it myself. I do have patreon (and others) for other projects and it’s another revenue stream, which is great. But for my YouTube main channel I believe the content itself has value, and having to pour time and resources into building a value-add package devalues it - both in the immediate (since I would now have less time to devote to content creation) and longer term (since it makes it essentially a leader for my value add packages).
(Some larger creators I know do manage to carve out some revenue on patreon etc without any “perk package” but I think for that to work it becomes even more of a numbers game, and won’t help small creators just getting started. I’m also putting aside the recent announcements ref. The App Store etc since they’re not directly relevant here).
If you aren't able to get enough funding through Patreon, then it's simply because you haven't found a large enough or the right audience yet. It has nothing to do with value add. Not every viewer is going to subscribe to you on Patreon. Even the biggest channels I have subbed on Patreon have a fraction of their viewers on Patreon of what they have on YouTube, yet it's more than sufficient to fund an entire well-off lifestyle based on it.
> Don't do your videos for money. You are interrupting users that pay for YouTube premium with ads in the middle of your videos. Set up a way to donate to you on YouTube, channel memberships are an option, they display next to the "subscribe button".
You shouldn't work for money either. Just do it for free.
YouTube isn't work and I doubt this person creates videos for a living. I assume this is just extra money this person wants, not needs. Many years ago YouTube was about hobbyists, and nobody complained. I'm sick of the attitude to monetize everything. I listed a few non-intrusive options, just don't be hostile to your viewers shoving them sponsored crap in the middle of videos
For a lot of people, it is work and the quality is vastly better for it. Youtube in the past wasn't a replacement for tv, now given the quality many creators put into their work, it is.
In the beginning of YouTube, true. But nowadays YouTube is work for a lot of people. It's their primary source of income, even. It's pointless to say, "well, that's not how it should be". It is, and that's the reality of the situation.
And, frankly, the production value of a lot of stuff on YouTube is amazing. That doesn't come for free, in the form of recording equipment, set design and purchasing, and just plain old time to write scripts and do post-production work. There's no reason that stuff at that middle quality level (between random guy with a handheld smartphone and professional studio production) shouldn't exist. I think it's amazing that people can make such high quality content, without having to get past e.g. a hollywood studio gatekeeper.
In the past, TV was traditionally paid for through advertising and syndication, and movies through ticket sales, and VHS/DVD/Bluray sales. Nowadays there are so many more ways for people to distribute their creations, and more ways for viewers to compensate them for those creations.
The thing that sucks is that we are still so stuck on this ad-supported model, not that people want to put enough work into their creations that it needs to be a paid full-time job.
We live in a capitalist society, and most people are forced to work to make ends meet. Being able to choose to put in what amounts to full time hours on a passion project isn't a privilege most people have.
You, presumably, wouldn't work for free, why do you insist that artists should entertain you for free?
> You, presumably, wouldn't work for free, why do you insist that artists should entertain you for free?
You didn't understand my post. I don't insist that artists entertain for free. I was responding to the parent who said "don't make videos for money". I am in fact a full-time content creator.
But does it really work? I would expect click fraud detection to catch this pretty easily given how big the click fraud arms race is, especially since AdNauseam said their implementation is quite naive.
> I do worry that if this takes off it will just result in those sponsors pulling their budgets for this type of advertising
I think most advertisers track how their ads are doing by looking at how much the personal discount code gets used, or tracking links in the description. I won't ever use any of that, so no advertiser will ever know I didn't have to suffer through the ad read about their product.
If there aren't enough people willing to pay for someone else's work product to make it worth the producers time/effort, then I'd argue that maybe that work product is not actually worth producing in the first place. In the realm of youtube, that may require putting out enough quality content as a loss-leader to gain a following large enough that a percentage is willing to support the creator directly. Many have made this work well.
I have many issues with advertising in general, but put simply, it breaks the basic transactional nature of business. When the people benefiting from someone else's work product aren't the ones paying for it, then both the producer and consumer end up being taken advantage of for someone else's profit.
The way I see it, tools like Patreon that allow consumers to directly support people they benefit from are just what are needed.
> I do worry that if this takes off it will just result in those sponsors pulling their budgets for this type of advertising, and it’ll be another nail in the coffin for creators.
For advertisers masquerading as creators. Not all creators turn their hobby into a hustle and not all that do use abusive methods to extract money out of their viewers.
I do support some patreons and have also donated directly to projects I like but I would also be more than happy if payment opportunities for "creators" dried up entirely and we went back to an internet with more genuine content instead of crap designed to be profitable.
> likely to kill off sponsorships as a whole, not just those bad ones.
I’d like to see this.
If creators make money it should be from YouTube handouts from Premium and paid subscriptions and/or creators seeking funding directly outside YouTube.
Having less “professional” content (and less content in general) is a reasonable price to pay to break our dependence on adtech and the “attention economy”.
Obviously these sponsored segments are effective marketing otherwise no one would pay for them, but I'm sure they're far less effective with users who seek out tools like sponsorblock.
One thing I've always wondered is do sponsors request watchtime data for their sponsored segments? I'm under the impression that they don't, which is wild to me.
The main area that SponsorBlock blocks are the type of sponsor read that typically are recorded separated from the video. Those are never going to be safe again blocking and it likely that most companies that uses that kind of services knows this. They are low quality, low effect, and thus (likely) fairly cheap.
At the other end of the spectrum, we got paid content and sponsored gear. He who pays the piper calls the tune. It turns the issue to a balancing act where too much sponsored content will likely ruin the viewer ship (and artistic freedom/integrity/happiness/extra), but in turn it provide an income. SponsorBlock has no effect here, but naturally users may not click on paid content if they feel like it too much like an advertisement. The channel Linus Tech Tips have a few videos on this, and its a fairly common topic on their wan show.
I actively support channels and causes by purchasing merch, donating, etc. That said, I refuse to waste a second of my life watching ads of any kind or supporting adtech. Adtech is what has enshittified the entire internet and we must burn it with fire at all costs.
I use FreeTube to block all ads and sponsor segments and I teach everyone I know to do the same.
The ad model results in creators being restricted in order to be advertised friendly, and encourages mass spying, of which the data is often irresponsibly managed and leaked putting people in danger.
This model is fundamentally unethical to participate in from either side.
Make some merch, and provide a mix of accessible and anonymous ways to donate to you.
As a creator - I'd be very interested to know whether a direct microtransaction system (not crypto, imagine something like PayPal) would be appealing to you. (none currently exists, but I want there to be)
Your per-video ad revenue is probably under 1c/video, right? If so, I don't think that many consumers would bat an eye at directly paying that cent (or more), assuming a sufficiently well-designed wallet UI (clear indicator of balance, easy refund system (with anti-refund-abuse countermeasures), current spend amount per session and spend rate prominently displayed, one-click content purchase with low latency, etc.). Does that sound plausible, or am I missing something?
It won't. Honestly, most people use the official apps on their phones/TVs. Desktops and laptops are in a minority now, sadlyu, but good for stuff like this. Some know about ublock origin, but that's still a small % compared to the population.
I watch a bunch of travel vlog channels and for the most part they advertise the same things (If I ever see another athletic greens sponsor segment or a four sigmatic ad I will scream -- I even actually LIKE four sigmatic products) but I have several channels whitelisted in SponsorBlock because the ads they do are hilarious.
Watch some of their videos and you will see what I mean. I was watching the channel for a year or more before watching a video while sponsorblock API was down (it's volunteer run so it happens sometimes) and realized I was missing out on a really hilarious and important part of their videos, instant whitelist!
Sponsored segments always have stipulations on what you need to mention and how. Some may let you add some pizzazz, but that's why they all sound the same. Thats part of the contract.
Even that pizzazz is risky though. Sometimes videos get delayed simply because the sponsor comes in last minute and needs to debate the segment.
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 great, the content was organic.
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.
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.
In this case the cupcakes are not free. They are explicitly exchanged for a minute of your attention. You use scripts and tools to get the product without paying for it.
Kind of like sneaking into a meeting room to eat the cupcakes, then leaving before the meeting begins.
If you decided not to watch ad-supported content, it would be the free market at work. In this case you're just stiffing creators.
Honestly the VPNs are probably the most ethical usual suspects. They actually do what's advertised and the affiliate links for deals are decent enough. If it's so much noise that people know what it is already, mission accomplished.
But yes, I sympathize. youtubers aren't google, and this will just mean sponsors will push only on the biggest youtubers, wheras the small-medium sized ones need the money the most (where sponsor blocks can be half or more of their income).
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 just a crappy mobile game that is about as "mobile game" as you can get. The only reason I use onshape is because a friend recommended it to me, and I was very skeptical about it initially
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.
also one should always be skeptical about the extent they believe they are not influenced by ads. that runs pretty deep. you say you instinctively don't trust it. but when the time comes to buy something, you won't automatically steer yourself towards a product that you have never heard before just because you have not seen an ad for it. having some names in your mind, even them showing up when you do research creates influence.
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 "generates negative returns" is the next myth in this. Whether or not advertising generates positive returns is not relevant. You can't measure the return of advertising in the first place. Even if you could measure it, you should be comparing it to the opportunity cost of not doing something more productive with that money. Which you also can't measure. No one rationally proposes that someone spends a hundred dollars on advertising to generate $100.10 in revenue is somehow a good use of money.
> 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. It's clearly measurable: An advertisement is shown one day on TV, for example, the sales the next day are higher. That's the case 99% of the time. You can say it's not, and you can call that "religious belief", if you want to.
Companies use ads because they work, obviously. Everybody thinks they are somehow "immune" to advertisements because they are "smarter than the rest", but the sale statistics are plain and simple.
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" farming causing mental fatigue) that are just waived away and/or swiped under the rug of ignorance by the industry adepts.
Scroll back ten years - even back then Google and Facebook made people believe in a literal myth that they're so Big Data they know people better than they do themselves (I kid you not, I heard this cliche way too many times), when in fact their best systems had extremely limited knowledge of both the audience (like very basic demographics that are not even always accurate) and advertised products (a few pieces of metadata at best). Heck, even modern LLMs have limited awareness so they struggle to make sensible recommendations a lot of time (and are extremely expensive for use in advertising at scale) and I'm talking about orders of magnitude simpler "targeting" systems back then.
Advertisement industry literally preaches advertisement, because their very well-being (aka market valuation) depends on it. I'm (a nobody internet weirdo) hold an opinion that it harms society more than it does it good by boosting the economy.
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.
Of course it does. Advertisements, as a general concept, have an effect of driving customers to sales (simply because it creates awareness about the product, when there was none) - I'm not arguing it doesn't.
But Google's approach is questionable. Yes, they make money, but that's not the only effect the have. They pushed this story about targeted ads, it literally became a heroic myth blown (stories of what's really some cost-shaving statistic optimizations got blown out of proportions and became preached like all this crazy Big Data hoarding is the only way to go), and that had quite severe negative effects on the whole world - so I'm not sure those revenue increases were worth it.
> 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, but you still can't stop seeing it.
It's the same with people who don't care about their privacy because "no one cares about what I do" without realizing that companies wouldn't be spending massive amounts of time and money collecting, storing, and analyzing every intimate detail of our lives that they can get their hands on if it wasn't making them money hand over fist at our expense.
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. They wouldn't be doing that if they weren't reasonably sure that it was paying off for them. As surveillance capitalism continues to creep deeper into our lives companies are getting better and better at being able to track the success of their advertising and what they've been seeing so far hasn't caused them to scale back their efforts at manipulating us. It's just making them better at it.
>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.
pretty sure YouTube ads are directly trackable though -- if someone clicks it and funnels through to a checkout process and pays, they have a direct report of how much they spent on the ad versus how much they made directly from that ad.
YouTube in-video sponsorships are a different beast admittedly; however there is still some basic tracking through use of promo codes (Use code JOHN15 for 15% off). They can see a report of how much they spent on ads that mention JOHN15 and how many sales included that promo code -- if sales vs ad spend are significantly positive, it becomes simple math to determine how much more to spend on ads, or to discontinue them.
I suppose your point though was that it's not possible to track the negative sentiment generated by the ads (people who get annoyed and decide to avoid your company at all costs). That is true, but companies who rather go down the path of something trackable than an unknown shot in the dark.
You're spot on with "go down the path of something trackable". The next step is they assume everything they tracked represents all data for all possible outcomes. It can't.
> 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.
I can't immediately come up with a scenario in which all of the following is true:
1) The ad-viewer is repulsed by the ad
2) The ad is repulsive for reasons unrelated to your product/company's actual characteristics (otherwise they weren't a potential customer anyway)
3) This accounts for a significant portion of ad viewership (otherwise it's not relevant)
4) There is no social/media backlash (that would make the issue visible)
5) There is a significant positive ROI anyway (that's the only motive to continue that advertising campaign, which is required to sustain both negative and positive effects of the ad)
Is not the modern internet and widespread usage of ad blockers that exact scenario?
Take a person that hates being advertised at, a persona that is growing. This person meets all of your criteria. Multiply this person across the internet.
When this person sees an ad, regardless of company or content, they are repulsed because they hate ads. This person likely runs an adblocker so when an ad gets through, they are even more angry. If this person sees this product in the store, they will avoid it.
Take a common example of Coca-Cola. Their ads are everywhere. This person would instead buy the store brand cola even though it has not been advertised at them.
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)
Why do you think so many things are not measurable?
It's very hard to poll or measure things to within a fraction of one percent with most audiences. But that's not what's needed for advertising. And in marketing you probably don't care about that - it's in the noise. You do care of "significant" changes and you can of course measure both positive and negative influence.
Even negative influence in people who aren't yet customers, or have never heard of your company, and (preferably) have never seen your ad. For example through a polling survey. Funny enough, such a poll is probably an effective ad campaign in itself in some cases! You can also measure opinion strength about advertising in general. It's more nuanced than you think. Which unfortunately leads marketing departments to commit atrocious injury to good taste. Agreed there.
> No one rationally proposes that someone spends a hundred dollars on advertising to generate $100.10 in revenue is somehow a good use of money.
Of course not, and yet they spend far more than that, to good (measured) effect.
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) effects. But it is inherently difficult to measure. And I've seen many mid-sized companies not do that at all, they run these ads based on what they believe might work.
Mind you, this is experience from 4 years ago, but I did find the ad industry, as obsessed with tracking as it is, to be surprisingly gut-driven. For a lot of it, it's hard to tell if it works.
I do fully agree that for people who know what they're doing, advertising absolutely works, in ways that are sometimes unintuitive to consumers.
> 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).
They are very much not meticulous about ROI. The thing to understand about the ad industry is that it's incredibly adversarial. Companies need ads to raise brand awareness and make people aware of new products. So far, so well-aligned. From there on it goes downwards. A company's marketing department is in an adversarial relationship with the rest of the company, aiming to increase the ad budget at all costs. The ad agency often just gets a pot of money from the department, and instructions to spend it all, no matter how unproductive. Because if the marketing department doesn't spend their budget, it might shrink. ROI is often not a consideration at all. And if the marketing department actually do care about ROI, then the ad agency certainly doesn't. Then you have the websites themselves, with their clickfarms and general fraud, and the ad exchanges that empower them.
The whole business is teeming with waste and fraud, but it's a necessary evil so it stays.
You can always 'enter element picker mode'. With a little practice/knowledge you can block that element/frame/etc. forever. And/or add a layer with Privacy Badger and block altogether most of the sus domains.
Another 'trick' I employ (always with Firefox) is that I open links not to a "New Tab", but instead I use "Open in Reader View" add-on, so I "Open in Reader View" (it does exactly what it says on the tin), so I only get the clean text and the relevant images. That works for almost every website.
You should go and report that to whoever maintains your block list. The information on where to report ads is at the top of the file, and you can find the file itself in ublock origin's settings. Better yet, create a rule and submit it along with the issue, although people who maintain lists for long periods of time tend to be much better at it and might not find your attempt useful. I do it anyway to show some respect, they deserve it.
Is there a best practice for developing rules that match randomized class names? There's a web app I use daily at work with obnoxious upselling banners that always come back if the page is refreshed and it's the only place I've run into this annoyance so far.
I only worked in ad tech briefly and many years ago, but what I saw there was a game being played between the people who make/distribute ads and the companies that buy them. The game is to convince the people buying ads that ads have value, even when they don't.
I suppose raises the question, is the spending of mega bucks on advertising (regardless of effectiveness) a net benefit for society?
As commenters have already raised, we'd have no Google, Facebook, Twitter (sorry 'X') or many other entities and the products they create without the money spent on advertising. Is this all just happening because people are too scared to look under the curtain and find that it's all just a sham?
We had advertising long before the internet came along, and from my personal memory most of the most aggressive advertising was for things that were either useless (magic snake oil remedies) or actually dangerous (tobacco products), not to mention all the "as seen on TV" junk that was "promoted" on morning television.
Is what we have now is more intrusive? It used to be that you could duck to the toilet during the adds on TV or flip the page in the newspaper or magazine, but now they are taking our cpu cycles, making web pages unreadable and that is not to mention the more intrusive ways of really getting in our heads.
I'd argue that we've always had (even if just the shop keeper recommending a product) and always will have advertising. There have always been products that are not needed or wanted by the majority, and advertising is the way that the producer of that product gets their product sold. I would be nice if there were not so much dodgy practice involved.
I am convinced that the bulk of online advertising money spent is just wasted. All it does is steal clicks and attributions for conversions that would have happened anyway.
> you won't automatically steer yourself towards a product that you have never heard before just because you have not seen an ad for it. having some names in your mind, even them showing up when you do research creates influence
This is 100% percent true. I thought about exactly this, and it's the first time I hear someone say it, I am glad. I try to keep away from advertisements, but it's just not really possible, you get influenced by even what your friends or family say.
> 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.
I feel the same. The more I hear about a brand in youtube ads (or any ads, for that matter), the more "scammy" feeling I get about it. At this point I feel I won't even consider looking into NordVPN, Betterhelp, or SquareSpace, even though I understand how this feeling is unjustified.
NordVPN wasn't caught yet, but it's to good to be true and ALWAYS having 73% off is illegal marketing.
Betterhelp sold data to facebook to retarget you with ads.
SquareSpace had a security issue were entering the email of an old, not yet migrated account, was instant account takeover... how does this slip through security reviews?
Everything that needs my favorite minecraft youtuber to advertise it, is scam. It wouldn't sell without influencer marketing.
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 making it look like you're from somewhere else to watch different stuff on streaming services. I think Tom Scott put it well here https://youtu.be/WVDQEoe6ZWY
My take on NordVPN is that it's surely some kind of honeypot, to catch extremely illegal uses (pedos, drugs), or high value targets (journalists, politics ?). Not sure who's running it.
But if you're using it for mildly illegal things like having the Netflix catalogue from another place it's probably good enough.
Just don't install their app, configure it yourself, don't use it full time, and don't expect protection from anything other than low level law enforcement from your country. Expect your connection to be monitored when you're using it, as much as can be (so not breaking encryption, but all the rest for sure).
I have absolutely no evidence whatsoever other than the fact that it's been a high visibility service for very long, which makes me think it would have already been taken down a while ago if it was actually effective at protecting high value targets
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, but this is how, depending on that model, a VPN can be more secure than HTTPS.
Most of what people use personal VPNs for is to break some rules, sometimes the law. Circumventing geofencing or content blocking is most likely against some terms of service. VPN services can't really advertise for this, so they talk about evil hackers.
I saw a couple of VPN promos recently where the sponsored YouTube presenter talked about geoblocking circumvention as an important VPN use case. I don't know whether the sponsor thought that was desirable or not (and also don't know whether the sponsor requested it or not).
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.
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.)
I think you’d be surprised at how effective advertising is on you. An awful lot of it is brand familiarity. You mentioned some examples, but presumably you’ve seen more than three ads (not expecting you to list them).
Square space is one provider that commonly does these kinds of placements and I can confirm that it’s an excellent product (albeit expensive).
Where do you think your friend found out about onshape?
Sure, it makes me aware of brands, and then I don't use their service because they have to pay people to say it's good. And I already have a web hosting solution, its the raspberry pi in my closet.
Ehh, if you go to buy a new car, will you buy a brand you've never heard of before? Or will you perhaps check out the brand you've seen ads for a hundred times in your life?
It's not a conscious decision, your mind is familiar with some of the brands more than others, for whatever reason, and that tricks you into trust. Sure, you still might look into reviews and stuff, but your mind has already been primed to some extent in what brands you even consider.
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.
I barely interact with content creators. They don't reply to my comments very much, and even if they did, they'd still say they 100% support the thing they're being paid to say nice things about. I cant have a genuine conversation with them about the thing, how good it is, what the downsides are etc. See Kyle hill's vaguely recent video about scientific misconduct where they also advertise BetterHelp. The comments section was overwhelmingly negative about it, and their response was essentially "cry about it."
I prefer smaller channels (because they feel more "human" if you know what I mean), and their authors spend a lot of time engaging with the audience. Discussion is actually useful, you can learn something from YouTube comments. Yes, that YouTube.
Just step outside the highly commercialized part and you'll be surprised.
Thus the ad industry term "impressions" ? One gets the impression (heh) that they're just trying to beat logos and catchphrases into your reptile brain.
"Familiarity breeds contempt"... but ubiquitous superficiality does not, I guess.
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 just YC’s advertising board.
If that's the sum of your proof, your thesis is a joke. I am not the customer of any YC company, nor have I ever applied for a job at one, nor have I ever or will I ever apply to YC itself. Your attempt to cold read me was pathetic.
apache2/html/css, and I'm a little sceptical about pcbway/jlcpcb because the shipping times are nuts. I know its because they're coming from china but it makes me want to etch my own PCBs instead
I now sort of want to see a video about PCB etching sponsored by either of those because it would make me laugh from the contradiction
My YouTube echo chamber directs me to pcbway. JLCPCB is clearly targeting a lower quality YouTube audience as I only watch sophisticated content creators whose stunning intellect make me feel comfortable in the products they endorse. I suggest you avoid JLCPCB on these grounds alone.
The hardest thing about selling something is making people aware or it's existence. So it's not really a bad bad thing.
Said that, if i see that thing everywhere i can probably find a cheaper thing with the same quality because the marketing budget must be HUGE and these 10% discount codes give 10% to you and 10%the the creator so i can find a code 20% somewhere.
I don't trust them either. The inherent conflicts of interest makes any advertising suspicious. They are guaranteed to be overstating the pros and understating the cons.
"Sponsored segments" on youtube are nothing but normal advertising, they just permanently hardcoded the ads into the video instead. I don't like that they use the word "sponsors" for that. Sponsorships can be an ethical way to make money. Think Patreon, GitHub Sponsors.
It might be a noncentral example of sponsorship, but it's been a traditional usage since the early days of television: "and now, a word from our sponsor".
Edit: actually, I think that phrasing arose in the early days of radio!
Influencer marketing works so well on the younger generations that it's scary.
Just look at Prime. It's just a generic crappy sports drink and kids were literally paying 10-15€/bottle for it during the worst hype times because supplies were so short.
I am starting to think that these companies aim for saturation of mindshare. Like Coca-Cola, Pepsi and such. This bombarding is there for you to remember the name of the company. And then when you are ready to purchase either go for it or try to find some sponsored segment again for that discount. Individual conversions are less important than the long term mindshare.
Advertising being so lucrative and Implicit endorsement being what it is (plus opportunity cost) means that any public person recommendation might as well be treated as advertisement, so you may only trust the advice of those you know directly
That's probably for the better, but it also means that you'll have blindsposts
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 about figuring out where to chop off the tail. You’ve got your core 15% who you can send an email to saying “buy this”, and they will, 95% of the time - then segments step down in terms of convertibility until you’re down to 0.01%, at which point you’re usually going to get more people irritated by the marketing than you will sales.
The marginal cost of most marketing is very low - that’s to say, to reach 10,000,000 eyeballs doesn’t cost much more than to reach 10,000 - unless you’re doing paper catalogues, which is a whole other thing, most of your cost is up front, artwork, direction, whatever - so it makes sense to shoot for a bigger basket and get some bycatch.
Me - I resolutely refused to do any marketing for our business. Mistake, bluntly, as I let my emotions get in the way of rationality. Had anyone other than a clique of medium-large UK merchants ever heard of us, the business might have gone somewhere - instead after a decade we were trundling along in a comfortable rut and I ejected.
So, you hate it, I hate it, it’s misleading, it’s annoying, it’s a negative signal to us - but it works on most people.
> 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.
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
I stopped using this because I found out that I want that custom thumbnails and tittles as a signal of quality. Many thumbnails will signal which creator made the vid at first glance, where before I sometimes missed video from channel I have involuntary vocal reaction whenever they release a new vid (exurb1a).
Its also very helpfull for determining the quality of the video itself. Usually from that one picture I can tell that even if the video is about a topic I'd like to know more about, I definetly dont want to learn in that specific video. Removing this signal made me waste way more time in videos that seemed good from the tittle alone.
I used to use it, unfortunately it doesn't work so well with titles. It lowercases unknown acronyms and initcaps all words even in languages which Do Not Use This Capitalization For Titles.
Oh my god, what a difference it made. Thanks for sharing this. I do wish this could have just been a feature tacked on the Sponsor Block extension, especially considering it has features which rely on that data, but otherwise it's perfect.
For those that haven't watched the demo video: for videos that don't have community thumbnails or titles it has options allowing it to automatically pick a random (non-sponsor segment) screenshot and automatically clean up the title (remove emoji, fix capitalization).
"DeArrow is an open source browser extension for crowdsourcing better titles and thumbnails on YouTube. The goal is to make titles accurate and reduce sensationalism. No more arrows, ridiculous faces, and no more clickbait.
...
There are currently 64,634 users who have submitted 230,432 titles and 107,027 thumbnails."
Yeah, Clickbait Remover extension is similar. It's available for all main browsers and replaces the egregious thumbnails with a frame from either the first, middle, or last part of the video. I like it!
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
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).
> 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.
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 when it is at the very end), some do big but informative sponsored sections where the presenter interviews the business.
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.
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.
Yes, the alternative to ads is paying. As someone mentioned in this thread: It's kinda shit that these sponsored segments don't get skipped automatically if you pay for premium.
I am too greedy to pay for premium tbh and as long as µblock works with the normal ads, I'm fine. If it stops working one day, I'll probably rather stop using youtube instead of paying for premium
Just to make you aware, they added pseudo SponsorBlock on TY Premium.
If you "skip" 10 seconds on a sponsored segment a "skip to next part button" will appear on screen to the end of the sponsored segment (it does not use chapters and it does not appear 100% of times)
Some alternatives include merchandise, sponsorships (Patreon etc), tipping, and organic engagement / sharing so that more people can find them and give them money.
> 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.
And he can choose which content creators he watches based on how obtrusive their monetization strategies are, that is also very much part of capitalism.
I wasn't arguing in favor of SponsorBlock, I was stating that you have to option to not watch the content at all if the sponsorship is so annoying you'd consider installing something like SponsorBlock.
Also extra useful: iSponsorBlockTV. You run it in on a server and you can set it up with the YouTube app on all your commercial streaming boxes that don't support browser extensions.
i have been using sponsor block firefox extension for some time. It's incredible. Youtubers I watch (LTT, marcushouse) are typically shilling crap like vpn or those stupid ray bud things.
Youtube is not usable without adblocker and annoying without sponsorblock
Those channels are essentially informercials with brand deals. Rather than skipping sponsors, I dumped them altogether. LTT content especially has become far more vacuous over time. It's as if the videos are a vessel around which to place ads.
I used to watch LMG all the time, then it felt like the content turned to infomercials.
Then that whole drama thing went on and the fact that (in a leaked video) they had a manager say "you gonna get up on that table and dance for me" at the end of a HR meeting with zero reactions aside from laughing led me to fully block all of their channels.
To me it's clear they have an internal culture problem that came along with the money.
For anyone that watches a lot of YouTube I also highly recommend the "Tweaks for YouTube" extension, it's totally transformed my watching experience and fixes a lot of the little nits I have with the facebook UI and algorithmic feeds.
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.
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. There's no hiding behind the algorithm or Google or whatever, they have to actually read off the advertisement. I find the human in the loop serves as a valuable filter on what gets advertised (at least on the channels I follow).
* The best creators actually make the ad worth watching. See Terrible Writing Advice for an example. I don't always watch the ad, but I sometimes do because it's just fun.
In general I agree that ads are bad in all their forms, but sponsor reads are one of the least offensive items in a bad genre.
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.
> "If you're watching this educational video you might like Brilliant"
I think there is a nuance. If there is a video that does this for 5 seconds in a 15 minute video, to sell a product they really know and like, and that is strongly related to the content, then sure.
But shilling random products? perhaps even "crap products" (you know exactly which ones: gambling, crypto-related, low quality SaaS...) and doing it for more than a tiny mention? This is basically the reinvention of ad funded TV, only the productions are crap in comparison and the regulation is non existent.
So in that case, sorry, I'm happy to both watch your content with skipped ads, enjoy the content, and see your content disappear because your monetization fails.
> I noticed you were searching for shoes the other day, so here's a Nike ad
That's not native advertising. Native advertising is when you write an article about a subject just to shill a product.
On YouTube it's somebody saying they've been using Ground News to do research for the video, or that security it's important, then transitioning to a NordVPN ad. You're looking up to somebody for information, but then they turn into a psychopath for 2 minutes to push vitamin supplements when they damn well know you can just eat better instead.
While I agree with the sentiment, this point I highly disagree with. At least sponsor segments are (at their face) transparent. I'm sad that there's many disingenuous products and misinformation in these segments, but at least you know it is an ad. On the other hand, native advertising has all those same bad things but additionally tries to deceive you into believing it isn't an ad.
Analogously, I'd be upset if someone handed me a glass of piss when I asked for something to drink. But at least I can recognize it and turn it down. On the other hand, if you hand me a glass of piss and actively take efforts to make it look, taste, and appear like water, al while telling me it is water, sure, I probably won't be upset because I don't know. But dear god... if I find out... Well, I don't think there are many reasons that someone should be punched in the face, but that doesn't mean there are zero reasons to...
Deception is so much worse.
Btw: check out ReVanced[0]. You can rebuild the YouTube APK (and others) to integrate adblock and sponsor block. All optional too! Unlike pihole, it'll actually achieve that.
Using yt-dlp to download video files is great too because it has support for sponsorblock[1] which will then automatically remove the segments you choose from the file.
For anyone using an Android phone, the ReVanced[1] patches for the YouTube app (formerly just YouTube Vanced) applies both an adblock and SponsorBlock, on top of various other convenience features. You'll need to provide your own YouTube APK file to patch.
I'll never go back to using non-Vanced YouTube ever again.
Advertisements are a blight on this world. They are the reason for marketing and sales budgets being quadruple that of engineering and UI/UX budgets, the whole 'form before function' thing, and enshittification in general.
The only thing that moved me on from using (Re)Vanced was setting up my own Invidious instance, and using the Clipious app (F-Droid store) to access it.
Clipious, by default, connects to public instances of Invidious, so you can try it out without having to setup your own instance.
Has the installation gotten easier? Last time I checked I needed to find a speccific version apk of youtube app itself that revanced patcher patches before installing. Too many steps to make way too often.
The last time I patched my app was several months ago, and it's still running fine. I do have to patch about twice a year and it's a five-minute affair of getting the correct version, going to APKMirror and downloading the corresponding version of YouTube, and patching it with the latest app.
Please if you report segments, use a correct type!
I’ve seen enough segments to be marked as ads when they are self-promotion and self-promotion when they are barely promotion and more like further exploration info.
It's pretty inevitable when you have stuff like this that "ads" devolves into "the boring parts". It's all volunteer driven and there's way too many videos to moderate, so it is what it is.
I suspect if I was creating videos and putting them on YouTube, the best way to make SponsorBlock obsolete would be to put a banner on my video that lasted the duration of my video.
You’d then need to create a new type of in-video adblocker that displayed an overlay to cover the advertisement, since you could no longer block it by timestamp.
That may sadly be the next step if this does become prolific enough for ads to stop sponsoring individuals. A race to the bottom of quality against consumers who want free stuff and content creators who want to pay rent.
Personally I just stop watching videos and entire channels with sponsored segments. If they are okay with shilling some crappy product for a little cash I don't trust them not to sell out or be deceptive in less obvious ways as well.
I also feel it's annoying that videos have become so long to cram in more ad breaks. It's not that I'm "tiktok generation that only can consume short content", but some things just aren't warranted a 15+ minute video. I'm interested, but not that interested. Sorry Steve Mould, Veritasium etc., I love your videos, but many of them could have been a few minutes long
Revanced with sponsorblock is the best method of watching youtube on mobile without ads. I think their is an ethical question about supporting creators, so I think if you do use an adblockwr and sponsorblock you should consider donating directly to creators you watch.
I like the technical side of such projects, because I'm a dev. I am also a creator and I am always conflicted when see such tools, because it does affect the bottom line of other creators.
I hate the very idea of "content creation" for its own sake, so this is perfect. Youtube was a million times better when it was people uploading quirky and informative videos about stuff they actually cared about, as opposed to soullessly shilling "content" dominating the recommendations no matter how much you try to convince the algorithm you aren't interested.
A hundred times this. I'd go so far as saying I'd trade the 2024 media landscape for the 2014 one in a heartbeat. And honestly, I'd also trade that one for the 1994 media landscape. "Content creators" are the worst thing to happen to media in 50 years.
maybe my viewing habits are not much different from the contributors, but i am very impressed with the effectiveness of the community effort here.
i have seen some cases where videos get the right tagging within minutes of going live. almost suggesting that the creators might be secretly doing the tagging for us!
from further digging, it appears that the initial community efforts have also helped develop a neural network based approach (https://github.com/andrewzlee/NeuralBlock). this appears to be the top current contributor according to the leaderboard (https://leaderboard.sbstats.uk/), with almost 8x the contributions to the next submitter, and ~1.6% of total submissions.
regardless of your moral stand on this, a very impressive collection of open-source efforts!
i've gotten used to having no ads thanks to Firefox with uBlock Origin and SponsorBlock that it became painful when i try to browse the web on others' computers
SponsorBlock is a godsend when watching Linus Tech Tips where it feels like it's 80% ads and 20% content
for other YouTubers, i find that their ads are actually useful if they're relevant to the video's content. for example, i discovered Boot.dev when i was watching bigboxSWE
Ads are just going to migrate into the context via bugs or in video popups/banners like we now have on cable and network TV in the US. Of course this won't reduce ad breaks at all.
Skipping is not anonymous by default: "So, if you watch a video, and it does have segments, and you do skip a segment, then the server does get access the that segment ID, which is directly linked to the video."
What do you mean by "not anonymous" here? Obviously the server will receive what video you are looking at, as well as anything it can deduce from your request (such as IP) in order to work. Whether it just gets the video (required to work at all) or an individual segment (not quite required but could lessen the payload size) doesn't matter for the level of anonymity does it?
1) if I skip ads on a video via Smart Tube Next, does this directly reduce the creator's income?
2) why do creators ask for likes and subscribe, does this directly increase income?
1) probably not directly. Eventually the advertisers might notice a decrease in effectiveness lower their investment in that area (either by lowering the amount they are willing to give the creator for a sponsored segment or not doing sponsored content entirely). Eventually if they think the ROI isn't there they will reduce their spend.
2) You have to feed the algorithm beast to be successful. Even channels with high subscriptions still get a tremendous amount of views from YouTube's recommended algorithm. One big part of that algorithm is "Engagement" which includes the number of subscribers, likes, and any other engagement on the video (such as comments, which is why you'll see a lot of comment-bait questions in videos now like (if you disagree let me know in the comments).
One issue with SponsorBlock is that people use skip to highlight[0] on music, which should be illegal. To me there often is no highlight for music. You need to hear the first part of the piece in order to enjoy the second. And people have different views on what counts as the highlight. I don't even like seeing the skip to highlight color on the scrub bar in videos that are just music. Skip non music[1] is good though.
When people Listen to Giorgio by Moroder, but they skip the "boring talking part". Really shows the kind of respect today's people have for the pioneers. Sometimes I'll just loop the introduction as motivation (still has a really good beat!).
But yea, reason #2 for not wanting to use SponsorBlock. I have niche tastes, I don't trust others to tell me what's "the bad parts".
You can just turn that off in the options including the marker on the seek bar.
Also when it is bad don't hesitate to downvote. The database is only that good because of user feedback (and some anti-botting measures). You can check hidden segments and votes here: https://sb.ltn.fi/
I think that turns off the skip to highlight everywhere, right? I still want to see skip to highlight in non music videos. Also, looking at the use cases on the wiki for highlight, musics should not be allowed
> Skipping to the point/most important part of the video
Skipping to the part of the video referred to by the title
Skipping to the part of the video referred to by the thumbnail
Skipping to the part of the video referenced from a preview/teaser at the start of the video
There is no "most important part" of a piece of music. And the last three don't apply at all.
uBlock Origin, Consent-o-Matic to automatically decline cookies, SponsorBlock and Argentinian VPN for $2/month YouTube premium makes the internet usable again.
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.
I think this is inevitable, but I’m also disappointed. I run an adblocker because deep tracking is invasive, consent can’t freely be given for every website, a significantly detracted user experience from relayouts while reading, huge performance costs, and bandwidth usage.
We’re seeing here on this thread that it is in fact that people just don’t want ads. These content creators need to be paid somehow.
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, in any other context the immorality is clear. If a guy buys a woman a vodka soda at a hotel bar, can she accept it and return to her table, or does she need to listen to his offer to come up to his room before she can drink it?
Even without such a hardline stance on advertising: there is simply no other way to avoid sponsored YouTube segments despite being a YouTube Premium subscriber and sponsoring a channel directly. Maybe not everyone agrees with the former but I've not seen a single debate against the latter.
It's not necessarily an either-or situation. It can be privacy, annoyance, and a general lack of effectiveness.
Advertising isn't just the art of selling a product, it's the art of getting past our normal social defense that someone is trying to take our money, our attention, and our time. Advertising is necessarily adversarial, and everyone's tolerance for it is going to be unique depending on how heavily they rely on free resources, but it is a necessary unpleasantry at its best.
If I could even recall the exact number of times an advertisement of any type appealed to me in the last 20 or more years, it would amount to less than the fingers on my hand. I used to welcome all of Google's advertising tracking and relevance-seeking as the best version of advertising out there, but even that resulted in unimpressive and less than meaningful ads. If Google can't advertise something useful to me, then I have zero qualms about walking by, palm facing them in refusal.
Because of these product failures, and because it is unwise to trust a big company with all of your personal data, I rarely desired to be advertised to at all.
Individual content creators have the opportunity to give me a chance with something unique that they know that their viewers would be interested in because they (hopefully) relate to their audience much more than a faceless corporation, and can present a product in its best, most relevant light.
But if that content creator is trying to sell me a Scandinavian VPN service or a game of legendary shadows, you can bet I have zero interest.
All this may change as GenAI-driven methods may key in on relevant interests based on what I wish to share about myself. I'm hoping that Apple's Intelligence systems will end up preserving privacy as well as driving a more effective ad model.
Yes, it has nothing to do with privacy. The opposite is maybe true in that case (i.e. google can probably see my usage of sponsorblock in the access logs, which makes it simpler for them to identify me).
But I do use it. I don't watch video clips very often. When I did, most of the times it was disappointing waste of time. Conference talks are the most obvious exception that come to my mind, and they don't interrupt their talk with sponsor ads.
Once something is in YT (or any other big tech silo), I'm completely outside of charity or goodwill mode. It's basically like sth broadcasted by a random tv station for me. I maybe consume it, but I'll not start thinking how I can support them. The 'free web' that I'd explicitly try to support does not happen in big tech's walled gardens.
Btw: Are there any 'good' sponsors in YT? I suspect, a company that sponsors YT channels is by definition suspect. Just because the target audience doesn't really ask for more. They spend hours each day in a loop of mostly pointless 'subscribe, like me, follow me, comment below, $SPONSOR, ...' and always the big show without any actual substance in the end.
I get where you're coming from but consider this: using an adblocker like ublock isn't only about digital privacy.
Many people, myself included, dislike being advertised to in general.
Especially in the real world I think ads are a blight, and so do the Swiss [1].
I do use sponsor block myself, though I have it disabled on certain channels because they actually show decent sponsors, like things that their audience might actually be interested in and they're not complete lies.
But there is absolutely no positive impact on my life from seeing the 624th ad for a VPN to "protect myself online".
> Unless blocking ads has nothing to do with privacy and is just an annoyance with ads...
there were some comments in another post that went so far as to want all advertising banned. So for some people it truly is just "skip all annoyances, consume for free". And I see takes in this thread about how apparently everyone should be making videos as a passion/hobby.
It's either brash overrreactions, naivete on societal structures, or simply being stuck in a tech bubble (where our labor only indirectly produces value, compared to the visualizations or art or other content leveraged by tech. Hence why many can give it away).
I first started to block ads for privacy and to prevent those that takes over the screen, but once you have blocked ads once, you start to enjoy the actual peace and ability to concentrate.
Plus ads are for shitty products, since good products end up selling through recommendations and reviews.
How do those recommenders find out about a product in the first place? Advertising and PR is how that happens unless a person happens to be friends with the owner.
Advertising facilitates discovery, reviews and recommendations facilitate sustained growth.
Apparently the average distance between any two Facebook users is less than 5, and that distance is presumably lower when you restrict to smaller localities like a country or city, so assuming that's a good measure of social connectedness, I'd expect news to travel fast if there's something interesting to say.
Somehow I doubt uBlock Origin or SponsorBlock run ads, for example, yet here we are all knowing about them, and allegedly somewhere around 1/3 of Internet users have an ad blocker.
It is not a free web if the creators I watch are being paid off to promote and never criticize corpos in their industry.
Block all ads of all kinds. I do not want to watch advertizer os sponsor friendly creators. I want people talking to me honestly like they might off camera.
We must switch to micro transaction pay-per-view model like LBRY to eliminate all ads and ensure creators get paid better without having their integrity compromised by corpo sponsors.
Microtransactions won't fix this, for the same reason that paid cable channels and newspapers still show ads. The temptation to double-dip is too great.
First, it can be unproductively applied to any monetization system - you can always say that the temptation will still exist to double-dip.
Second, because it's ignoring the fact that if you want to get rid of ads, you have to replace them with something else.
And third, it's only partially true - microtransactions will make the ad problem better, because ad display by small creators is partially driven by the need to make a living. Once that living is met, the pressure to also display ads gets significantly reduced.
> First, it can be unproductively applied to any monetization system - you can always say that the temptation will still exist to double-dip.
That's capitalism. The Uber app was a straightforward experience, until they started loading it up with ads and tip screens. Paid Hulu and Netflix tiers have ads too, when previously they didn't.
If that's a "terrible argument", there should be numerous counterexamples of companies doing the opposite.
That's an utterly meaningless statement. You haven't even defined "capitalism", let alone what it means for something to "be" capitalism. This is political dog-whistling, the opposite of any rational argument.
> The Uber app was a straightforward experience, until they started loading it up with ads and tip screens. Paid Hulu and Netflix tiers have ads too, when previously they didn't.
This is intentionally deceptive and misleading. Uber is the only one of these that is actually correct, and it's a morally bankrupt company in the first place. Hulu and Netflix, on the other hand, have tiers that don't have ads, which is objectively not double-dipping.
> If that's a "terrible argument", there should be numerous counterexamples of companies doing the opposite.
First, no, that's false. There are many reasons why counterexamples would be rare or nonexistent - most obviously, because customers used to getting a free product tend to be extremely unhappy if you now tell them that they have to pay.
You also ignored every one of my points, which soundly rebutted your argument, and explained why it was bad - that your argument is utterly unrelated to microtransaction systems in particular, that you still have to have a alternative monetization system for when ads are removed, and that microtransactions will make the ad problem better.
Second, there are numerous counterexamples of companies that charge consumers directly without double-dipping - Google One, Dropbox, Remember the Milk, World of Warcraft, LegendKeeper, ChatGPT, most video games, Notion, Slack, etc.
Third, there are specific examples of companies moving away from ad-supported models to paid subscription models (without keeping ads), which is likely what you were trying to claim that "double-dipping" was: Medium, Evernote, and the New York Times, despite the aforementioned extreme aversion of consumers to starting to pay for something that they previously got for free.
>there are numerous counterexamples of companies that charge consumers directly without double-dipping - Google One, Dropbox, Remember the Milk, World of Warcraft, LegendKeeper, ChatGPT, most video games, Notion, Slack, etc.
That's really your best list?
- Google constnatly double dips. They were cuaght not too long ago scanning Drive folders for potential Gemini use. Slack just had this discussion as well.
- WOW charges subscriptions and for cosmetics in game. That's how more and more video games are trying to recoup costs. DLC, microtransactions, battle passes, NFTs, etc. You can avoid most of that if you're indie, but that's the AAA market.
- ChatGPT is in market capture mode right now in a very hot market. It's going to pull a google in 5-10 years if it's still dominant. I would bet my bottom dollar on that one.
>there are specific examples of companies moving away from ad-supported models to paid subscription models (without keeping ads)
And they are double dipping on their own services by selling to AI to train their data. It won't be ads for you today. It probably will be tomorrow. If the goal is to minimize annoyance, this is honestly worse than double charging.
We're doomed without a fundamental shift in how society consumes content.
There are dozens more that you can find easily with a quick search, and these alone support my point.
> Google constnatly double dips
Sure, maybe they're not the best choice. Let's use Apple instead.
> Gemini
> And they are double dipping on their own services by selling to AI to train their data
Other forms of double dipping than ads aren't on topic, relevant, or productive for this thread which was specifically about micro transactions not replacing ads because of double dipping. (yes, the problem is real - see later)
> WOW charges subscriptions and for cosmetics in game
Also off topic, but here I don't even see a problem. Unlike ads being involuntarily shoved down your throat, you're not compelled to buy cosmetics.
> It won't be ads for you today. It probably will be tomorrow
This is very speculative, and not supported by the hundreds of SaaS products that do not, even those that have been around for years.
> We're doomed without a fundamental shift in how society consumes content.
Like microtransactions?
Moreover, none of this addresses my points that if you get rid of ads (or user data harvesting), you still have to replace it with something else, and that utx will reduce the pressure to do these other things.
Sure, ultimately you'll need regulation to get rid of user data harvesting, and maybe ads too, but I'm confused as to why "double dipping" is being brought up as an argument against utx after those things are gone - they're almost orthogonal.
LegendKeeper will never have ad placements because of how ugly they are. Personally I wouldn’t be able to tolerate an ad messing up the flow of our designs and user focus, lol. Idk how others do it; we also never relied on ads in the first place so maybe that makes it easier.
YouTube (and Google's advertising platform as a whole) literally advertises investment scams, allows deepfakes, and has been known to have ads that link to fake bank websites and contain malware.
There is no advertising on the internet that doesn't have potential issues because at least the dominant advertising platforms (Google, Meta) work at a scale that cannot satisfactorily filter for the kind of things I've mentioned above.
Do you want your kids or parents or grandparents exposed to that kind of advertising?
Also, the "free web" is a thing that already existed. Advertising was an add-on, not a core component.
With sponsorships I think people are just annoyed by them being repetitive. There are maybe ten companies that seem to sponsor every YouTube channel and podcast, and there's only so many times you can get pitched the same wallet or VPN before you develop the instinct to skip ahead.
But before we skip ahead, let me tell you about this comment's sponsor, Squarespace. From websites and online stores to marketing tools and analytics, Squarespace is the all-in-one platform to build a beautiful online presence and run your business. Use code "eyeroll" to get 10% off your first order.
Sponsorblock is not as blunt a tool as people make it here. You can only block specific type of ads and you can whitelist whole channels which I do for some niche channels I subscribe to. In Android, I use Tubular [1], the NewPipe fork that integrates Sponsorblock and ReturnYoutube Dislike. My only additional request in this awesome app is if we can download the video after snipping out the sponsor block sections.
[1] https://github.com/polymorphicshade/Tubular
>and you can whitelist whole channels which I do for some niche channels I subscribe to
Honestly, these are ads that actually support the content I watch. So that's why I keep the adroll by default. AFAIK Google isn't getting any cut of it and that makes me feel good.
I don't understand this sentiment. Are you buying a product with a tracking code? If not, it's not supporting anyone, and watching a recording of a sales pitch you're not interested in is just wasting your time.
The YouTuber gets the ad money, even if the video is not watched. Though that does not mean you should skip the ad, because the videos have heatmaps and no one would advertise if the segment was always "cold". Though what the OP is saying is you can send strong signals (to both the advertiser AND the YouTuber) as to what ads you're willing to watch and not. In fact, in this way, it is a great tool for making a more efficient market as it increases information quality. But only under the assumption it is both pervasive and not used bluntly.
If you're not interested in the advertisement, then you're creating a less efficient market by signaling that you are. So you ought to skip past it or block it in that case. And if you're not interested in any advertisements, the market is more efficient when you block them all. Or just run adnausium if you're basically just trying to help creators scam advertisers.
Remember in all advertising funded models that you are always the product. The market is for "high quality" (i.e. profitable) viewers, not high quality videos.
You're missing a critical part: there's additional information we can communicate. And that's what this is all about, what information is being communicated. The inefficiency is lack of perfect information.
If you indiscriminately watch or block that is a signal. Watch communicates potentially more because there's a secondary effect of some of those people buy the product. But by indiscriminately watching or not watching, we provide information about an interpolation along what was binary before. It is more complex to read, but now we can communicate that we don't dislike this add more than our willingness to support the channel. And on top of that, again our conversion rate. In a way, the discriminating information tells us something about the likely conversion rate. This is just more information, though that doesn't mean we are good at measuring it.
Yes, but profits aren't the only thing people care about. At least not all people. Money is still a proxy for something more abstract.To make it clearer, there are in fact ads that I do enjoy. This is true for all of us because an ad is so vaguely defined. During a political campaign I appreciate some ads because I want to know the candidates positions, when they are debating, and so on. Too much of it pisses me off, but that's different.
I also like ads that make me aware of certain things that provide utility to my life, but maybe not yours and this can be based on timing.
So stop rejecting this and recognize that these are all attempts at communicating these other factors. It's another variable in a system of equations.
Adnausium isn't making the market more efficient. It's wasting everyone's time and bandwidth.
> It's wasting everyone's time and bandwidth.
No, that's what ads are doing. And not just your computers bandwidth but also your mental bandwidth. Fuck ads.
Right, I said run it if you want to help creators scam advertisers. That's more or less what you're going for if you're not interested in something, but you believe your "I watched the ad" signal helps the creator negotiate with advertisers.
It's reducing the advertiser's returns on their investments. Reduce it to zero or negatives and they will stop advertising. That's world changing technology.
There's no bigger waste of bandwidth than ads, by the way. Ads are noise that's deliberately added to the signal just because it makes somebody somewhere money. These are actually the most charitable words I can use to describe ads.
What's the point of this? Nobody's getting a cut unless you use the affiliate link, and it's in the description anyway. You're just watching your favourite creator say how much they love ExpressVPN through gritted teeth.
CC's get paid for the sponsorship on top of any affiliate links. The RAID ads are the most obnoxious thing ever, but you dig through and realize even a tiny 2k sub channel can get a few hundred out of it (at this level you are getting maybe a few dozen dollars a month in YT ads) and you completely realize why they "sell out". I can only imagine the kind of cash moderate sized YouTubers (the 100-300k range) can get (i know a 400k YouTube disclosed half their revenue came from ad rolls, and their revenue was enough to live humbly.
>You're just watching your favourite creator say how much they love ExpressVPN through gritted teeth.
Which one of us likes every aspect of our job? Or every order/request of a customer? Gotta do what you gotta do.
Why do you feel better about using Google's platform without paying (by watching ads) than about consuming someone's content without paying?
I do pay so the point is moot. But for the exercise:
Google has probably already well overextended it's reach and made thousands off data without my consent. And will probably make more without my consent from Gemini. They have so many cash glows that I couldn't care less about plugging one of the holes up. They've long burned their good will points.
Meanwhile, I am an aspiring indie dev and I've overtime gotten rough ideas of how and what other creators on YT are paid. I honestly feel bad knowing some of these people arguably work 5 times harder than I do selling their brands while making maybe half (if they are a really established creator, maybe 500k+ subs) of what I make just walking to my computer and typing into a codepad. Some can barely afford their rent despite this hard work, and potentially hundred of hours of entertainment given to me. And those are "big" (but not Huge) creators. Someone with 50-100k subs may still not be able to do their work full time, or they do it on the very edge of viability.
I can't do much. I subscribe to some crowd funds, but not all. being able to at least watch their ad rolls is some form of appreciation in my mind. So call it guilt or call it an odd emotional attachment.
I just want to try and pay it forward, knowing I may be on that seat one day.
> without paying
Attention is not a valid currency or payment method. Their service is literally free of charge. They did it that way hoping we would look at the ads. We're not obligated to do so. They have only themselves to blame for their risky business model that gambles on the idea that people might look at irrelevant content they didn't ask for.
They need to charge us up front if they want us to pay. If they send us ads, we'll delete them before they're shown. Nothing they can do about it. And we won't lose a second of sleep over it.
Why not just donate to the creators you like instead of letting them or a third party psychologically manipulate you into giving money to that third party who in turn pay some small part of that money to fund the creator.
I try (tried) to. Money's tight now, but on the heyday of 2022 I was giving at least $5/month to 10 different creators. I'd say only 2 of those were even for a specific reward, 3 of then explicitly had no rewards.
But I'm subbed to 30 channels and probably "watch every video but am not subbed" to 10-15 others. I'm not quite at a point where I can support everyone I want to support.
yt-dlp has a sponsorblock integration that removes the segments from the downloaded file.
Yes I use it in Desktop/laptops, but integrating it in Android through termux was a pain. I recently found out about [Seal](https://f-droid.org/en/packages/com.junkfood.seal/) which seems to provide a front end for yt-dlp in Android. Might try this out soon.
I first found Seal which uses arai2 under the hood. After getting used to Seal, I had to start using yt-dlp with aria2 on linux as well. The only nitpick is that you can't get multiple parallel downloads with Seal.
I use Seal all the time when people send me links to videos on social media, since, lacking the apps and accounts, I can't reliably or conveniently get them to play at the present stage of enshittification of those platforms. Seal is great! Definitely give it a try.
You can also mark segments in the downloaded files with that combination of tools, which is useful and non-destructive.
Check out https://github.com/kieraneglin/pinchflat or https://github.com/meeb/tubesync You have to install them on a server or desktop, but they can both snip out sponsored sections from videos.
I also use Tubular on Android. The one caveat is that Youtube changes seem to break the app on a regular basis so you do need to periodically return to the Github repo to update it.
That sounds useful, thanks! Odd that it's not on any of the stores (eg F-droid).
It is in the Izzyondroid repo: https://apt.izzysoft.de/fdroid/index/apk/org.polymorphicshad...
I can also highly recommend the app sponsored by Louis Rossmann: Grayjay. It can do everything that Tubular does and much, much more. It also uses a plugin architecture so you don't have to wait for an update of the app when Youtube blocks it again. https://grayjay.app/
It's also on the Play Store but without any plugins due to Google policy.
Thank you! I've added the repo and will look at Grayjay now.
I've been using NewPipe X which is very similar, but now has comment reply viewing, which I really value. Does Tubular have that now?
What's comment reply viewing? Do you mean viewing the replies to a comment because Tubular can do that.
Yes, they added comment replies functionality a little while ago.
As a YouTuber, I’m conflicted about this. My main channel (non-tech) is small, but is monetised, and YouTube see fit to throw me a _very_ variable amount of money every month. CPMs are down right now so revenue has tanked along with it, it’ll pick back up at some point, but the variability is itself the pain point. My videos are relatively expensive and time consuming to make, but people seem to find them useful, and even enjoyable. The occasional (relevant) sponsor read or similar has been a huge help in providing some stability in the past, and I know for many channels it’s the main source of income since YPP revenue share can be so volatile.
I do worry that if this takes off it will just result in those sponsors pulling their budgets for this type of advertising, and it’ll be another nail in the coffin for creators. Sure many of us also do patreon etc but that’s never really sat right with me personally (and see also the post on HN just today about Apple coming for a revenue split there for another creator-hostile storm brewing).
On the other hand, I totally get the hatred of “the usual suspect” sponsors (VPNs, low-quality learning platforms etc) that get done to death because of their aggressive sponsor budgets and not-unreasonable deals. Those get shoehorned into a ton of videos and it’s a shame, but a blunt instrument like this is likely to kill off sponsorships as a whole, not just those bad ones.
The thing that sucks is I pay for YouTube Premium to remove ads then youtubers always have sponsored segments. It makes my $20/mo useless because I'm spending time watching ads still. I don't have a solution I'm just stating my perspective on it.
That said, SponsorBlock has been around for years. I've been using it for as long as I can remember. Basically any decent-sized channel's videos already have the sponsored segment skipped. I'm not sure why someone just posted it but we're well beyond SponsorBlock "taking off".
Same feeling here. It's gotten twice as expensive, which is insane by itself. But worse is the jarring rotation of sponsored advertisers.
it's reminiscent of NASCAR. Or, like being a kid forced to watch advertising during TV breaks, wondering why the TV screen istrying to sell me cigarettes.
It's maybe a bit social-media-toxic to say that some youtubers are my "favorite people" in that i look forward to their takes on the topics they cover. I lose interest though when that youtuber presents to me an unprompted ad for my testicular health.
I have no solution for creators consumers or google :(
I always wondered why YouTube themselves didn't start restricting sponsored segments. I don't necessarily agree with the idea (not a big fan of how restrictive youtube already is) but I always thought it was odd they were ok with their premium offering being devalued by sponsored segments.
Someone spotted a "SKIP"-button for sponsored segments and posted about it on the LTT-subreddit: https://old.reddit.com/r/LinusTechTips/comments/1ekajmt/is_y...
I have YouTube Premium and on my phone I sometimes get a "Jump ahead" button that pops up on the bottom right corner when the video is in fullscreen. It doesn't just appear during sponsored segments but also during "less exciting" moments of a video like the introduction.
They just give you 10% of SponsorBlock so you dont get SponsorBlock :D
They could stop sponsored segments, but they couldn't stop creators and users from going to other platforms where they allow sponsored segments. They have far less control than e.g. Apple with the app store (where they literally can stop other app stores from ever coming into being, barring regulation that changes that).
> but they couldn't stop creators and users from going to other platforms where they allow sponsored segments
It's not like there are many viable competitors, at least for long form videos.
If youtube stopped allowing sponsored segments that puts pressure on the market to produce such a thing. Even now creators are trying to come up with alternatives. Nothing has panned out, but something like stopping sponsored segments could very well tip a large number of people who want to get paid to find another way to get paid.
So what, even despite high-profile creators such as Practical Engineering constantly pushing for Nebula (the largest of them), it's still a fraction of their YouTube following.
Most of the time, the complete content is a disguised AD anyway. Same for most hollywood movies.
People getting their own sponsors means Google doesn't need to increase rates to compensate creators. Who wouldn't take a deal for a 3rd party to pay part of your "employee" compensation if they were given a chance? Google still has plenty of sponsors going directly to them anyway.
> It's gotten twice as expensive, which is insane by itself.
No. Look, I'm not happy to pay more, but YT is really great. It's completely obviated the need to watch broadcast or cable TV for me (yes I know, sports...). They haven't enshittified it at all, and since I'm a music lover, I love that they include YT music (although I sorely miss its predecessor). There is the sum-of-human-knowledge and then some !! on youtube. it's absolutely worth what they charge. In fact, I dont know how they can even order enough storage to keep the thing running. tl;dr the features and content has grown proportionately with the price increase.
>They haven't enshittified it at all
really? There are entire posts dedicated to how many features Youtube cut removed, or messed up over the years. as a old school forum boomer I still hate that they changed from a nested comments section to "twitter feed of loose chains" over a decade ago.
I won't go on a whole rant on every little feature, but the service has definitely gotten worse. It just so happens that the tech core still works fine enough (smoothly watching videos on nearly any platform), and the business core is powered by user-generated content which is as good as you choose.
P.S. I sure do wish we got Youtube Premium Lite wasn't cancelled. I do just mostly want ad-free browsing. I can manage around offline/offscreen videos and no YT Music (also miss Google Play Music btw).
Cutting or removing features!= enshittification. To me that word means contracts with early cancellation fees, charging more for long form or educational content, pop-ups, rate limiting ( you get 10 vids per day on your free plan), charging to upload, billing authors for bandwidth used, and so on. I don't think you realize how good we have it.
Your definition slightly off. Here it is from the guy who coined the term:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/#hey-guys
> Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.
Removing features is absolutely part of enshittification.
>Then, they die.
Yeah, any day now YT is going to shut its doors.
You must have an incredible lack of imagination, the story of software is the story of mayflies.
> Or, like being a kid forced to watch advertising during TV breaks, wondering why the TV screen istrying to sell me cigarettes.
Cigarette commercials have been illegal since 1971.
Good to knoW that the entire world is under a single jurisdiction.
r/USDefaultism
Wow thanks for this
If your creators are also on Nebula ( https://nebula.tv , no affiliation other than being a former user) it may be worth considering.
The various creators I used to follow on Nebula have no ads at all in the videos published in Nebula, compared to those they post on Youtube. Not sure if its applicable for all creators on Nebula though.
> I'm not sure why someone just posted it but we're well beyond SponsorBlock "taking off".
Are we, though? Regular ad blockers are still only used by a minority of web browser users. I would be surprised if SponsorBlock has larger market share than that.
That's fair I just mean I was recommended it by someone and have recommended it to others. Mostly just expressing people know about it and it's been around a while not necessarily intending to assert that it's ubiquitous.
> That said, SponsorBlock has been around for years. I've been using it for as long as I can remember. Basically any decent-sized channel's videos already have the sponsored segment skipped. I'm not sure why someone just posted it but we're well beyond SponsorBlock "taking off".
I was gonna post a similar comment but with the opposite conclusion: SponsorBlock has been around for years, and the people who are really annoyed by sponsors are mostly already using it. Most of the rest of the population either doesn't mind sponsor segments (me) or isn't willing to go to the trouble of installing addons. Of course, there's always going to be people who become aware of it due to threads like this and start using it, but I'd venture that that's too small a number for worries about this suddenly "taking off".
I think, to some degree, this was my sentiment as well just not stated as clearly. I meant to say basically "SponsorBlock has been around and I know of a couple people who use it so it's taken off but hasn't caused any kind of revolution" but have been dealing with somethings in life and I think just was short with my explanation.
being around for years =/= mass awareness. Just look at Hacker News ;)
There is no perfect solution because the interests are diametrically opposed. Many CC's don't WANT to be a business, but if you want to work full time you need to be. Businesses' main incentive is to get max customers or max revenue, while a concumer's incentive is to get as much as possible for as little money as possible.
Ironically enough, the RAID SHADOW LEGENDS (since we're talking about the "usual suspects) financial model may be the best of both worlds, at the expense of some well off people (and some unfortunate addicts): have whales bankroll 80% of the game and subsize the free players. But that probably can't happen with 99.99% of video creators.
This is why I started using SponsorBlock. I've been a YouTube Premium subscriber since it first became available (when it was called YouTube Red), but I'm still inundated with long-form "ads" for Made In cookware and other such nonsense.
Exactly why I instantly stopped paying for Spotify. They even went so far as to have regular advertising before podcasts.
Not paying for shit like that, only because they put a clause in the TOS that says ad free only means ad free music.
I have no qualms using any ad blocking option available. And I am happily paying for creators using patreon or other means they provide.
Oh Spotify does not have ad free music and there is no subscription level that makes Spotify music free of advertisements.
They hunt me with banners and popups for random musicians almost every day.
What they provide is an ad free music "listening experience", meaning: it is not audio ads. It's a really sneaky and toxic product in that way.
Couldn’t agree more. Enshittification as a symptom of (hopefully) late stage ~~cancer~~ capitalism.
You can still manually skip the sponsored segments. That's not the case with most ads on YouTube, so your subscription is not worthless.
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 it turns into just another piece of formulaic slop.
But another reason why sponsor reads annoy me is that it breaks the youtube premium deal. I pay YT for an ad free experience. YT pays you more for my view than a 'free' watcher, and then you shove in ads anyway. Now I do get your argument that "it's not enough", but that does not change my end of the deal.
Idealy ad reads would be autoskipped for premium subscribers. If that meant premium being a bit more expensive, I would be fine with that personally.
I wish YouTube Premium (and honestly, Spotify too!) had a feature where I could voluntarily commit X additional dollars per month to be directly distributed to the creators I watch according to their share of my total watchtime, with some kind of manual opt-out button for individual videos/creators that I explicitly do not want to support. I am already a member of several Patreons but wish I could cast a bit of a wider support net for the people I watch enough-to-want-to-support-them-but-not-enough-to-join-their-Patreon, yknow?
>I could voluntarily commit X additional dollars per month to be directly distributed to the creators I watch according to their share of my total watchtime, with some kind of manual opt-out button for individual videos/creators that I explicitly do not want to support.
They halfway do this. The numbers are opaque but part of your premium is given to creators you watch, and that cut is based on your watch time, among other factors.
ofc I dobut we'd ever get that granular a control on CC's. As said in another reply, memberships are sort of that solution.
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Is that not just youtube "memberships" though? The creator can choose the cost and have multiple "tiers" - I don't think there's anything stopping them having a $1 "tip jar" tier.
Sure, it's not quite the same, but at some point of similar-enough the number of people who actually use each feature becomes vanishingly small and/or the cost of managing the extra option outpaces the income, and it's just not worth it.
Even then I've heard of some channels uploading ad-free versions of their videos for certain membership tiers.
This somewhat reminds me on the discussions around the Web Monetization API [1] a few years ago.
I still wish for a service that gives me access to all paywalled sites or a way to sending all websites I visit a little money in exchange for them not serving ads.
[1]: https://webmonetization.org/
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.
I've actually bought/planned to buy a few things that I was introduced to via YouTube sponsorships, but it's never been any of the generic YouTube sponsor merchandise. It's always something highly relevant to the topic of the channel, or even the specific video. Usually some sort of specialty tool.
but if the sponsorship is relevant it could be a conflict of interest for the editorial
> But another reason why sponsor reads annoy me is that it breaks the youtube premium deal.
I totally get that, and I feel the same way when I see yet another read as a viewer and premium subscriber.
I don’t really have an answer (and if I did, I’d be doing it already), but I will say that my (subjective, based on my ad placement strategy and viewer profile) experience is that premium views are worth less than non-premium - although YouTube cleverly don’t actually give me enough data to _know_ that as a fact (and it would go against their stated position, which I guess they would never do).
Linus Sebastian has said the exact opposite of that whenever he's discussed the breakdown of where the money that Linus Media Group makes comes from. Premium views are worth more than free views.
A game streamer I sometimes watch also said something similar - that "youtube premium" views are tracked separately and worth significant multiples per view compared to those that get ads.
They also said it isn't variable in the same way for what ads can get assigned to your content, or for "limited monetization" content (which apparently pretty much sets the ad income to zero).
Just a guess: maybe it depends by which vertical they’re in? Not all channels earn the same so many be there are cases where non-premium users are more valuable than premium ones?
If I remember correctly the numbers given were 6x more direct payouts for a premium view vs. a free view.
> blunt instrument like this is likely to kill off sponsorships as a whole
That's the dream. Ads are a poison and a blight.
Removing them is something many users, including me welcome. If one wants money for their videos, they're welcome to actually allow getting payments i.e. patreon, the "Youtube sponsorship"-thing.
It greatly depends on the audience, but for many cases, unfortunately, it's more likely the case that you are dreaming.
Typical income flows for streamers include:
1. Passive advertising from video and stream platforms (which many adblockers do block)
2. Active advertising via sponsorships (which SponsorBlock wants to block)
3. Live stream donations
4. Video/stream-independent donations, most usually via Patreon
5. Paid "premium" or behind-the-scene programmes (partly overlaps with video/stream-independent donations due to their obvious weaknesses)
6. Merchandises
And not all streamers can do them at once. Live stream donations only work for some genres of streaming and it is easy to stress audiences. Usual donations may or may not work, but it is usually thought to be weaker than live stream donations due to its passiveness (unless you come up with very different perks, but then your income is completely independent from streaming).
Many high-profile channels rely greatly on merchandises because it does have significant margins if you can keep launching enough of them, but they are especially risky when your channel and/or stream is not large enough. So smaller channels have traditionally relied on passive advertising, but its flaws are well known and discussed to the death by now. (If you need a list though, higher processing fees, prevalence of adblocking, generally too low income to be sustainable, extreme platform dependence etc.) This leaves active advertising as a compelling option for smaller streamers, at least for now.
While I do loathe most kind of advertising, active advertising like this is something I can (barely) tolerate because it is meant to be performed by streamers themselves, unlike passive advertising which rarely relates to the streamer or content itself. And I'm afraid that there doesn't seem to be any other viable option remaining. I can always skip an ad portion of a video if I do find it annoying anyway.
If blocking ads means for-profit video creators go out of business then so be it. There will always be those who do it because it is something they enjoy and usually that kind of content is more worthwhile anyway.
You are free to do so, but your claim won't work for most of my favorite creators and streamers. Thank you.
Sure, I totally get that. I’m no fan of being advertised to myself and as a premium subscriber I do find sponsor segments - especially poorly-places ones - just as annoying as everyone else when watching YouTube - which is why I said I was conflicted in my earlier comment.
However as I mentioned in another reply in this thread, removing routes to monetisation and devaluing content in general (by making it be effectively a loss-leader for value-add sponsorships or memberships) will only have the effect of making YouTube non-viable for many, and especially those who necessarily have higher production values to make better quality (I’m thinking more thoroughly-researched, more interesting, that sort of thing) content.
Making YouTube non-viable is the entire point. Google should not be the gatekeeper for the world's content, or get to decide who wins and loses in a rat race trying to keep up with algorithms built to keep users addicted to low quality advertizer friendly content.
The end game of ad blocking tech is to make ads a non viable source of revenue so creators will move on to ethical platforms like LBRY or peertube where creators are in charge again and users can pay them directly with no corrupt middle-men .
I would suggest being an early adopter on alternative platforms building a direct relationship with a more independent donation-motivated audience before everyone else does.
These are platforms with worse availability and worse affordances, ranging to nonfunctional once you're on a mobile device. Adblocking technology isn't going to make them better. Making them better is going to make them better, but the unit economics remain not in their favor.
A more likely future is less video rather than people move to PeerTube and shake an upturned hat for donations. Which doesn't bother me much, but is likely to invoke the FAFO gator on a lot of folks.
> A more likely future is less video
I would say less big budget video. If we're being honest, YouTube is essentially television at this point. Many YouTube views, maybe even most, don't go towards individual creators. They go to Studios and the Jimmy Kimmel's of the world.
If someone like boxxy is making videos with a potato cam on her bedroom floor, I don't think she necessarily cares much about the monetization.
That USED to be the entire draw and appeal of YouTube. Then monetization came and surprise! The platform changed to be more monetizable, i.e. watered down and corporate.
The problem is that "cheap video" still costs a lot of money to ship to consumers. Things like PeerTube get around this by just doing a bad job of it, but if you want things like traffic steering and adaptive bitrate (and you do, because if you don't have these things, you will annoy the audience and they will leave), you are going to Pay The Money.
> 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.
>You mean I could get a f...ing text again about things
Tone aside, we already do that... it's also monetized and being AI-slopified as we speak. Much faster than video.
in this scenario where videos become non-viable, people would ujst paywall their text like many journalists have resorted to. There's no free lunch these days.
Exactly that. But surprisingly, although I'd consider it as a trivial insight, we're living in a world that just doesn't want to understand that.
And while YT is a lot about casual nonsense, there are other big tech walled gardens, where content fights against some corporate-controlled algorithms, but the content is our entire public discourse nowadays. :( And people still do not want to understand what a terribly bad idea that is...
I'm not trying to be offensive or hostile but, as much as I value the higher-quality content on youtube, if youtube went back to being just a place people posted videos of themselves doing stuff instead of what effectively amounts to studios making youtube content, I'd consider that a win.
Again, not that your content isn't likely appreciated by your audience and valuable. I just miss the days of youtube just being a fun video platform instead of another TV channel.
> I just miss the days of youtube just being a fun video platform instead of another TV channel.
It's another effect of the economy. Programmers are traditionally well compensated, so they can use their free time literally giving away knowledge for others. Because they don't need to monetize that knowledge to survive.
Video editing: not so much. If you want more people just having fun you need some part of the economy making sure they pay rent. Hence, hustle culture. It'd still exist if everyone was comfy, but many people would instead focus on leisure over minmaxing money.
D'accord
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 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.
>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 video ads.
I’m not asking why it is. I’m asking why it should be.
Why what should be? Why platforms with money pay people with no money? Why platforms with no money shut down?
It's not a very fun answer. Google gets a lot of ads to pay then to shove ads down the consumer's throats, and they can do this with no risk of users migrating. They "should" get more money because they more effectly do this than news websites, which have failed to appeal to advertisers effectively enough.
I don't really know what to do with that answer, though. Accept I'm the minority that will subscribe to paid avenues to support creators (or even care about other creator's well beings?) and move on?
No I’m asking why we should look at people who make video on YouTube differently than any other type of creator who publish elsewhere.
The original post I was replying to said:
> However as I mentioned in another reply in this thread, removing routes to monetisation and devaluing content in general (by making it be effectively a loss-leader for value-add sponsorships or memberships) will only have the effect of making YouTube non-viable for many, and especially those who necessarily have higher production values to make better quality (I’m thinking more thoroughly-researched, more interesting, that sort of thing) content.
And my answer was that this is no different than any other type of creator online.
> I’m asking why we should look at people who make video on YouTube differently than any other type of creator who publish elsewhere.
I don't know who's "we" here. But that's simply psychological. You will look at [person who make lots of money] differently from [person who can barely cover rent], if only because the latter may need more help you may be able to give.
There's no "should" here. And influencers aren't limited to YouTube. all my answers come down to "because they are backed by a trillion dollar corporation"
>And my answer was that this is no different than any other type of creator online.
Maybe instead of "but no one else makes money" to drag down, we should change the lens to "let's reward other mediums for being high quality and throrougly researched" to boost up other mediums of creation.
Especially in a time where we are already getting so much slop and misinformation (and we're not even close to the worst of the storm). I'm sure you seen enough of the internet to know most people will just accept the slop and at best take years of introspection before they realize why quality matters (others never do).
Assuming when you say thoroughly researched, you're looking for high quality educational information, the highest quality videos are generally from a camera pointed at a blackboard/whiteboard recording a lecture that an expert was already going to give. Not a lot of production value necessary.
And I'll agree with you the day we all decide to pay a monthly fee that is big enough to support various websites and creators.
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.
The point is that's fine, and it is perfectly sustainable for people to do things they enjoy for free. It'd perhaps not be sustainable for someone to play video games as a full-time job, but maybe that's okay (or even desirable from a societal resource allocation standpoint)?
Simply make rent, housing, and food free. Then people need not make money for the majority of needs.
Indeed:
https://www.entrepreneur.com/business-news/what-is-gen-zs-no...
> According to a recent report by decision intelligence company Morning Consult, which surveyed over 2,000 adults in the U.S., 57% of Gen Zers said they'd be an influencer if given the opportunity, compared to 41% of adults from all age groups.
If true, possibly the most damning rebuttal of UBI proponents that there is.
I don't see how. They are young adults and of course they want to be [flashy job]. Some may do it out of passion, some will inevitably realize the platform exploits them and moves on so they can have stability, or pay rent. Trust me, I'm a game dev, the 2000's version of this, succeeded by the band musicians of the 90's/80's.
UBI would bring out more passionate people and not force the passionate but disheartened to drop out. meanwhile, the passionate who do stick it will optimize for money. So they can pay rent. Or worse, the unpassionate marketers take over and the discipline is reduced to slop (we've probably been here for ~10 years now).
Because they're saying if they could sustain themselves, they'd have their job be to... eat at restaurants, play video games, travel, try on clothes, wear makeup, etc. Basically be an exact conservative caricature of socialists.
The irony is that its a caricature of rich nepo babies under consumer capitalism vs socialism. In a pure socialist society (good example of this is US government or military jobs) you still work and there wouldn’t be such striking wealth inequality on display.
Having previously worked for the US government and knowing multiple people in the US military, there's both significant wealth inequality, and significant downgrades in quality of life compared to the private industry.
Sure, but then you're either not providing UBI (e.g. it is conditioned on working), or requiring forced labor so actual jobs are still done.
Jobs can still pay on top of ubi which would be enough incentive to hold them. You may as well ask why any navy cook would strive to be general when peeling potatos is less stress. The answer is also higher pay.
> A majority (53%) of Gen Zers surveyed considered influencing a respectable career choice, and a similar percentage would be willing to leave their current jobs if they could sustain their lifestyle as an influencer.
There's some wiggle-room on what "their lifestyle" means, but I doubt that the positive answer is biased toward e.g. HENRYs, and in fact it's likely biased in the other direction. If UBI can match whatever their current lifestyle is (or even exceed it, e.g. paying for a personal living space instead of roommates), then these people are essentially saying that they'd be happy not to work.
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.
I think that's fine, though. Maybe we should have different platforms. Maybe we have a platform just for people who post stuff out of love for their craft, and don't expect any sort of compensation. And then we have a platform for people who want to monetize, and the platform itself has a subscription fee that gets distributed to creators based on views, or... something. Anything, really.
Maybe this could all be YouTube, but creators decide on a per-video basis whether they're uploading publicly or only to paid viewers. I dunno, there are so many other models.
The current situation with YouTubers asking people to subscribe to their Patreon or whatever is so weird, since often they have to distribute patron perks outside of YouTube, or via unlisted links, or whatever. I assume Google hasn't built in paid subscriptions option for fear of anti-trust regulation, but an integrated solution like that would likely be better for both creators and viewers.
> Maybe we should have different platforms. Maybe we have a platform just for people who post stuff out of love for their craft, and don't expect any sort of compensation
There are plenty of alternative video hosting sites if you seek that. So, why are you still on Youtube?
>but creators decide on a per-video basis whether they're uploading publicly or only to paid viewers. I dunno, there are so many other models.
Sure, works for Onlyfans. they even blend in both subscriptions AND PPV behind the sub. And we know how quality that content is (no offense to the models there. but come on, I've seen $100 for 2 pictures, behind a $20/month subscription. You're not 2000's Brittany Spears).
> I assume Google hasn't built in paid subscriptions option for fear of anti-trust regulation
They do. CC's can enable Memberships and upload videos specific to that.
The issue is that
1. the memberships are small for many right now. Conseuqnces of being late to the party.
2. what's offered isn't necessarily going to be even higher quality than a public video.
3. ad rev from non-subbed views is still signifigant. Making a paid subscription for certain videos can mean brining in less money.
4. That lower view count affects your algorithm for growing.
It's complex. And sadly, outside of the OF model most people simply don't want to pay for content. They get bored and they move to Tiktok and that's the real endgame should YT fall.
They do have that functionality[0]. The elephant in the room to me when discussing these things is that people aren't wrong when they won't pay for most "content". The overwhelming majority of it brainless filler-noise that a lot of people probably only look at because they don't know what else to do with their time. If actually pressed to come up with how much they'd pay for it, they correctly come up with $0 as the answer. Unfortunately, they don't then figure that it's not worth their attention either.
[0] https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/7636690
If they want to make money, they are totally free to have a website hosting their content behind a paywall.
Than I can decide if their content is worth money to me (let me tell you: in 999 out of 1000 "creators" it isn't).
But I already pay for a few select content creators. And happily shell out more than I would pay YT for an adfree experience.
Spoilers: the 1 out of 1000's won't get your money either because of any number of arbitrary reasons unrelated to their craft that is conjured up.
- Slow website/video host? Great now they need to pay for a better host or pay a web dev to optimize their site.
- Not responive? now that dev/service needs more money.
- pay is too much (meanwhile they still can't even make minimum wage)? Well, their fault for valuing themselves over a McDonalds' employee
- they pivot to premium teaching and now are a "scam"? Why am I here, I can google and learn this for free on Youtube
You can't win with some people.
They receive my money, as I pay them the way they ask for it.
I am actually not responsible for their choices of how they spend it.
Everybody has to invest something to deliver their craft. A handyman needs tools and materials. A carpenter as well. They pay taxes. And so on. That’s the reality of doing business. If they are not business savvy enough to turn a profit. Not my responsibility.
That’s called free market capitalism by the way. Everybody is free to try to make money on their terms in any given environment. But nobody is entitled to actually make money. That’s how the market actually acts as an agent for economic and business evolution. Not the worst thing there is, given how well real existing socialism worked. I grew up next to the GDR. I know how "strong" their economy was. How successful their companies were.
Other aspects, like creating a social net to mitigate the worst effects of capitalism on the people is a topic for a different thread imho, though.
If you're a HN-er you should know the culture of HN is very old school and fringe mentality. E.g:
- Flip phones are celebrated in some threads because people don't want smart phones (extreme minority in real life)
- Disabling JS and pushing sites to go back to just raw HTML CSS (with some even not understanding why we need JS, extreme minority irl. IRL site owners care about attracting customers and the things they want to do can't be done with raw HTML CSS much of the time)
- Kagi taking off. IRL most people still do and will continue to Google
- People acting like if ads were disabled forever the population would totally pay for things they like (IRL people don't, there's a reason piracy is big. People want the things they want for the cheapest cost possible)
HN is a very specific type of tech-centric bubble
>IRL people don't, there's a reason piracy is big.
It is? That's not my observation. In fact, music piracy seems to be all but dead, thanks to the streaming services. Movie piracy is not, and seems to be increasing (hard to say though), because of people getting frustrated with the fragmentation of streaming; back in Netflix's heyday, it seemed like movie piracy was much smaller, because you could just pay $7/month to Netflix and watch whatever you wanted.
>People want the things they want for the cheapest cost possible
No, most people want convenience. That's why music piracy is basically dead. Piracy is usually a PITA, and it's easy to subscribe to Spotify or Apple Music and listen to everything you want. Piracy is usually a service problem, not an economics problem.
> Movie piracy is not, and seems to be increasing (hard to say though), because of people getting frustrated with the fragmentation of streaming
I feel that proves the point. When everything is all together for $20 people don't mind. when it's spread out, people are too lazy to sub/unsub to other $20 services as needed to watch content on demand. Someone that's a heavy enough power user to watch that much TV shouldn't mind paying $100+ to keep up. Premium cable was way more expensive and restrictive back in the day.
Meanwhile, all that conversation and none of these streaming services are even profitable. Because giving all your content away for rent isn't financially viable. But it's still too much for lazy consumers. So the entire thing collapses.
>No, most people want convenience. That's why music piracy is basically dead.
It's also why people completely raged when Netflix and GamePass increased prices. There definitely is a breaking point for many (past the ones who complain about every price hike on the internet but stay subscribed).
>Piracy is usually a service problem
Everytime I hear this, I simply need to point to the mobile industry to prove it wrong (or maybe right? Just not the way people think is "fair"). They fixed piracy by doing the classic Web dev action: Keep everything valuable on your server. The APK you pirate is worthless, as it is simply a thin client into their actual value.
We know how the rest ends from there.
>I feel that proves the point. When everything is all together for $20 people don't mind.
I think this proves my point, that it's a service problem. Put everything together in a single, easy-to-use service for a low price (like Netflix in 2012), and only the true die-hards will still bother with piracy. Ask them to subscribe to a whole bunch of services (with a high total cost) or try to figure out how to save money by strategically subscribing and unsubscribing to see the stuff they want, and have to deal with shows suddenly disappearing or moving to a competing service when they're half-finished watching them, and many will simply go back to torrenting because it's honestly easier than all that BS. But instead you think people are "lazy"... A lazy person doesn't do torrenting; it's really not that easy.
>Premium cable was way more expensive and restrictive back in the day.
Back then, 1) there weren't many alternatives. At the beginning of cable TV's reign, videotapes weren't even commonly available. And 2) back then, people had more disposable income because the cost-of-living was much, much lower (particularly housing). Technology is much better now too, so people expect to pay less.
>Meanwhile, all that conversation and none of these streaming services are even profitable.
Citation needed. Last I checked, Netflix is doing quite well, and even better after cracking down on the password-sharing.
>It's also why people completely raged when Netflix and GamePass increased prices.
Some people raged, but Netflix's subscriber count has increased and profits are up, so obviously those people either got over it, or were a small minority.
in all fairness, I'm sure Kagi is aware it's serving a niche right now. It's more a matter if that niche (maybe a few thousand consistent subscibers?) can support their infrastructure. You don't need to compete with Google to make a good living.
I wouldn't pay real money other than my YT Premium, so I'm fine with sponsor reads. I'm not alone.
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 and dealing with ads and/or sponsored segments instead leaving those that do a bit stuck with the latter.
[1] Just one example https://www.reddit.com/r/youtubegaming/comments/p1qmgu/conte... [2] https://backlinko.com/youtube-users
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 people working on actually valuable stuff.
>Someone needs to figures out how to take my money and distribute them to people working on actually valuable stuff.
why do you need a financial advisor to donate to Patreon or even Youtube memberships now? The models are about as easy to (un)subscribe from as you can get, while allowing granular control.
Do you really want some "index fund" where you trust someone else to use your money to fund "good creators"? That sounds like a capitalist's wet dreams. And a consumer hellscape.
>Do you really want some "index fund" where you trust someone else to use your money to fund "good creators"? That sounds like a capitalist's wet dreams. And a consumer hellscape.
Yes, I have a limited amount of time so I use curators (or algorithms) to narrow down what I might most like. For example, people used to pay HBO and other TV networks, or these days, Apple/Netflix/Amazon/Disney/etc.
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.
Direct payment is good, but Patreon-type models are unfair (for both consumers and creators), inefficient (in terms of both time and money spent by consumers), and unscalable (to anything but a tiny fraction of the economy).
We need direct microtransactions on the per-video/content-item level.
I absolutely hate advertising in all forms, and will aggressively block ads whenever I can.
I pay for YouTube Premium, though I have no idea how much (if any) of that goes toward creators. If a YouTube channel I enjoy has a Patreon, I'll subscribe.
Advertising is psychological manipulation. I get that there aren't many ways for independent creators to get paid for their work, only a selection of sub-optimal choices, but ads are gross.
I believe YT Premium supports creators better than the ads you would have watched would have.
I think this is a spot where YouTube fails to give a "fully valid" option as a platform. As a user right now I can have YouTube Premium, be a Patreon, and leave a Super Thanks on a video but still get served a sponsored segment. At the same time on the creator side I have no way to target YouTube Premium users or people paying directly to the channel with different content while keeping it as the same posting on the same platform (i.e. all as one video post on YouTube). As a result, no matter how you slice it, there is no way to have things be "right" even given ideal and fully willing creators and viewers.
This leaves the only realistic way for a channel to make reasonable money to be via ads and sponsored segments targeting the majority of non paying users at the expense of the rest.
I will either block/skip ads or not use youtube
instead of having a "sponsored" segment where you talk about some product (basically an ad) you could just make the whole video about that product, and thus sponsorblock wouldnt really be used - i mean, sorta like product reviews
Well, that’s your call, of course. And when it comes to regular YT ads I don’t really blame you, “the algorithm” and the way monetisation works encourages us to set up aggressive mid-roll placements etc that must be incredibly annoying if one doesn’t pay for premium.
One of the nice things about sponsor segments is that they don’t involve YouTube, so the creator gets more benefit from the deal, but of course done badly (and I assume this must be the case with many of the generic irrelevant VPN ads for example) they will harm retention and thus limit reach.
Your “whole video” suggestion is really “advertise smarter” IMO, which I completely agree with. Personally I’ve never done a “reading a 30-second script about how great product X is” type segment, but I have done videos where I try out “product X” in some way that’s relevant to my audience. It’s more product placement than direct advertising, but I guess even that is unpalatable to some.
Even sponsor segments mean you are being biased by third parties, which makes it harder for you to criticize them later if they are no longer something you would honestly endorse.
I did not click the video to waste time hearing about corpo sponsors you have been paid to shill. At most I will listen to information of non profit causes to donate to.
Use the sponsor segments to tell users how to donate to you. Sponsor block categorizes these differently and leaves them by default.
Just a heads up, the VPN ads are annoying sure but I think a lot of people would agree the RAID SHADOW LEGENDS ads are the worst lol
Those are called "fully integrated ads" and most of the time you don't see them because creators want more money for the whole video being an ad vs 30second of the 10 minute video. They also tend to involve a lot more back and forth with the creator and the sponsor about what is "allowed" in the video.
"I will either block/skip ads or not use youtube"
I agree. But to add, if youtube went all out and made ad blocking sufficiently difficult I probably would pay for it.
I fixed my dryer some time back. Watching a youtube video on how to probably saved me multiple hours then figuring it out all on my own. I use it to fix cars.
Never in my life have I been interested in any sponsor mentioned in a YouTube video. It's sad to see creators having to include these humiliation rituals in their videos just to keep their channels alive. To me, such tools are just a noise filter.
It is sad. Early YT was for hobbyists and those that loved to share.
I think we need to rethink the whole "advertising as a way to support creators" model. Support comes in many forms, and decoupling knowledge of a thing from being paid for good work would likely result in higher quality outcomes.
It's possible there's something to the Nostr model (https://nostr.com/) that could be of use here. A key part of Nostr is the "zap" system. In addition to allowing users to just merely upvote posts, users can also choose to zap a post, which is just a method of sending Bitcoin to the poster's wallet.
Think of it like a tip system, as it directly and concretely rewards users for good content, by exchanging a token of direct value (money).
With a system like this, advertising is something you do to get recognized, while the zaps are something you receive as a reward for valuable work (by whatever metric your audience appreciates).
YouTube has something a bit more direct available for partnered channels via the "Super Thanks" comment option. It allows you to tie a dollar amount to your comment on the video.
>Sure many of us also do patreon etc but that’s never really sat right with me personally
Patreon is people explicitly and knowingly agreeing to give you money in exchange for a service they want. Why does forcing people to watch ads preferable to that? Maybe I am misunderstanding what you mean when you say it doesn't sit right with you, because that sounds like you don't like the concept. I can understand if it doesn't bring in enough, but it is by far the most honest transaction between you and your viewers. Whereas with ads, you make the viewer the product and that doesn't sit right with me.
> Sure many of us also do patreon etc but that’s never really sat right with me personally
I'm curious what it is about the Patreon model that doesn't sit right with you? To me it seems like it's both the most respectful monetization strategy to viewers, and provides the creator with a much more stable income than YT ads, YTP shares, or sponsors.
Agreed; I don't get the GP's aversion here. To me, ads -- especially ads embedded in the regular flow of a video -- are one of the most disrespectful things you can do to your audience. Asking for voluntary subscription payments (perhaps with some added perks beyond what you'd get as a free viewer) sounds like the best model possible. People will pay if they find your content valuable and can afford the expense. Sure, there are a lot of people who will freeload, but that's just life. If you don't find that acceptable, then you need to put more of your content behind a paywall.
If you can't make enough money to be satisfied with the Patreon model, and that makes you want to create less, maybe that's the correct outcome.
>I do worry that if this takes off it will just result in those sponsors pulling their budgets for this type of advertising, and it’ll be another nail in the coffin for creators.
I don't think I've ever purchased a product that I have seen advertised by a creator on YT that I hadn't already purchased before seeing it in a sponsored ad. That last bit I added because I used to use ExpressVPN and now I'm seeing some sponsored ads for it.
The deal has been made between the creator and the company already, it's been added to their video, so there should not need to be any noticeable affect from running sponsor block for people like myself who don't jump to buy advertised products when seeing them advertised by a creator I follow. Unless there is some kind of feedback that YT is giving the companies about who is viewing their sponsored ads, I guess, but I doubt that's happening. So my use of sponsor block (which I don't actually use - the right arrow button exists) shouldn't have any affect on sponsor finances that I can see.
I'm not against creators making money, but I don't want to see ads in videos placed by YT and I don't want to see them in videos by creators, but I understand they would like to make some money. I've given through Patreon to some creators, but I'm not going to do that for all of the dozens of creators I follow. If I could just press a button and tip a small amount to the creator when watching a video I really liked, using a payment method I've already set up, I'd start doing that in a heartbeat. But I don't know if such an animal exists.
Don't do your videos for money. You are interrupting users that pay for YouTube premium with ads in the middle of your videos. Set up a way to donate to you on YouTube, channel memberships are an option, they display next to the "subscribe button".
> Don’t do your videos for money.
This is of course a valid suggestion, and there are many, many creators that do this. However I think the world would be a poorer place if we lost all the creators that do need to make _some_ money for their channels to survive, which IMHO is the natural endgame if we remove or block all routes to passive monetisation.
I do get the issue with premium, as a premium subscriber myself I too find it annoying to be interrupted by yet another 30-second (or increasingly, more) read for some shady VPN or whatever.
Channel memberships, like patreon etc., are an option, but have a vanishingly small rate of uptake, and people expect some sort of value-add in return (early access to videos, a discord, and so on). Without other routes to revenue this just devalues the content itself, which I feel may be part of the problem here - we no longer value attach value to quality content. Rick Beato made a great video on the effects of this (in the music industry) recently, and it’s not great - but it does feel like all media is going a similar way.
I often pay for Patreon to get uncensored videos. Youtube by itself already devalues videos in various ways and avenues like Patreon let creators provide what they actually want to provide, not just what YouTube allows them to.
That’s great, I’m glad that you’re supporting creators directly and getting value from it too. But unfortunately you’re in the minority in my experience, for every person who does this, there are hundreds who wouldn’t even consider it.
For creators making certain kinds of content the “uncensored” and “non-ad-friendly” topics are a great argument for direct sponsorship etc, I definitely agree.
You can also time delay any content .
Supporters get access via paid LBRY views or access to unlisted or privately hosted videos right away, and they are published a month later for free on public platforms.
I just don't personally find that sort of thing compelling. For the kinds of videos I watch, it doesn't matter to me if I watch it today or a month from now.
I think paywalled bonus content has the most value. A creator has a lot of control in that sense: if they are not making enough money, they can shift more of their free content behind the paywall. Certainly there's a point where viewers will get mad and leave, and/or what's available for free won't be enough to attract new paid subscribers, but there's still wiggle room.
If by "certain" you mean anybody covering anything from movies to songs to games to whatever else, yes. I mean "those" creators. It's extremely easy to fall afoul of YouTube's Draconian censorship. I'm not talking about sex games. I'm talking about YouTube demonetizing anything they want for arbitrary reasons.
I feel you're not recognising the issue and what Patreon solves, and why relying on YouTube for revenue is simply not an option for anybody.
Well, what I had in mind by “certain” is probably really “not me”. I’m fully aware how easy it is to fall foul of the ad-friendly guidelines, and have had more than one video demonetised for “reasons” myself. I’m also very aware that tying one’s entire revenue to a single platform isn’t a good strategy in _any_ business, it’s not limited to YouTube (but I can see an argument for it being worse there specifically).
I really do recognise the issue, being in it myself. I do have patreon (and others) for other projects and it’s another revenue stream, which is great. But for my YouTube main channel I believe the content itself has value, and having to pour time and resources into building a value-add package devalues it - both in the immediate (since I would now have less time to devote to content creation) and longer term (since it makes it essentially a leader for my value add packages).
(Some larger creators I know do manage to carve out some revenue on patreon etc without any “perk package” but I think for that to work it becomes even more of a numbers game, and won’t help small creators just getting started. I’m also putting aside the recent announcements ref. The App Store etc since they’re not directly relevant here).
If you aren't able to get enough funding through Patreon, then it's simply because you haven't found a large enough or the right audience yet. It has nothing to do with value add. Not every viewer is going to subscribe to you on Patreon. Even the biggest channels I have subbed on Patreon have a fraction of their viewers on Patreon of what they have on YouTube, yet it's more than sufficient to fund an entire well-off lifestyle based on it.
> Don't do your videos for money. You are interrupting users that pay for YouTube premium with ads in the middle of your videos. Set up a way to donate to you on YouTube, channel memberships are an option, they display next to the "subscribe button".
You shouldn't work for money either. Just do it for free.
YouTube isn't work and I doubt this person creates videos for a living. I assume this is just extra money this person wants, not needs. Many years ago YouTube was about hobbyists, and nobody complained. I'm sick of the attitude to monetize everything. I listed a few non-intrusive options, just don't be hostile to your viewers shoving them sponsored crap in the middle of videos
>YouTube isn't work
Youtube isn't work but producing videos at a decent quality and frequency is. It happens that a large amount of them are distributed through Youtube.
For a lot of people, it is work and the quality is vastly better for it. Youtube in the past wasn't a replacement for tv, now given the quality many creators put into their work, it is.
> YouTube isn't work
In the beginning of YouTube, true. But nowadays YouTube is work for a lot of people. It's their primary source of income, even. It's pointless to say, "well, that's not how it should be". It is, and that's the reality of the situation.
And, frankly, the production value of a lot of stuff on YouTube is amazing. That doesn't come for free, in the form of recording equipment, set design and purchasing, and just plain old time to write scripts and do post-production work. There's no reason that stuff at that middle quality level (between random guy with a handheld smartphone and professional studio production) shouldn't exist. I think it's amazing that people can make such high quality content, without having to get past e.g. a hollywood studio gatekeeper.
In the past, TV was traditionally paid for through advertising and syndication, and movies through ticket sales, and VHS/DVD/Bluray sales. Nowadays there are so many more ways for people to distribute their creations, and more ways for viewers to compensate them for those creations.
The thing that sucks is that we are still so stuck on this ad-supported model, not that people want to put enough work into their creations that it needs to be a paid full-time job.
We live in a capitalist society, and most people are forced to work to make ends meet. Being able to choose to put in what amounts to full time hours on a passion project isn't a privilege most people have.
You, presumably, wouldn't work for free, why do you insist that artists should entertain you for free?
> You, presumably, wouldn't work for free, why do you insist that artists should entertain you for free?
You didn't understand my post. I don't insist that artists entertain for free. I was responding to the parent who said "don't make videos for money". I am in fact a full-time content creator.
My mistake then.
I encounter that attitude a lot here so I guess I jumped to conclusions.
Yeah, I get that!
I would rather expect an extension like AdNauseam[1] which automatically play the advertisement muted in background.
[1]: https://adnauseam.io/
The best part about AdNauseum is it solves the criticism people give ad-blockers: content creators still get paid
But viewers do not owe anything to videomakers[1]
[1] honestly content creator is a terrible word for what it is, I wish people would stop repeating that non sense.
I agree completely, but it's easier to build a bridge than it is to redirect a river.
But does it really work? I would expect click fraud detection to catch this pretty easily given how big the click fraud arms race is, especially since AdNauseam said their implementation is quite naive.
> I do worry that if this takes off it will just result in those sponsors pulling their budgets for this type of advertising
I think most advertisers track how their ads are doing by looking at how much the personal discount code gets used, or tracking links in the description. I won't ever use any of that, so no advertiser will ever know I didn't have to suffer through the ad read about their product.
If there aren't enough people willing to pay for someone else's work product to make it worth the producers time/effort, then I'd argue that maybe that work product is not actually worth producing in the first place. In the realm of youtube, that may require putting out enough quality content as a loss-leader to gain a following large enough that a percentage is willing to support the creator directly. Many have made this work well.
I have many issues with advertising in general, but put simply, it breaks the basic transactional nature of business. When the people benefiting from someone else's work product aren't the ones paying for it, then both the producer and consumer end up being taken advantage of for someone else's profit.
The way I see it, tools like Patreon that allow consumers to directly support people they benefit from are just what are needed.
> I do worry that if this takes off it will just result in those sponsors pulling their budgets for this type of advertising, and it’ll be another nail in the coffin for creators.
For advertisers masquerading as creators. Not all creators turn their hobby into a hustle and not all that do use abusive methods to extract money out of their viewers.
I do support some patreons and have also donated directly to projects I like but I would also be more than happy if payment opportunities for "creators" dried up entirely and we went back to an internet with more genuine content instead of crap designed to be profitable.
> likely to kill off sponsorships as a whole, not just those bad ones.
I’d like to see this.
If creators make money it should be from YouTube handouts from Premium and paid subscriptions and/or creators seeking funding directly outside YouTube.
Having less “professional” content (and less content in general) is a reasonable price to pay to break our dependence on adtech and the “attention economy”.
Obviously these sponsored segments are effective marketing otherwise no one would pay for them, but I'm sure they're far less effective with users who seek out tools like sponsorblock.
One thing I've always wondered is do sponsors request watchtime data for their sponsored segments? I'm under the impression that they don't, which is wild to me.
The main area that SponsorBlock blocks are the type of sponsor read that typically are recorded separated from the video. Those are never going to be safe again blocking and it likely that most companies that uses that kind of services knows this. They are low quality, low effect, and thus (likely) fairly cheap.
At the other end of the spectrum, we got paid content and sponsored gear. He who pays the piper calls the tune. It turns the issue to a balancing act where too much sponsored content will likely ruin the viewer ship (and artistic freedom/integrity/happiness/extra), but in turn it provide an income. SponsorBlock has no effect here, but naturally users may not click on paid content if they feel like it too much like an advertisement. The channel Linus Tech Tips have a few videos on this, and its a fairly common topic on their wan show.
I actively support channels and causes by purchasing merch, donating, etc. That said, I refuse to waste a second of my life watching ads of any kind or supporting adtech. Adtech is what has enshittified the entire internet and we must burn it with fire at all costs.
I use FreeTube to block all ads and sponsor segments and I teach everyone I know to do the same.
The ad model results in creators being restricted in order to be advertised friendly, and encourages mass spying, of which the data is often irresponsibly managed and leaked putting people in danger.
This model is fundamentally unethical to participate in from either side.
Make some merch, and provide a mix of accessible and anonymous ways to donate to you.
As a creator - I'd be very interested to know whether a direct microtransaction system (not crypto, imagine something like PayPal) would be appealing to you. (none currently exists, but I want there to be)
Your per-video ad revenue is probably under 1c/video, right? If so, I don't think that many consumers would bat an eye at directly paying that cent (or more), assuming a sufficiently well-designed wallet UI (clear indicator of balance, easy refund system (with anti-refund-abuse countermeasures), current spend amount per session and spend rate prominently displayed, one-click content purchase with low latency, etc.). Does that sound plausible, or am I missing something?
>I do worry that if this takes off
It won't. Honestly, most people use the official apps on their phones/TVs. Desktops and laptops are in a minority now, sadlyu, but good for stuff like this. Some know about ublock origin, but that's still a small % compared to the population.
Make your sponsored segments worth watching.
I watch a bunch of travel vlog channels and for the most part they advertise the same things (If I ever see another athletic greens sponsor segment or a four sigmatic ad I will scream -- I even actually LIKE four sigmatic products) but I have several channels whitelisted in SponsorBlock because the ads they do are hilarious.
https://www.youtube.com/user/kingingit365
Watch some of their videos and you will see what I mean. I was watching the channel for a year or more before watching a video while sponsorblock API was down (it's volunteer run so it happens sometimes) and realized I was missing out on a really hilarious and important part of their videos, instant whitelist!
Sponsored segments always have stipulations on what you need to mention and how. Some may let you add some pizzazz, but that's why they all sound the same. Thats part of the contract.
Even that pizzazz is risky though. Sometimes videos get delayed simply because the sponsor comes in last minute and needs to debate the segment.
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 great, the content was organic.
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.
In this case the cupcakes are not free. They are explicitly exchanged for a minute of your attention. You use scripts and tools to get the product without paying for it.
Kind of like sneaking into a meeting room to eat the cupcakes, then leaving before the meeting begins.
If you decided not to watch ad-supported content, it would be the free market at work. In this case you're just stiffing creators.
Honestly the VPNs are probably the most ethical usual suspects. They actually do what's advertised and the affiliate links for deals are decent enough. If it's so much noise that people know what it is already, mission accomplished.
But yes, I sympathize. youtubers aren't google, and this will just mean sponsors will push only on the biggest youtubers, wheras the small-medium sized ones need the money the most (where sponsor blocks can be half or more of their income).
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 just a crappy mobile game that is about as "mobile game" as you can get. The only reason I use onshape is because a friend recommended it to me, and I was very skeptical about it initially
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.
also one should always be skeptical about the extent they believe they are not influenced by ads. that runs pretty deep. you say you instinctively don't trust it. but when the time comes to buy something, you won't automatically steer yourself towards a product that you have never heard before just because you have not seen an ad for it. having some names in your mind, even them showing up when you do research creates influence.
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 "generates negative returns" is the next myth in this. Whether or not advertising generates positive returns is not relevant. You can't measure the return of advertising in the first place. Even if you could measure it, you should be comparing it to the opportunity cost of not doing something more productive with that money. Which you also can't measure. No one rationally proposes that someone spends a hundred dollars on advertising to generate $100.10 in revenue is somehow a good use of money.
> 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. It's clearly measurable: An advertisement is shown one day on TV, for example, the sales the next day are higher. That's the case 99% of the time. You can say it's not, and you can call that "religious belief", if you want to.
Companies use ads because they work, obviously. Everybody thinks they are somehow "immune" to advertisements because they are "smarter than the rest", but the sale statistics are plain and simple.
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" farming causing mental fatigue) that are just waived away and/or swiped under the rug of ignorance by the industry adepts.
Scroll back ten years - even back then Google and Facebook made people believe in a literal myth that they're so Big Data they know people better than they do themselves (I kid you not, I heard this cliche way too many times), when in fact their best systems had extremely limited knowledge of both the audience (like very basic demographics that are not even always accurate) and advertised products (a few pieces of metadata at best). Heck, even modern LLMs have limited awareness so they struggle to make sensible recommendations a lot of time (and are extremely expensive for use in advertising at scale) and I'm talking about orders of magnitude simpler "targeting" systems back then.
Advertisement industry literally preaches advertisement, because their very well-being (aka market valuation) depends on it. I'm (a nobody internet weirdo) hold an opinion that it harms society more than it does it good by boosting the economy.
> I (a nobody internet weirdo) hold an opinion that it harms society more than it does it good by boosting the economy.
I agree with that, but precisely because of how effective they are on manipulating people into consuming and wasting their time.
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.
Of course it does. Advertisements, as a general concept, have an effect of driving customers to sales (simply because it creates awareness about the product, when there was none) - I'm not arguing it doesn't.
But Google's approach is questionable. Yes, they make money, but that's not the only effect the have. They pushed this story about targeted ads, it literally became a heroic myth blown (stories of what's really some cost-shaving statistic optimizations got blown out of proportions and became preached like all this crazy Big Data hoarding is the only way to go), and that had quite severe negative effects on the whole world - so I'm not sure those revenue increases were worth it.
I think, I need to think it more through.
> 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, but you still can't stop seeing it.
It's the same with people who don't care about their privacy because "no one cares about what I do" without realizing that companies wouldn't be spending massive amounts of time and money collecting, storing, and analyzing every intimate detail of our lives that they can get their hands on if it wasn't making them money hand over fist at our expense.
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. They wouldn't be doing that if they weren't reasonably sure that it was paying off for them. As surveillance capitalism continues to creep deeper into our lives companies are getting better and better at being able to track the success of their advertising and what they've been seeing so far hasn't caused them to scale back their efforts at manipulating us. It's just making them better at it.
>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.
pretty sure YouTube ads are directly trackable though -- if someone clicks it and funnels through to a checkout process and pays, they have a direct report of how much they spent on the ad versus how much they made directly from that ad.
YouTube in-video sponsorships are a different beast admittedly; however there is still some basic tracking through use of promo codes (Use code JOHN15 for 15% off). They can see a report of how much they spent on ads that mention JOHN15 and how many sales included that promo code -- if sales vs ad spend are significantly positive, it becomes simple math to determine how much more to spend on ads, or to discontinue them.
I suppose your point though was that it's not possible to track the negative sentiment generated by the ads (people who get annoyed and decide to avoid your company at all costs). That is true, but companies who rather go down the path of something trackable than an unknown shot in the dark.
You're spot on with "go down the path of something trackable". The next step is they assume everything they tracked represents all data for all possible outcomes. It can't.
> 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.
I can't immediately come up with a scenario in which all of the following is true:
1) The ad-viewer is repulsed by the ad
2) The ad is repulsive for reasons unrelated to your product/company's actual characteristics (otherwise they weren't a potential customer anyway)
3) This accounts for a significant portion of ad viewership (otherwise it's not relevant)
4) There is no social/media backlash (that would make the issue visible)
5) There is a significant positive ROI anyway (that's the only motive to continue that advertising campaign, which is required to sustain both negative and positive effects of the ad)
Is not the modern internet and widespread usage of ad blockers that exact scenario?
Take a person that hates being advertised at, a persona that is growing. This person meets all of your criteria. Multiply this person across the internet.
When this person sees an ad, regardless of company or content, they are repulsed because they hate ads. This person likely runs an adblocker so when an ad gets through, they are even more angry. If this person sees this product in the store, they will avoid it.
Take a common example of Coca-Cola. Their ads are everywhere. This person would instead buy the store brand cola even though it has not been advertised at them.
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)
Why do you think so many things are not measurable?
It's very hard to poll or measure things to within a fraction of one percent with most audiences. But that's not what's needed for advertising. And in marketing you probably don't care about that - it's in the noise. You do care of "significant" changes and you can of course measure both positive and negative influence.
Even negative influence in people who aren't yet customers, or have never heard of your company, and (preferably) have never seen your ad. For example through a polling survey. Funny enough, such a poll is probably an effective ad campaign in itself in some cases! You can also measure opinion strength about advertising in general. It's more nuanced than you think. Which unfortunately leads marketing departments to commit atrocious injury to good taste. Agreed there.
> No one rationally proposes that someone spends a hundred dollars on advertising to generate $100.10 in revenue is somehow a good use of money.
Of course not, and yet they spend far more than that, to good (measured) effect.
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) effects. But it is inherently difficult to measure. And I've seen many mid-sized companies not do that at all, they run these ads based on what they believe might work.
Mind you, this is experience from 4 years ago, but I did find the ad industry, as obsessed with tracking as it is, to be surprisingly gut-driven. For a lot of it, it's hard to tell if it works.
I do fully agree that for people who know what they're doing, advertising absolutely works, in ways that are sometimes unintuitive to consumers.
> 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).
They are very much not meticulous about ROI. The thing to understand about the ad industry is that it's incredibly adversarial. Companies need ads to raise brand awareness and make people aware of new products. So far, so well-aligned. From there on it goes downwards. A company's marketing department is in an adversarial relationship with the rest of the company, aiming to increase the ad budget at all costs. The ad agency often just gets a pot of money from the department, and instructions to spend it all, no matter how unproductive. Because if the marketing department doesn't spend their budget, it might shrink. ROI is often not a consideration at all. And if the marketing department actually do care about ROI, then the ad agency certainly doesn't. Then you have the websites themselves, with their clickfarms and general fraud, and the ad exchanges that empower them.
The whole business is teeming with waste and fraud, but it's a necessary evil so it stays.
> if you are seeing an ad of something for any noticeable duration of time, that means it works
It means my uBlock Origin failed. I will not be returning to that site as a result.
You can always 'enter element picker mode'. With a little practice/knowledge you can block that element/frame/etc. forever. And/or add a layer with Privacy Badger and block altogether most of the sus domains.
Another 'trick' I employ (always with Firefox) is that I open links not to a "New Tab", but instead I use "Open in Reader View" add-on, so I "Open in Reader View" (it does exactly what it says on the tin), so I only get the clean text and the relevant images. That works for almost every website.
You should go and report that to whoever maintains your block list. The information on where to report ads is at the top of the file, and you can find the file itself in ublock origin's settings. Better yet, create a rule and submit it along with the issue, although people who maintain lists for long periods of time tend to be much better at it and might not find your attempt useful. I do it anyway to show some respect, they deserve it.
Good tip, I'll try and do that in the future.
Is there a best practice for developing rules that match randomized class names? There's a web app I use daily at work with obnoxious upselling banners that always come back if the page is refreshed and it's the only place I've run into this annoyance so far.
I only worked in ad tech briefly and many years ago, but what I saw there was a game being played between the people who make/distribute ads and the companies that buy them. The game is to convince the people buying ads that ads have value, even when they don't.
I suppose raises the question, is the spending of mega bucks on advertising (regardless of effectiveness) a net benefit for society?
As commenters have already raised, we'd have no Google, Facebook, Twitter (sorry 'X') or many other entities and the products they create without the money spent on advertising. Is this all just happening because people are too scared to look under the curtain and find that it's all just a sham?
We had advertising long before the internet came along, and from my personal memory most of the most aggressive advertising was for things that were either useless (magic snake oil remedies) or actually dangerous (tobacco products), not to mention all the "as seen on TV" junk that was "promoted" on morning television.
Is what we have now is more intrusive? It used to be that you could duck to the toilet during the adds on TV or flip the page in the newspaper or magazine, but now they are taking our cpu cycles, making web pages unreadable and that is not to mention the more intrusive ways of really getting in our heads.
I'd argue that we've always had (even if just the shop keeper recommending a product) and always will have advertising. There have always been products that are not needed or wanted by the majority, and advertising is the way that the producer of that product gets their product sold. I would be nice if there were not so much dodgy practice involved.
That rings with what Uber said, that they'd been scammed $100 million.
https://veracitytrustnetwork.com/blog/digital-marketing/uber...
I am convinced that the bulk of online advertising money spent is just wasted. All it does is steal clicks and attributions for conversions that would have happened anyway.
I've been on the internet since before it was all about ads and clocks.
I've never intentionally clicked on an ad. It's either been an accidental drive by click or deception.
It's not wasted, it pays for the two out of three major web browsers we currently have, along with Go and many other things.
> you won't automatically steer yourself towards a product that you have never heard before just because you have not seen an ad for it. having some names in your mind, even them showing up when you do research creates influence
This is 100% percent true. I thought about exactly this, and it's the first time I hear someone say it, I am glad. I try to keep away from advertisements, but it's just not really possible, you get influenced by even what your friends or family say.
> 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.
Advertisement obviously works. But the premise or mechanism is not as clean and simple as you laid out.
Marketing, whether they are external firms or internal teams, have their own incentives, just like anyone else.
But… Personally I like good marketing and I‘m drawn to services and products who do so.
For example tech and games sometimes do very good marketing by providing educational resources, transparency through blogs/vlogs etc.
Some products are focused on a high quality, sustainable niche, and they do very pronounced, sometimes humorous over the top ads.
I „mistrust“ marketing if it wants to sell cheap crap in a disingenuous way. But I‘m glad to see ads for interesting, quality products.
I feel the same. The more I hear about a brand in youtube ads (or any ads, for that matter), the more "scammy" feeling I get about it. At this point I feel I won't even consider looking into NordVPN, Betterhelp, or SquareSpace, even though I understand how this feeling is unjustified.
> I understand how this feeling is unjustified
Every company you listed is bad.
NordVPN wasn't caught yet, but it's to good to be true and ALWAYS having 73% off is illegal marketing.
Betterhelp sold data to facebook to retarget you with ads.
SquareSpace had a security issue were entering the email of an old, not yet migrated account, was instant account takeover... how does this slip through security reviews?
Everything that needs my favorite minecraft youtuber to advertise it, is scam. It wouldn't sell without influencer marketing.
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 making it look like you're from somewhere else to watch different stuff on streaming services. I think Tom Scott put it well here https://youtu.be/WVDQEoe6ZWY
My take on NordVPN is that it's surely some kind of honeypot, to catch extremely illegal uses (pedos, drugs), or high value targets (journalists, politics ?). Not sure who's running it.
But if you're using it for mildly illegal things like having the Netflix catalogue from another place it's probably good enough.
Just don't install their app, configure it yourself, don't use it full time, and don't expect protection from anything other than low level law enforcement from your country. Expect your connection to be monitored when you're using it, as much as can be (so not breaking encryption, but all the rest for sure).
I have absolutely no evidence whatsoever other than the fact that it's been a high visibility service for very long, which makes me think it would have already been taken down a while ago if it was actually effective at protecting high value targets
> 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, but this is how, depending on that model, a VPN can be more secure than HTTPS.
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.
Most of what people use personal VPNs for is to break some rules, sometimes the law. Circumventing geofencing or content blocking is most likely against some terms of service. VPN services can't really advertise for this, so they talk about evil hackers.
I saw a couple of VPN promos recently where the sponsored YouTube presenter talked about geoblocking circumvention as an important VPN use case. I don't know whether the sponsor thought that was desirable or not (and also don't know whether the sponsor requested it or not).
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.)
The same can be said for folks using Clouflare or Google DNS.
I think you’d be surprised at how effective advertising is on you. An awful lot of it is brand familiarity. You mentioned some examples, but presumably you’ve seen more than three ads (not expecting you to list them).
Square space is one provider that commonly does these kinds of placements and I can confirm that it’s an excellent product (albeit expensive).
Where do you think your friend found out about onshape?
Sure, it makes me aware of brands, and then I don't use their service because they have to pay people to say it's good. And I already have a web hosting solution, its the raspberry pi in my closet.
I've asked them but they may be asleep
Ehh, if you go to buy a new car, will you buy a brand you've never heard of before? Or will you perhaps check out the brand you've seen ads for a hundred times in your life?
It's not a conscious decision, your mind is familiar with some of the brands more than others, for whatever reason, and that tricks you into trust. Sure, you still might look into reviews and stuff, but your mind has already been primed to some extent in what brands you even consider.
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.
I barely interact with content creators. They don't reply to my comments very much, and even if they did, they'd still say they 100% support the thing they're being paid to say nice things about. I cant have a genuine conversation with them about the thing, how good it is, what the downsides are etc. See Kyle hill's vaguely recent video about scientific misconduct where they also advertise BetterHelp. The comments section was overwhelmingly negative about it, and their response was essentially "cry about it."
I prefer smaller channels (because they feel more "human" if you know what I mean), and their authors spend a lot of time engaging with the audience. Discussion is actually useful, you can learn something from YouTube comments. Yes, that YouTube.
Just step outside the highly commercialized part and you'll be surprised.
> Most people think they're above being influenced by ads, but they're not.
Exactly why they should be illegal!
Allowing people to spend money manipulating us into giving them money so they can spend more manipulating us into… is mad.
> An awful lot of it is brand familiarity.
Thus the ad industry term "impressions" ? One gets the impression (heh) that they're just trying to beat logos and catchphrases into your reptile brain.
"Familiarity breeds contempt"... but ubiquitous superficiality does not, I guess.
I’ve never realised the use of the word impression until now - makes a lot of sense
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 just YC’s advertising board.
If that's the sum of your proof, your thesis is a joke. I am not the customer of any YC company, nor have I ever applied for a job at one, nor have I ever or will I ever apply to YC itself. Your attempt to cold read me was pathetic.
But you've heard of YC :P
It's to get people to remember the name.
What first comes to your mind when you are in need of a website builder? Squarespace. Want to make some PCBs? JLCPCB
apache2/html/css, and I'm a little sceptical about pcbway/jlcpcb because the shipping times are nuts. I know its because they're coming from china but it makes me want to etch my own PCBs instead
I now sort of want to see a video about PCB etching sponsored by either of those because it would make me laugh from the contradiction
The next project I build I want to try one of these services. The idea of a one-off PCB is pretty cool.
My YouTube echo chamber directs me to pcbway. JLCPCB is clearly targeting a lower quality YouTube audience as I only watch sophisticated content creators whose stunning intellect make me feel comfortable in the products they endorse. I suggest you avoid JLCPCB on these grounds alone.
/s… at least I think :-)
The hardest thing about selling something is making people aware or it's existence. So it's not really a bad bad thing.
Said that, if i see that thing everywhere i can probably find a cheaper thing with the same quality because the marketing budget must be HUGE and these 10% discount codes give 10% to you and 10%the the creator so i can find a code 20% somewhere.
I don't trust them either. The inherent conflicts of interest makes any advertising suspicious. They are guaranteed to be overstating the pros and understating the cons.
"Sponsored segments" on youtube are nothing but normal advertising, they just permanently hardcoded the ads into the video instead. I don't like that they use the word "sponsors" for that. Sponsorships can be an ethical way to make money. Think Patreon, GitHub Sponsors.
It might be a noncentral example of sponsorship, but it's been a traditional usage since the early days of television: "and now, a word from our sponsor".
Edit: actually, I think that phrasing arose in the early days of radio!
Influencer marketing works so well on the younger generations that it's scary.
Just look at Prime. It's just a generic crappy sports drink and kids were literally paying 10-15€/bottle for it during the worst hype times because supplies were so short.
I am starting to think that these companies aim for saturation of mindshare. Like Coca-Cola, Pepsi and such. This bombarding is there for you to remember the name of the company. And then when you are ready to purchase either go for it or try to find some sponsored segment again for that discount. Individual conversions are less important than the long term mindshare.
Advertising being so lucrative and Implicit endorsement being what it is (plus opportunity cost) means that any public person recommendation might as well be treated as advertisement, so you may only trust the advice of those you know directly
That's probably for the better, but it also means that you'll have blindsposts
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 about figuring out where to chop off the tail. You’ve got your core 15% who you can send an email to saying “buy this”, and they will, 95% of the time - then segments step down in terms of convertibility until you’re down to 0.01%, at which point you’re usually going to get more people irritated by the marketing than you will sales.
The marginal cost of most marketing is very low - that’s to say, to reach 10,000,000 eyeballs doesn’t cost much more than to reach 10,000 - unless you’re doing paper catalogues, which is a whole other thing, most of your cost is up front, artwork, direction, whatever - so it makes sense to shoot for a bigger basket and get some bycatch.
Me - I resolutely refused to do any marketing for our business. Mistake, bluntly, as I let my emotions get in the way of rationality. Had anyone other than a clique of medium-large UK merchants ever heard of us, the business might have gone somewhere - instead after a decade we were trundling along in a comfortable rut and I ejected.
So, you hate it, I hate it, it’s misleading, it’s annoying, it’s a negative signal to us - but it works on most people.
> 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.
I hear you, but I still bought those Feastable chocolate bars...
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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
I stopped using this because I found out that I want that custom thumbnails and tittles as a signal of quality. Many thumbnails will signal which creator made the vid at first glance, where before I sometimes missed video from channel I have involuntary vocal reaction whenever they release a new vid (exurb1a).
Its also very helpfull for determining the quality of the video itself. Usually from that one picture I can tell that even if the video is about a topic I'd like to know more about, I definetly dont want to learn in that specific video. Removing this signal made me waste way more time in videos that seemed good from the tittle alone.
I used to use it, unfortunately it doesn't work so well with titles. It lowercases unknown acronyms and initcaps all words even in languages which Do Not Use This Capitalization For Titles.
You can change that in the settings.
Oh my god, what a difference it made. Thanks for sharing this. I do wish this could have just been a feature tacked on the Sponsor Block extension, especially considering it has features which rely on that data, but otherwise it's perfect.
For those that haven't watched the demo video: for videos that don't have community thumbnails or titles it has options allowing it to automatically pick a random (non-sponsor segment) screenshot and automatically clean up the title (remove emoji, fix capitalization).
Whoah, how does it do that? It looks like magic, so does it handle the clickbait use of "this" as well ("this game", "this recipe", "this film")?
I'm using one that just decapitalizes and uses a random frame thumbnail from the middle, which is okay.
According to the extension homepage:
"DeArrow is an open source browser extension for crowdsourcing better titles and thumbnails on YouTube. The goal is to make titles accurate and reduce sensationalism. No more arrows, ridiculous faces, and no more clickbait.
...
There are currently 64,634 users who have submitted 230,432 titles and 107,027 thumbnails."
Yeah, Clickbait Remover extension is similar. It's available for all main browsers and replaces the egregious thumbnails with a frame from either the first, middle, or last part of the video. I like it!
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
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).
> 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.
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 when it is at the very end), some do big but informative sponsored sections where the presenter interviews the business.
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.
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.
The sponsors don't pay less if you skip the segment. They won't know.
There’s some data available for this in the YouTube dashboard, actually.
Yes, the alternative to ads is paying. As someone mentioned in this thread: It's kinda shit that these sponsored segments don't get skipped automatically if you pay for premium.
I am too greedy to pay for premium tbh and as long as µblock works with the normal ads, I'm fine. If it stops working one day, I'll probably rather stop using youtube instead of paying for premium
Just to make you aware, they added pseudo SponsorBlock on TY Premium.
If you "skip" 10 seconds on a sponsored segment a "skip to next part button" will appear on screen to the end of the sponsored segment (it does not use chapters and it does not appear 100% of times)
Some alternatives include merchandise, sponsorships (Patreon etc), tipping, and organic engagement / sharing so that more people can find them and give them money.
> 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.
And he can choose which content creators he watches based on how obtrusive their monetization strategies are, that is also very much part of capitalism.
I'd argue choosing to watch for free content that cost money to produce is the opposite of capitalism.
I wasn't arguing in favor of SponsorBlock, I was stating that you have to option to not watch the content at all if the sponsorship is so annoying you'd consider installing something like SponsorBlock.
Bdouble0100's are as entertaining as the rest of the video. Still screws with the flow, but worth skipping then going back to watch after
Also extra useful: iSponsorBlockTV. You run it in on a server and you can set it up with the YouTube app on all your commercial streaming boxes that don't support browser extensions.
https://github.com/dmunozv04/iSponsorBlockTV
How does this work, how does it get between the client and youtube.com?
It uses the tv youtube app remote control over local network to see if it plays a video, and skips at the right time.
Ha. What a fantastic piece of hack. Absolutely brilliant. Love it.
Oh my god I could kiss you. It works on AppleTV.
Related:
iSponsorBlockTV v2: SponsorBlock for TVs and game consoles - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37873749 - Oct 2023 (115 comments)
SponsorBlock – Skip sponsor, filler, intro, outro, like/sub reminders on YouTube - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35733993 - April 2023 (4 comments)
SponsorBlock – Skip over sponsorship segments on YouTube - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26886275 - April 2021 (174 comments)
An open-source browser extension to auto-skip sponsored segments on YouTube - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21743196 - Dec 2019 (101 comments)
Show HN: SponsorBlock – Skip sponsorship segments of YouTube videos - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20778926 - Aug 2019 (137 comments)
i have been using sponsor block firefox extension for some time. It's incredible. Youtubers I watch (LTT, marcushouse) are typically shilling crap like vpn or those stupid ray bud things.
Youtube is not usable without adblocker and annoying without sponsorblock
Those channels are essentially informercials with brand deals. Rather than skipping sponsors, I dumped them altogether. LTT content especially has become far more vacuous over time. It's as if the videos are a vessel around which to place ads.
Hard agree.
I used to watch LMG all the time, then it felt like the content turned to infomercials.
Then that whole drama thing went on and the fact that (in a leaked video) they had a manager say "you gonna get up on that table and dance for me" at the end of a HR meeting with zero reactions aside from laughing led me to fully block all of their channels.
To me it's clear they have an internal culture problem that came along with the money.
I find the LTT stupid ideas like watercooling his server room funny but without Sponsorblock it’s a pain.
Also their merch … this is so overpriced. A screwdriver for 70 dollar, when nearly the same product costs 20.
But there are enough people that buy that stuff.
As far as I'm aware it's a similar price to screwdrivers of similar quality. Much cheaper options exist but I wouldn't call them "nearly the same".
LTT themselves said they worked with Megapro to make a slightly modified version of their screwdriver. The original is $33.
They licensed the required patents from Megapro, but the internals of the screwdriver are bespoke and higher quality than the Megapro equivalent.
The same dude (Ajay) also made a "clickbait title and thumbnail fix": DeArrow https://dearrow.ajay.app/
It's not as well known but also really great once you get used to it.
LTT is not even worth watching, it’s just sponsored crap now disguises as a informational video
I really dont understand how that channel can have so many fans. Makes me humble in realizing I really dont know how people work.
I know right? Personally, I only watch MIT lectures or C-SPAN highlights on YouTube. No idea how the proles can tolerate that slop.
You can watch LTT without any sponsors or ads on Floatplane[0], you just need to pay for it.
[0] https://www.floatplane.com/
For anyone that watches a lot of YouTube I also highly recommend the "Tweaks for YouTube" extension, it's totally transformed my watching experience and fixes a lot of the little nits I have with the facebook UI and algorithmic feeds.
https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/tweaks-for-youtube/...
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. There's no hiding behind the algorithm or Google or whatever, they have to actually read off the advertisement. I find the human in the loop serves as a valuable filter on what gets advertised (at least on the channels I follow).
* The best creators actually make the ad worth watching. See Terrible Writing Advice for an example. I don't always watch the ad, but I sometimes do because it's just fun.
In general I agree that ads are bad in all their forms, but sponsor reads are one of the least offensive items in a bad genre.
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.
> "If you're watching this educational video you might like Brilliant"
I think there is a nuance. If there is a video that does this for 5 seconds in a 15 minute video, to sell a product they really know and like, and that is strongly related to the content, then sure.
But shilling random products? perhaps even "crap products" (you know exactly which ones: gambling, crypto-related, low quality SaaS...) and doing it for more than a tiny mention? This is basically the reinvention of ad funded TV, only the productions are crap in comparison and the regulation is non existent. So in that case, sorry, I'm happy to both watch your content with skipped ads, enjoy the content, and see your content disappear because your monetization fails.
> I noticed you were searching for shoes the other day, so here's a Nike ad
That's not native advertising. Native advertising is when you write an article about a subject just to shill a product.
On YouTube it's somebody saying they've been using Ground News to do research for the video, or that security it's important, then transitioning to a NordVPN ad. You're looking up to somebody for information, but then they turn into a psychopath for 2 minutes to push vitamin supplements when they damn well know you can just eat better instead.
Ah, my mistake! I didn't realize "native advertising" was a term of art.
Analogously, I'd be upset if someone handed me a glass of piss when I asked for something to drink. But at least I can recognize it and turn it down. On the other hand, if you hand me a glass of piss and actively take efforts to make it look, taste, and appear like water, al while telling me it is water, sure, I probably won't be upset because I don't know. But dear god... if I find out... Well, I don't think there are many reasons that someone should be punched in the face, but that doesn't mean there are zero reasons to...
Deception is so much worse.
Btw: check out ReVanced[0]. You can rebuild the YouTube APK (and others) to integrate adblock and sponsor block. All optional too! Unlike pihole, it'll actually achieve that.
[0] https://revanced.app/
Firefox + ublock origin + this + enhancer for youtube = Youtube bliss :)
I dont auto skip sponsors as some are actually useful but clicking the button works
Using yt-dlp to download video files is great too because it has support for sponsorblock[1] which will then automatically remove the segments you choose from the file.
[1]: https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp?tab=readme-ov-file#sponsorb...
For anyone using an Android phone, the ReVanced[1] patches for the YouTube app (formerly just YouTube Vanced) applies both an adblock and SponsorBlock, on top of various other convenience features. You'll need to provide your own YouTube APK file to patch.
I'll never go back to using non-Vanced YouTube ever again.
Advertisements are a blight on this world. They are the reason for marketing and sales budgets being quadruple that of engineering and UI/UX budgets, the whole 'form before function' thing, and enshittification in general.
[1]: https://revanced.app/patches?pkg=com.google.android.youtube
The only thing that moved me on from using (Re)Vanced was setting up my own Invidious instance, and using the Clipious app (F-Droid store) to access it.
Clipious, by default, connects to public instances of Invidious, so you can try it out without having to setup your own instance.
ReVanced remains my backup option, however.
Has the installation gotten easier? Last time I checked I needed to find a speccific version apk of youtube app itself that revanced patcher patches before installing. Too many steps to make way too often.
> Too many steps to make way too often.
This is not how I feel.
The last time I patched my app was several months ago, and it's still running fine. I do have to patch about twice a year and it's a five-minute affair of getting the correct version, going to APKMirror and downloading the corresponding version of YouTube, and patching it with the latest app.
God forbid you have to expend a bit of effort every six months to get free entertainment and skip ads.
Unless you specifically care about app experience, you can also use Sponsorblock, ublock and many other extensions in plain Firefox on Android
Came here to say the same thing. Revanced YT patches for Android are extremely sweet. And yes, even better features (for viewers) than YT Premium.
But how will I become an actual member of the House of Lords by buying a square foot of land in Scotland if I skip the sponsor blocks of videos?
Please if you report segments, use a correct type!
I’ve seen enough segments to be marked as ads when they are self-promotion and self-promotion when they are barely promotion and more like further exploration info.
It's pretty inevitable when you have stuff like this that "ads" devolves into "the boring parts". It's all volunteer driven and there's way too many videos to moderate, so it is what it is.
I suspect if I was creating videos and putting them on YouTube, the best way to make SponsorBlock obsolete would be to put a banner on my video that lasted the duration of my video.
You’d then need to create a new type of in-video adblocker that displayed an overlay to cover the advertisement, since you could no longer block it by timestamp.
That may sadly be the next step if this does become prolific enough for ads to stop sponsoring individuals. A race to the bottom of quality against consumers who want free stuff and content creators who want to pay rent.
Personally I just stop watching videos and entire channels with sponsored segments. If they are okay with shilling some crappy product for a little cash I don't trust them not to sell out or be deceptive in less obvious ways as well.
I also feel it's annoying that videos have become so long to cram in more ad breaks. It's not that I'm "tiktok generation that only can consume short content", but some things just aren't warranted a 15+ minute video. I'm interested, but not that interested. Sorry Steve Mould, Veritasium etc., I love your videos, but many of them could have been a few minutes long
I also expect my entertainment providers to work for free.
Freetube.io has it implemented already few years.
Revanced with sponsorblock is the best method of watching youtube on mobile without ads. I think their is an ethical question about supporting creators, so I think if you do use an adblockwr and sponsorblock you should consider donating directly to creators you watch.
I like the technical side of such projects, because I'm a dev. I am also a creator and I am always conflicted when see such tools, because it does affect the bottom line of other creators.
I hate the very idea of "content creation" for its own sake, so this is perfect. Youtube was a million times better when it was people uploading quirky and informative videos about stuff they actually cared about, as opposed to soullessly shilling "content" dominating the recommendations no matter how much you try to convince the algorithm you aren't interested.
A hundred times this. I'd go so far as saying I'd trade the 2024 media landscape for the 2014 one in a heartbeat. And honestly, I'd also trade that one for the 1994 media landscape. "Content creators" are the worst thing to happen to media in 50 years.
maybe my viewing habits are not much different from the contributors, but i am very impressed with the effectiveness of the community effort here.
i have seen some cases where videos get the right tagging within minutes of going live. almost suggesting that the creators might be secretly doing the tagging for us!
from further digging, it appears that the initial community efforts have also helped develop a neural network based approach (https://github.com/andrewzlee/NeuralBlock). this appears to be the top current contributor according to the leaderboard (https://leaderboard.sbstats.uk/), with almost 8x the contributions to the next submitter, and ~1.6% of total submissions.
regardless of your moral stand on this, a very impressive collection of open-source efforts!
i've gotten used to having no ads thanks to Firefox with uBlock Origin and SponsorBlock that it became painful when i try to browse the web on others' computers
SponsorBlock is a godsend when watching Linus Tech Tips where it feels like it's 80% ads and 20% content
for other YouTubers, i find that their ads are actually useful if they're relevant to the video's content. for example, i discovered Boot.dev when i was watching bigboxSWE
I think this is the most interesting read: https://blog.ajay.app/voting-and-pseudo-randomness-or-sponso...
Ads are just going to migrate into the context via bugs or in video popups/banners like we now have on cable and network TV in the US. Of course this won't reduce ad breaks at all.
Skipping is not anonymous by default: "So, if you watch a video, and it does have segments, and you do skip a segment, then the server does get access the that segment ID, which is directly linked to the video."
What do you mean by "not anonymous" here? Obviously the server will receive what video you are looking at, as well as anything it can deduce from your request (such as IP) in order to work. Whether it just gets the video (required to work at all) or an individual segment (not quite required but could lessen the payload size) doesn't matter for the level of anonymity does it?
SponsorBlock is 20-anonymous: https://github.com/ajayyy/SponsorBlock/wiki/K-Anonymity
Two questions.
1) if I skip ads on a video via Smart Tube Next, does this directly reduce the creator's income? 2) why do creators ask for likes and subscribe, does this directly increase income?
By no means an expert, but these are my thoughts:
1) probably not directly. Eventually the advertisers might notice a decrease in effectiveness lower their investment in that area (either by lowering the amount they are willing to give the creator for a sponsored segment or not doing sponsored content entirely). Eventually if they think the ROI isn't there they will reduce their spend.
2) You have to feed the algorithm beast to be successful. Even channels with high subscriptions still get a tremendous amount of views from YouTube's recommended algorithm. One big part of that algorithm is "Engagement" which includes the number of subscribers, likes, and any other engagement on the video (such as comments, which is why you'll see a lot of comment-bait questions in videos now like (if you disagree let me know in the comments).
thx
I wish there existed something like this for arbitrary videos such as for movies..
Kinda https://runpee.com/
One issue with SponsorBlock is that people use skip to highlight[0] on music, which should be illegal. To me there often is no highlight for music. You need to hear the first part of the piece in order to enjoy the second. And people have different views on what counts as the highlight. I don't even like seeing the skip to highlight color on the scrub bar in videos that are just music. Skip non music[1] is good though.
[0] https://wiki.sponsor.ajay.app/w/Highlight
[1] https://wiki.sponsor.ajay.app/w/Music:_Non-Music_Section
When people Listen to Giorgio by Moroder, but they skip the "boring talking part". Really shows the kind of respect today's people have for the pioneers. Sometimes I'll just loop the introduction as motivation (still has a really good beat!).
But yea, reason #2 for not wanting to use SponsorBlock. I have niche tastes, I don't trust others to tell me what's "the bad parts".
You can just turn that off in the options including the marker on the seek bar.
Also when it is bad don't hesitate to downvote. The database is only that good because of user feedback (and some anti-botting measures). You can check hidden segments and votes here: https://sb.ltn.fi/
And messing about with the API is made easy here: https://mruy.github.io/sponsorBlockControl-sveltekit/
You can find this and many more things on the wiki you already linked.
I think that turns off the skip to highlight everywhere, right? I still want to see skip to highlight in non music videos. Also, looking at the use cases on the wiki for highlight, musics should not be allowed
> Skipping to the point/most important part of the video Skipping to the part of the video referred to by the title Skipping to the part of the video referred to by the thumbnail Skipping to the part of the video referenced from a preview/teaser at the start of the video
There is no "most important part" of a piece of music. And the last three don't apply at all.
That is planned per channel but not a priority at the moment: https://github.com/ajayyy/SponsorBlock/issues/435
uBlock Origin, Consent-o-Matic to automatically decline cookies, SponsorBlock and Argentinian VPN for $2/month YouTube premium makes the internet usable again.
YouTube has started cancelling premium subscription made in a different country.
https://www.pcmag.com/news/youtube-cracking-down-on-cheap-pr...
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.
Ah, I thought that VPN should be bought from there.
Is there an equivalent that anyone knows about for Podcasts?
I can not live without this.
Even if I am on a device with premium, I still need to use like 3 different blockers/extensions to get YouTube to a state were it is usable.
Most thread opener start with "I" ... seems that people need to make a statement why or why they are not using Sponsorblock. Interesting.
I spend a lot of time on Youtube, I watch live trials, so this helps a lot, thanks!
Firefox, UBlock, Sponsorblock. Only way to tube
Youtube premium also supports skipping past commonly skipped video timestamps.
I think this is inevitable, but I’m also disappointed. I run an adblocker because deep tracking is invasive, consent can’t freely be given for every website, a significantly detracted user experience from relayouts while reading, huge performance costs, and bandwidth usage.
We’re seeing here on this thread that it is in fact that people just don’t want ads. These content creators need to be paid somehow.
I have been using it since beta and it's always awesome.
Honestly, my brain tunes out the sponsored segment. Just like it did for TV ads.
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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, in any other context the immorality is clear. If a guy buys a woman a vodka soda at a hotel bar, can she accept it and return to her table, or does she need to listen to his offer to come up to his room before she can drink it?
Even without such a hardline stance on advertising: there is simply no other way to avoid sponsored YouTube segments despite being a YouTube Premium subscriber and sponsoring a channel directly. Maybe not everyone agrees with the former but I've not seen a single debate against the latter.
As creators oft disclose, buying from sponsors is a way to help support channels.
Somebody is buying though. Advertising absolutely works.
It works on an easily manipulated minority, which means everyone else has to suffer, right.
It's not necessarily an either-or situation. It can be privacy, annoyance, and a general lack of effectiveness.
Advertising isn't just the art of selling a product, it's the art of getting past our normal social defense that someone is trying to take our money, our attention, and our time. Advertising is necessarily adversarial, and everyone's tolerance for it is going to be unique depending on how heavily they rely on free resources, but it is a necessary unpleasantry at its best.
If I could even recall the exact number of times an advertisement of any type appealed to me in the last 20 or more years, it would amount to less than the fingers on my hand. I used to welcome all of Google's advertising tracking and relevance-seeking as the best version of advertising out there, but even that resulted in unimpressive and less than meaningful ads. If Google can't advertise something useful to me, then I have zero qualms about walking by, palm facing them in refusal.
Because of these product failures, and because it is unwise to trust a big company with all of your personal data, I rarely desired to be advertised to at all.
Individual content creators have the opportunity to give me a chance with something unique that they know that their viewers would be interested in because they (hopefully) relate to their audience much more than a faceless corporation, and can present a product in its best, most relevant light.
But if that content creator is trying to sell me a Scandinavian VPN service or a game of legendary shadows, you can bet I have zero interest.
All this may change as GenAI-driven methods may key in on relevant interests based on what I wish to share about myself. I'm hoping that Apple's Intelligence systems will end up preserving privacy as well as driving a more effective ad model.
Yes, it has nothing to do with privacy. The opposite is maybe true in that case (i.e. google can probably see my usage of sponsorblock in the access logs, which makes it simpler for them to identify me).
But I do use it. I don't watch video clips very often. When I did, most of the times it was disappointing waste of time. Conference talks are the most obvious exception that come to my mind, and they don't interrupt their talk with sponsor ads.
Once something is in YT (or any other big tech silo), I'm completely outside of charity or goodwill mode. It's basically like sth broadcasted by a random tv station for me. I maybe consume it, but I'll not start thinking how I can support them. The 'free web' that I'd explicitly try to support does not happen in big tech's walled gardens.
Btw: Are there any 'good' sponsors in YT? I suspect, a company that sponsors YT channels is by definition suspect. Just because the target audience doesn't really ask for more. They spend hours each day in a loop of mostly pointless 'subscribe, like me, follow me, comment below, $SPONSOR, ...' and always the big show without any actual substance in the end.
Sure, there are always a handful of exceptions...
>Once something is in YT (or any other big tech silo), I'm completely outside of charity or goodwill mode.
real shame to publish the creators stuck in a monopoly when they will be the first to fall, and Google last.
I get where you're coming from but consider this: using an adblocker like ublock isn't only about digital privacy. Many people, myself included, dislike being advertised to in general.
Especially in the real world I think ads are a blight, and so do the Swiss [1].
I do use sponsor block myself, though I have it disabled on certain channels because they actually show decent sponsors, like things that their audience might actually be interested in and they're not complete lies. But there is absolutely no positive impact on my life from seeing the 624th ad for a VPN to "protect myself online".
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41075766
If I’m going to skip it manually anyway, may as well let the machine do it. The whole point of computers is to automate busywork.
No sales will be lost either way as I’m already a customer of the website builder and am absolutely not in the market for a VPN and never will be.
> Unless blocking ads has nothing to do with privacy and is just an annoyance with ads...
there were some comments in another post that went so far as to want all advertising banned. So for some people it truly is just "skip all annoyances, consume for free". And I see takes in this thread about how apparently everyone should be making videos as a passion/hobby.
It's either brash overrreactions, naivete on societal structures, or simply being stuck in a tech bubble (where our labor only indirectly produces value, compared to the visualizations or art or other content leveraged by tech. Hence why many can give it away).
In an ideal world that would be the case but it’s not realistic.
Money needs to be made somehow, even if it is just to break even on the cost of making the video. Maybe you needed to buy something.
We see people complain about paywalls on websites, so if that started to seriously happen for videos I doubt it would go well.
I first started to block ads for privacy and to prevent those that takes over the screen, but once you have blocked ads once, you start to enjoy the actual peace and ability to concentrate.
Plus ads are for shitty products, since good products end up selling through recommendations and reviews.
How do those recommenders find out about a product in the first place? Advertising and PR is how that happens unless a person happens to be friends with the owner.
Advertising facilitates discovery, reviews and recommendations facilitate sustained growth.
Apparently the average distance between any two Facebook users is less than 5, and that distance is presumably lower when you restrict to smaller localities like a country or city, so assuming that's a good measure of social connectedness, I'd expect news to travel fast if there's something interesting to say.
Somehow I doubt uBlock Origin or SponsorBlock run ads, for example, yet here we are all knowing about them, and allegedly somewhere around 1/3 of Internet users have an ad blocker.
You still get these ads even when you go and buy YouTube premium that should be actually your way to an experience free of ads.
It is not a free web if the creators I watch are being paid off to promote and never criticize corpos in their industry.
Block all ads of all kinds. I do not want to watch advertizer os sponsor friendly creators. I want people talking to me honestly like they might off camera.
We must switch to micro transaction pay-per-view model like LBRY to eliminate all ads and ensure creators get paid better without having their integrity compromised by corpo sponsors.
Microtransactions won't fix this, for the same reason that paid cable channels and newspapers still show ads. The temptation to double-dip is too great.
This is a terrible argument.
First, it can be unproductively applied to any monetization system - you can always say that the temptation will still exist to double-dip.
Second, because it's ignoring the fact that if you want to get rid of ads, you have to replace them with something else.
And third, it's only partially true - microtransactions will make the ad problem better, because ad display by small creators is partially driven by the need to make a living. Once that living is met, the pressure to also display ads gets significantly reduced.
> First, it can be unproductively applied to any monetization system - you can always say that the temptation will still exist to double-dip.
That's capitalism. The Uber app was a straightforward experience, until they started loading it up with ads and tip screens. Paid Hulu and Netflix tiers have ads too, when previously they didn't.
If that's a "terrible argument", there should be numerous counterexamples of companies doing the opposite.
> That's capitalism.
That's an utterly meaningless statement. You haven't even defined "capitalism", let alone what it means for something to "be" capitalism. This is political dog-whistling, the opposite of any rational argument.
> The Uber app was a straightforward experience, until they started loading it up with ads and tip screens. Paid Hulu and Netflix tiers have ads too, when previously they didn't.
This is intentionally deceptive and misleading. Uber is the only one of these that is actually correct, and it's a morally bankrupt company in the first place. Hulu and Netflix, on the other hand, have tiers that don't have ads, which is objectively not double-dipping.
> If that's a "terrible argument", there should be numerous counterexamples of companies doing the opposite.
First, no, that's false. There are many reasons why counterexamples would be rare or nonexistent - most obviously, because customers used to getting a free product tend to be extremely unhappy if you now tell them that they have to pay.
You also ignored every one of my points, which soundly rebutted your argument, and explained why it was bad - that your argument is utterly unrelated to microtransaction systems in particular, that you still have to have a alternative monetization system for when ads are removed, and that microtransactions will make the ad problem better.
Second, there are numerous counterexamples of companies that charge consumers directly without double-dipping - Google One, Dropbox, Remember the Milk, World of Warcraft, LegendKeeper, ChatGPT, most video games, Notion, Slack, etc.
Third, there are specific examples of companies moving away from ad-supported models to paid subscription models (without keeping ads), which is likely what you were trying to claim that "double-dipping" was: Medium, Evernote, and the New York Times, despite the aforementioned extreme aversion of consumers to starting to pay for something that they previously got for free.
>there are numerous counterexamples of companies that charge consumers directly without double-dipping - Google One, Dropbox, Remember the Milk, World of Warcraft, LegendKeeper, ChatGPT, most video games, Notion, Slack, etc.
That's really your best list?
- Google constnatly double dips. They were cuaght not too long ago scanning Drive folders for potential Gemini use. Slack just had this discussion as well.
- WOW charges subscriptions and for cosmetics in game. That's how more and more video games are trying to recoup costs. DLC, microtransactions, battle passes, NFTs, etc. You can avoid most of that if you're indie, but that's the AAA market.
- ChatGPT is in market capture mode right now in a very hot market. It's going to pull a google in 5-10 years if it's still dominant. I would bet my bottom dollar on that one.
>there are specific examples of companies moving away from ad-supported models to paid subscription models (without keeping ads)
And they are double dipping on their own services by selling to AI to train their data. It won't be ads for you today. It probably will be tomorrow. If the goal is to minimize annoyance, this is honestly worse than double charging.
We're doomed without a fundamental shift in how society consumes content.
> That's really your best list?
There are dozens more that you can find easily with a quick search, and these alone support my point.
> Google constnatly double dips
Sure, maybe they're not the best choice. Let's use Apple instead.
> Gemini
> And they are double dipping on their own services by selling to AI to train their data
Other forms of double dipping than ads aren't on topic, relevant, or productive for this thread which was specifically about micro transactions not replacing ads because of double dipping. (yes, the problem is real - see later)
> WOW charges subscriptions and for cosmetics in game
Also off topic, but here I don't even see a problem. Unlike ads being involuntarily shoved down your throat, you're not compelled to buy cosmetics.
> It won't be ads for you today. It probably will be tomorrow
This is very speculative, and not supported by the hundreds of SaaS products that do not, even those that have been around for years.
> We're doomed without a fundamental shift in how society consumes content.
Like microtransactions?
Moreover, none of this addresses my points that if you get rid of ads (or user data harvesting), you still have to replace it with something else, and that utx will reduce the pressure to do these other things.
Sure, ultimately you'll need regulation to get rid of user data harvesting, and maybe ads too, but I'm confused as to why "double dipping" is being brought up as an argument against utx after those things are gone - they're almost orthogonal.
LegendKeeper will never have ad placements because of how ugly they are. Personally I wouldn’t be able to tolerate an ad messing up the flow of our designs and user focus, lol. Idk how others do it; we also never relied on ads in the first place so maybe that makes it easier.
(LegendKeeper mentioned!! 8))
LOL, it's awesome to see a LegendKeeper dev here! I don't TTRPG but I have a friend who does and is using your tool.
I love the UI, did you model it off Notion?
That's great to hear! Always happy to see LK usage out in the wild.
Definitely Notion-inspired! Over the next few months we'll be putting more of our own spin on it, though.
>I want people talking to me honestly like they might off camera
The you'll have to wish for a while since no one on YouTube is "as honest as if the camera is off".
It's because it's an annoyance with ads and even if people want a free web to exist something something prisoners dilemma.
Also these ads are in videos even if you're e.g. paying for YouTube premium so it's not just the free web.
YouTube (and Google's advertising platform as a whole) literally advertises investment scams, allows deepfakes, and has been known to have ads that link to fake bank websites and contain malware.
There is no advertising on the internet that doesn't have potential issues because at least the dominant advertising platforms (Google, Meta) work at a scale that cannot satisfactorily filter for the kind of things I've mentioned above.
Do you want your kids or parents or grandparents exposed to that kind of advertising?
Also, the "free web" is a thing that already existed. Advertising was an add-on, not a core component.
With sponsorships I think people are just annoyed by them being repetitive. There are maybe ten companies that seem to sponsor every YouTube channel and podcast, and there's only so many times you can get pitched the same wallet or VPN before you develop the instinct to skip ahead.
But before we skip ahead, let me tell you about this comment's sponsor, Squarespace. From websites and online stores to marketing tools and analytics, Squarespace is the all-in-one platform to build a beautiful online presence and run your business. Use code "eyeroll" to get 10% off your first order.
Oh god lol don't give companies who buy ad space any ideas!
I simply hate being advertised to and sold stuff when I'm not shopping. In any shape or form. But especially on my own devices and in my own home.
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