One of the nice features added to yt-dlp recently: It integrates with sponskrub to call into the SponsorBlock database and with the right options will strip the sponsor segments from downloaded videos.
Are the sponsor parts really so bad? To me not only is it easy to skip, I want indie people to make enough money to produce high quality content; otherwise media is just what a few biggies want to fund. They’re not enough from YouTube itself unless you’re in the top percentile.
Also what sponsored content are people downloading versus just streaming live? I don’t get the use case.
> Are the sponsor parts really so bad? To me not only is it easy to skip, I want indie people to make enough money to produce high quality content; otherwise media is just what a few biggies want to fund.
In my experience, it's the same with ads everywhere else. It (usually) starts out not being overly obnoxious, with just a "this video is sponsored by [garbage tier mobile game/earphones/vpn/whatever] more about them at the end of the video" and then the pitch at the end.
I don't mind these. They quickly get the name out at the beginning and then don't interrupt the video. What really annoys me are the ones that interrupt the video. At some point a few of them annoyed me enough that I installed SponsorBlock. Because I don't want to hear or see these ads, but i tolerated them. But once that threshold is crossed where I don't tolerate all of them anymore, why would I not just block all of them? I'm not going to unblock specific channels that are well-behaved to listen to ads for products i will definitely never buy.
It's the exact same thing with regular ad-blocking. Sometimes when I'm on a fresh OS I start browsing the web and only notice I don't have an adblocker once I visit a page with super obnoxious ads (e.g. google on mobile and realize there's only ads and no organic results for like the first 5 screens).
> What really annoys me are the ones that interrupt the video.
Especially when those interruptions take two minutes. I don't mind them up to 30 seconds, but their length does get pretty ridiculous from time to time.
There's no medium that's gonna make watch two minutes ad without looking away or trying to skip it. You either sell it quickly or don't.
Bill burr on his podcast is also good. He usually spends the segment making fun of the companys or getting off topic mid read ranting about something else. Hes mentioned hes had a few companies demand refunds afterwards.
Personally I am done with indirect funding models where people burn my time and attention in hopes of getting me to waste enough money on something that surplus cash can be skimmed to pay for the original content. It's ridiculous. Direct payment or GTFO.
And I'm putting my money where my mouth is. My Patreon bill was $150 this month. And that's not counting direct payments to creators.
> And I'm putting my money where my mouth is. My Patreon bill was $150 this month. And that's not counting direct payments to creators.
Nice!
I'm still not using Patreon but I "guilty" of paying for promising alpha quality stuff, subscribing to services I don't use deliberately even after realizing I cannot use it yet etc.
I think we IT people have a reputation for being a bunch of cynical whiners and I also think it is somewhat deserved so I am happy to hear that I am not alone in actually wanting to pay for good stuff.
If anyone wonder what makes me pay, here is the best I can come up with:
- stuff I use or can see myself using
- one time payments, no subscriptions (unless there is a specific ongoing cost that I realized must be there)
- tokens are a nice alternative to subscriptions (eg: $10 for 50 tokens that let me start multi-player games is something I would easily consider for a good game like Polytopia)
- not too expensive, once it passes impulse buy at around $10 monthly or $40 one time it gets significantly harder bjt not impossible
I love this, but that means you are now paying 3 times: ads/premium, sponsored messages, and patreon. Even if you block ads - as well as the much more complicated sponsored messages - you are still paying by having to manage that system and work around its edge cases. Direct "donation" should include ad-free and sponosor-free access to videos.
I'm mostly supporting people who are writers and the like, so that's less of a problem for me. But I hope that more direct payment shifts things in that direction.
In some cases it does, but that requires basically way too much work from the content creator, they have to have a separate way to give paying subscribers videos. For example, LinusTechTips has videos on their own video delivery service available, and they're pretty much ad free. I know some other creators do a similar thing (not setting up their own youtube competitor, but the rest).
Personally I just use adblock, skip the sponsor segments and live with it. Sponsor stuff is really easy to skip in my experience, especially on mobile where if you double tap the right side it skips 10 seconds. You get used to how many taps to do per content creator, their sponsor segments seem to be consistent lengths usually.
Then throw 5 pounds at a rotating list of whoever you like's patreon and install an adblocker.
Merch, it depends. I've grabbed some tshirts here and there that are comfy and not branded all to hell, couple of random knick knacks. A lot of it is indeed not appealing, so I mostly just send money.
YouTube premium sends money to creators as people watch their videos. According to a redditor [1], CGP Grey (a prominent youtuber) claims to get more money from premium users than ads.
I’ve got YouTube premium but I’ve noticed more and more channels breaking mid video to go into ad mode. Ordinary Sausage has been a too channel with the kids but jeez the last few videos there are nearly more ad than content.
This is pretty much same thing as other websites in general. While the content is entertaining and good enough to watch it is not consistent enough to pay for.
I would think that cutting sponsored sections of videos wouldn’t affect the money they receive at all. With Adblock, they can tell it wasn’t loaded. Can the sponsor tell that your view skipped the sponsor part?
> But what then do you think is a realistic alternative?
Not my department. I'm perfectly happy being a parasite. I used to watch Twitch every now and then. Twitch introduced server side ads and made ad-blocking unreliable and annoying - so i stopped using twitch.
My life doesn't depend on youtube, and if they decide to shut me out or the platform stops existing, that's fine with me. Maybe other video platforms can try out other models instead of that effective monopoly google has on online video currently.
I've also already said that I tolerate non-obnoxious ads. But looking at the rest of the web, it doesn't seem to go in that direction, so I'll keep blocking until they kick me out.
Twitch is still perfectly fine with streamlink. There's a 15 second loading screen where ads are meant to go (only at the start of your stream), but you don't see any ads.
In fact I do pay for yt premium, yet still get these kinds of ads.
So much for that misplaced and invalid attempt at moralizing.
"are they so terrible?" and "what's the alternative?" are not my problem to answer, and I don't even have to agree they are valid questions that someone has to answer.
I do not accept the premise that the only way content can exist is if advertisers pay for it. That's a false dichotomy. There is no such either/or choice.
I will happily live in a world that only has content that was either fully paid for by purchasing copies or subscriptions, or given to the world for free.
You attempted to paint anyone using this software or anyone complaining about the ads as somehow morally lacking. I say, if you don't understand why anyone would give away something for free, and only think of the consumers as ungrateful parasites, then I think that says something worse about you than what you tried to say about anyone else.
> I will happily live in a world that only has content that was either fully paid for by purchasing copies or subscriptions, or given to the world for free.
How do you feel about DRM to make sure content is only accessible to those who paid for it?
I pay $10/mo for YouTube Premium, and my expectation is that I will not have to sit through any ads. A sponsorship is an ad, which violates that expectation, so I use SponsorBlock to skip them.
For channels that I watch regularly, I contribute to their Patreon if they have one. I shouldn't have to sit through a sponsorship segment in addition to that.
It's hard to compare apples to apples, as ad revenue is based on amount of ads shown and your premium subscription is divvied up among your most watched creators based on watchtime [1]
Great link! Do you think it is fair to say the YouTube Premium payout model is similar to the music streaming platform, Spotify?
At the risk of nerd sniping myself, thinking deeper, I wonder if people who sign up for YouTube Premium do less random surfing on YouTube and instead focus on a few channels they love? That would _further_ concentrate their payouts. If true, then the 10x figure sounds reasonable.
Nope. Spotify divides the whole subscription revenue per content's share in total time being played, thus it doesn't matter if you listen exclusively to some garage band - your money would go to whatever pop is now topping.
Well not really because you up the count for the garage band you're listening to. Quick calculation shows this model gives more influence on the repartirion of money to those who listen to the most music, even though they pay the same (as compared to YouTube's that gives the same budget to everyone)
It's not possible to give that specific information
The reason being that people in the businessy genre already get 10x (~$10CPM) what a gaming channel (~$1CPM) gets because there's more advertisers and less channels. You'd need to know the source channel
Its not entirely the channels fault. If youtube paid creators a higher share on monetized videos and didn't keep changing the ranking and terms there would be less need to add alternate forms of monetization.
Heck, youtube could even build in a patron feature much like twitch has with subscriptions.
For about 20 years most everything was supported on nothing but some person's own desire to put themselves out into the world. This meant spending out of their own pocket if necessary. If hosting became too much of a bandwidth issue for them to be able to pay for hosting they would release it as a torrent and it would become shared and distributed peer2peer or they'd throw it up on a free file share and the it became the file sharing platform's problem to deal with the bandwidth and try to collect (typically through member-only "premium download speeds").
In the past 10 years or so quality has largely gone down and annoyances like ads and sponsor shoutouts have gone up to the extent "Sponsored by Raid: Shadow Legends" is an actual meme. There are very, very few content creators I feel are worth supporting. This ends up being a bit classist as mostly people with enough personal cash flow and free time can afford to become full-time content creators but by and large that's already kind of the case if you look at the people who become full-time content creators. But I personally feel that if your content is more of the "popcorn" variety that people use to fill their day but don't actually value compared to something people do value then the world at large isn't missing out. If enough people felt they would miss out - they'd pay to keep it around.
There are plenty of content creators I watch where I would not be all that sad if they vanished and they stopped creating content - because I use their content to fill gaps of boredom in my day and not because I place any significant value in their content. Then there are a few I absolutely do value and I already support them when possible. I assume ones without a method to directly support them are OK with losing some revenue to ad-blockers and the like. I have absolutely let personal opportunities of collecting cash slide past me because I weighed the effort to collect it to be greater than it was worth so I assume the reason they haven't opened up a way to donate to them directly is for similar reasons.
I consider ads to be psychological warfare and something that should (but never will) be illegal if they are designed to be emotionally manipulative in any way. If a dry, boring informercial doesn't inspire you to buy their product then it probably isn't worth buying howdy. I feel absolutely nothing bad about blocking them.
I'm 100% not going to buy whatever they're selling. If anything I'm less likely to buy something that's advertised to me. I've specifically stopped using services/products if I notice their ads too much.
So who is benefiting from me watching sponsor segments? Not me, not the content creator, not the brand.
I just skip them manually though tbh, haven't gotten around to automating it.
> I expect everything for free, then that’s both unrealistic and parasitic.
There are plenty of youtubers who do videos as a hobby with no money and the videos still are amazing. Then there are plenty of youtubers who only make 10 minute videos so they can get as many ad breaks as possible and add sponsor ads in the videos and the video quality and content is just terrible.
I'm perfectly fine with businesses that use intrusive ads going out of business - none of this is essential to my well being. The onus is on them to find revenue gathering methods that don't suck, not me.
And before you say "but creators have to make money too" - independent art gets created just fine without capitalistic motives, and I vastly prefer the patreon model, or just paying up front for larger content (documentaries, games, films etc).
(Although in this particular case, I'm pretty fine with the sponsor method with most of the creators I watch on youtube - there's definitely a line where it could get overbearing, but for the most part it's pretty easy to skip if you want and the brand they're shilling still gets shown to you over and over again so the advertisers aren't really losing out).
(Also chiming in with the "I do pay for YouTube premium" gang as well).
One thing I absolutely despise about "creators have to make money" is when some of those creators actually use YouTube to cram their shitty music down my throat via ads while I'm playing some other, completely different music that I actually chose.
It's grotesque that they think this is an ideal way to promote fan appreciation. I mean, the music styles don't even sync: You could be listening to Bach, with a playback history that clearly shows a preference for classical music, and some idiotic teen pop song by some attention-desperate, barely known singer starts playing via ad, which if you don't click to skip it (say you're in the kitchen with your hands dirty while listening to your interrupted Bach) will play FULLY for its entire 3 to 4 minute duration. Just bloody stupid...
Easy: a downloader that makes it look like you've watched those stupid commercials, but you actually haven't and you're back to the original video. Let the sponsors beware.
Until they see they get very little ROI and stop advertising that way. It's not like people sponsoring aren't looking to see what these channels do for them and just spend blindly...
In the 1940s and 1950s radio programs and eventually television shows were sponsored by advertisers. soap operas get their name for being vehicles for soap companies. Off the top of my head Fitch's soap company was a big advertiser in the 40s. Another big advertiser in the forties and fifties was rexall.
I don't know what the return on investment was, I always figured they did it as a way to show that they supported the arts.
Each show i listen to generally will have a primary sponser, who writes the show "headline song" and generally that sponsor will write lyrics to make that a jingle that has to do with their product.
Then you get the intro to the show, and sometimes a product spot. Then the show starts, and depending on the format (half hour, multi-part 12 minute, etc) you may get a mid-roll and finally at the end a final sponsor message, plus the studio (like CBS) would pitch other shows on their network, and the star of the show would also have their current movies and other productions pitched at the end, as well.
Check out Richard Rogue on OTRR or archive.org for both styles, the mid-roll and the post-intro roll with jingle, it varies depending on year of production. Their main sponsor was Fitch, as far as i can tell.
What is the difference between running this code and simply clicking ahead on the video timeline past the ad? How is it any different from recording a show on tape and just fastforwarding past the commercials?
Youtube doesn't really let you do that. If you're watching a video you chose and some shitty little ad gets crammed in there to screw with your enjoyment, its own little yellow timeline appears that you have to sit through until you can click to skip ahead after X seconds.
apparently the average viewer spends 41 minutes per day on youtube, so that's about 20 hours per month. 1 dollar per hour is pretty cheap when it comes to entertainment, no?
For me, yes, they're bad. I get it's not the end of the world, but a lot of the ad copy in sponsor segments really grates on me, like VPN ones. I try to get rid of ads from my life where I can, this is part of it.
And for me, a lot of the videos I download are played back, audio only, while I go for walks or am otherwise away from the Internet. YouTube lets you download videos, but my audio comes from multiple sources, YouTube is just one source. I can integrate yt-dlp into my feed reader so I don't need to think about the source anymore than I need to worry about going to a random podcast's website to listen to those.
In the end though, a tool like SponsorBlock is just another way I remove the annoyances from the modern Internet.
"MAKES IT SO YOUR ISP CAN'T SEE YOUR TRAFFIC" - yeah, congrats, now it's just another ISP that sees your traffic, which was probably protected by TLS anyway...
Heck, they even keep recommending the utility of Terms of Service violations like accessing contents from other regions.
I think you know that geo-blocking is due to licensing agreements with copyrights holders, which is a tangled mess in itself, not that streaming platforms believe that the content won’t be appreciated by foreign audiences. Most of what’s on them over here is already in English anyway. Besides, I don’t think Americans have access to 100% of the content available on Netflix worldwide, either.
That said, I agree that it’s ridiculous if you take a step back, and in a sane world we wouldn’t have these types of restrictions. But it’s an artifact of an old, complicated system and isn’t something Netflix or anyone else can unilaterally fix.
I also agree with arghwhat that marketing your service as a way to violate another business’ terms of service doesn’t come across as serious, even if it’s not something I’d necessarily have a problem with personally.
Not that I personally care if individuals violate terms of service, but using that in a sales pitch seems akin to advertising for piracy services.
Abiding by the terms of the agreement which you enter into with the company providing the service is a requirement to continue service and/or avoid liability, irrespective of whether it includes completely idiotic and archaic business practices and irrespective of whether this causes harm.
And yes, I also find Netflix to have extremely limited value.
Not paying for a service whose terms you disagree with in areas you disagree. Using alternative services that do not have those terms. Demonstrating against the business practice. Petitioning for law that renders the terms illegal or invalid. Finding way to challenge the parasitic middlemen that are to blame. And so forth.
I pay for YouTube premium but still see them. That’s not OK, especially when the creators make 10x more money off YouTube Premium users than from ad-based users.
YouTube needs to make a way for creators to label the sponsor sections and it skips it for Premium users.
As for why downloading, I download any/every video I find useful so I don’t have to go back to YouTube to watch it later. Everything from blender tutorials to car build videos that taught me something to music video clips and generally just anything interesting. It all goes to my NAS and I can instantly pull it up for reference and scrub quicker and don’t have to deal with YouTube’s increasingly annoying website.
> YouTube needs to make a way for creators to label the sponsor sections and it skips it for Premium users.
I have read that more and more creators use sponsored segments because that pays much better than YT revshare..
So they may not care about the Premium user experience as much, and if Premium lets people skip sponsored segements, that might drive down the overall segment viewership, AND increase Premium subscribers and then it's a lose-lose for the creator since those segments will be less and less valuable to the sponsor.
They're talking about the free ad-watching type users. It's been published by multiple creators that YT Premium is easily their biggest income stream but there's just very very few people willing to pay Premium (for most creators it's like 1-2% or less).
If YouTube made it more appealing to buy Premium, eg by letting you block sponsored segments, download videos easily, etc etc... everyone would win.
I'm just pointing out that this should be the job of the premium team at YouTube, not left to subscribers.
so:
- Sponsorskip is a good solution to a problem that shouldn't exist
- If YouTube cared they could make this an even better experience and make sure both honest producers, paying customers and sponsors got a better deal. Today the revenue maximizing play seems to be to add sponsors on top of premium and hope advertisers doesn't realize they are being skipped.
I always remember the HN comment[0] where developer explained which video was the breaking point that pushed them into creating this app, and it was kurzgesagt of all authors.
I am personally wondering if Yourube themselves are going to start implementing some thing like this sooner or later; after all, you are paying for an ad free experience on YouTube premium, just to watch all of those new videos become filled with in-video advertisements.
> I am personally wondering if Yourube themselves are going to start implementing some thing like this sooner or later; after all, you are paying for an ad free experience on YouTube premium, just to watch all of those new videos become filled with in-video advertisements.
Unlikely. It requires monitoring content and ensuring they people add (correct) timestamps for sponsored content. This would need to be verified by YouTube moderators and in general requires a lot more resources than you think. Crowdsourcing like SponsorBlock is feasible but it's unlikely that YouTube will integrate SponsorBlock into the site.
Holy shit. Kurzgesagt of all things, indeed. It's the one channel where I could actually stand their sponsor section. Most other channels I know do much worse. But I guess the video referenced was kind of low, surprisingly low.
> Are the sponsor parts really so bad? To me not only is it easy to skip
Well, yes. Skipping involves effort. If I wanted to engage my hands with the content, I would've opted for a book, not a video.
Anyway, actual sponsor parts I can stand. They're at least somewhat interesting, by virtue of being unexpected. Like, who is this video sponsored by this time? Or, why this well-known and otherwise respected science/technology video vlogger keeps advertising scummy VPN services?
What I can't stand is the "like and subscribe" dance. It's just completely mind-dumbing. Yes, I know you have a Patreon, it's in the video description. Yes, I know where the stupid "bell icon" is, I don't need unsolicited YouTube UI 101 lessons. No, I'm not going to click anyway, because I'm here for a particular video, not the whole channel.
The more subscribers a channel has the closer they are to gaining an official star from YouTube. They want to boost the subscriber level to attract sponsorship too.
Considering the current system and real options that they have right now, what are they supposed to do if they want to earn money (or even a living) making videos that will make you happy?
Perhaps more importantly, would you give them money?
Sure. I pay for YouTube Premium (which I understand gives content creators a comparatively higher rate for my view) and I still have to deal with sponsorships.
This also goes for channels with well over 1M subscribers. I honestly have a hard time believing they're struggling to make a living (but I haven't seen the numbers).
Worst of all, the sponsorships tend to be for some scammy VPN or gacha, even when it comes to creators who otherwise create high-quality content.
> what are they supposed to do if they want to earn money (or even a living) making videos that will make you happy
Make me happy? It's simple: don't do videos for a living. If you have something interesting to say, say it, and put a PayPal link (or Patreon, if you discover that you regularly have something interesting to say). If you don't have anything interesting to say, just don't do the video. I'm not gonna watch it anyway.
But that's just me, really. There's no good answer to your question, because for me, the moment a YouTuber wants to do videos in order to make money (or a living), I don't want to watch them anymore. Under the current system, they're creating a huge conflict of interest for themselves - monetizing views through advertising is in direct opposition to delivering quality and trustworthy content. Almost all ways to improve engagement degrade the value delivered to the viewer.
I'd be more comfortable with creators doubling down on Patron and one-time donations. Even the merch[0]. "I make this stuff for as long as I can afford it, want to help, send me money" is a honest deal. So is a paywall, but that's tougher to implement on the Internet.
> Perhaps more importantly, would you give them money?
Yes, I would and I do. I subscribe to a bunch of Patreons, occasionally buy stuff from creators or send them direct donations. But not for everything, of course. That's the nature of the market. A random video I got linked to is worth $0 to me until I finish watching it, and after I'm done, it's hard to price.
--
[0] - Though I seldom buy any, and really dislike the concept. Most merch is a waste of matter and energy used to create it; it exists only to break through people's reluctance to spend money on intangible content, but at the cost of most money being lost in making and shipping stuff that will end up in a landfill after a short dust-gathering break at some viewer's home. I hate these sorts of "hacks" for human psyche, but I see why they're needed.
There's also a conflict of interest here too - the videos could become just a vector for peddling merch. But so far, I haven't seen any YouTube creator falling into that trap - unlike ad monetization, which affects everyone.
> If you are watching for free, and you're that annoyed by ads, then maybe you just feel entitled.
If the the content is there, I'll watch it; if it's not, I won't. I certainly don't feel entitled to it.
If anything, the sense of entitlement seems to be emanating firmly from the people who upload the videos: they seem to think that because they upload videos, they are entitled to make money from them. Sorry, no.
I'll add another wrinkle: I like content-creators that create for the love of doing it and not to try and turn it into a business.
When I follow a YouRuber (I'm borrowing that typo, I like it) and have seen them descend into the paid/promotional arena, I have been turned off and stopped subscribing to their channel.
Advertising tends to naturally weed out, for me, the ones who are not as passionate about what they do. Sorry if this model is counter to YT's business model.
Better: if you want to make a business out of it, sell plans like WoodenGears guy, or kits like Ben Eater.
Preface: I am a Youtuber who prefers not to do sponsored segments but has done some in the past.
> Advertising tends to naturally weed out, for me, the ones who are not as passionate about what they do.
This is a remark I see over and over again, basically "You're only in it for the money" once you do sponsors. Here's the thing that no one really gets, Youtube is not a hobby. I don't care what the channel topic is, building cars, lathe projects, tech reviews, pets, etc. The hobby for the creator is the subject, not the video production platform or process. Youtube is not social media, we're not posting videos so our friends can see what we're up to. The entire system is built completely differently from something like facebook, twitter, instgram, etc. It requires actual work. Planning videos, making thumbnails, responding to comments from strangers, making business connections, and more when you get larger. "Making videos" themselves isn't just waving a camera around while you do something either and requires it's own thought and effort.
Anyone who has reasonable success on Youtube can be monetarily rewarded for that. That alone creates an expectation that it could possibly be a source of income from the outset. If you can achieve making it a sustainable income source capable of being lived off of, why wouldn't you? You can continue to do and build upon your actual hobby, whatever it is. But instead of working a different "conventional" job you do video production, PR, marketing, and potentially advertising. The problem is that the on platform advertisement revenue is not enough to cover the effort and resources required to make videos as you become more serious about it. Part of this is on viewers because Youtube knows if you are using adblock. I can see this on the back end, on average for my channel less than 50% of views are monetized. So if nobody used adblock I could make literally double the amount on just the on platform ads alone. But that's not how it is and it's not going to change.
So you have to do something else as well. Personally, as a Youtuber, I see two revenue paths. You either go crowd funded with something like Patreon or do sponsors. You can do both but unless it's well done and relevant it feels like double dipping to me. But the in video sponsors aren't any different than the other advertisements on platform on youtube, except they aren't blocked by adblock. (Youtubers properly disclosing the ads is a completely separate issue that should not besmirch everyone who does it.) Youtubers don't get to choose their sponsor partners unless they are gigantic and have to take what they can get. We get tons of spam offers that try to screw us, taking real ones from even slightly reputable companies can make a big impact. Youtubers should do a better job of picking them, but not everybody understands something like what a VPN actually is and how is just moves your endpoint to a different set of private hands. But advertising is tied to media and not new at all. Complaining about a slightly more effective version of it is just naivety about how the service works and what the people who make the videos do.
TL;DR: Youtube is not a hobby, the subject Youtubers talk about is. Youtube is a job that takes real work, but it can't pay well enough, partly because of adblock. In video sponsors are just a different ad method that directly pays bypassing the adblock problem.
PS: I do not use adblock, partly because it feels hypocritical to make money on ads and then block them for others. The internet is indeed annoying without it, but I manage just fine.
> Youtube is not social media, we're not posting videos so our friends can see what we're up to.
Speak for yourself. I post videos on Youtube to show some low hundreds of people (including friends) that are subscribed to me what I'm up to, to give them a good laugh or to share some music, art or software I've made. No one owes it to me to elevate this hobby into a job. There are many Youtube channels like this.
Maybe if I had a million subscribers the urge to attract people with youtube-faced thumbnails and to monetize through shitty mobile game sponsorships would be overwhelming but I'd like to believe that I wouldn't be pissed off if people opted to mechanically skip the latter.
> So if nobody used adblock I could make literally double the amount on just the on platform ads alone.
If people didn't have access to clean water on tap, I could make more money selling bottled water.
YouTube is not a hobby? Interesting. I don't think I ever thought it was. I guess I consider it closer to art.
Plenty of musicians, artists perform/create with no prospect of monetary gain. They do it for the accolades. They do it for the positive feedback. They do it because they have to: they're artists.
I suspect YouTubers like "Applied Science" are artists of a sort. I guess I'm drawn to YouTube artists.
I am conflating things in my mind a bit because most of the comments on my own videos that complain about sponsors or other revenue options use the "not as passionate" argument alongside the idea of "Youtube should just be a hobby". My apologies if that came off wrong. But it is inevitable that anyone making videos that is successful will have to treat it as a business because it is work.
Applied Science is a good example of someone who has not gone the sponsor route. He is crowd funded and has a Patreon page that is setup to charge when he releases a video(I'm a patron of his actually). It is still work to make the videos and describe what he's doing and how it works. He could be sponsored, even relevantly, if for example he used a Rigol scope to show something and then talked about it for a bit. But that wouldn't mean he is any less passionate about what he is doing.
The musicians and artists example is different though. Their hobbies produce media as an end result. Publishing it is part of the process. I make videos about vintage computers. My hobby without youtube would just be me sitting alone in a room tinkering. Creating a video out of whatever I'm doing requires deliberate additional effort.
I don't want to suggest in any way that creating the videos is easy and not work. I have put together probably 30 to 40 videos myself (Final Cut) and know how much work it is.
Gessoing a canvas is work. Setting up, taking down a drum kit is work too. If you want the world to see your hobby, or your art, there is a cost involved. We accept that cost for exposure in return: for the joy of sharing in return.
I don't fault anyone wanting to make money from their hobby or their art. But I also respect a little more perhaps those, like Applied Science, that don't want to ... sully their art with a blatant sponsor plug.
Again though, I'm just a viewer, fan, enthusiast, lurker — the content creators get to make their own rules, I don't get to tell them how to run their channel.
Subscribed to your YT channel, BTW. Wrote a very early game on the Commodore PET, LOL.
I think for some us pro-sponsor-segment people, I feel like regular ads are particularly dry and more of an "assault." But sponsor segments... can be creative, funny, and sometimes make me actually want to buy the product (...not the generic Raid: Shadow Legends ones... but even those if they're well done). I appreciate well-made ads, so I don't mind sponsor segments.
I watch a video for whatever topic the video title and description leads me to expect I'm going to hear about. A sponsorship segment, no matter how "clever", is still an ad.
> But sponsor segments... sometimes make me actually want to buy the product
That's exactly what I don't want: more sophisticated psychological manipulation that gets me to buy more stuff.
The only time I don’t smash the fast-forward button during podcast ads is during the Unmade Podcast. They actually manage to continue the show’s conversation while they promote Hover and Story Blocks. It also means that sometimes their ad slots (as defined by the time between “and now a word from this episode’s sponsor” and “thank you very much for supporting this episode”) can be over seven minutes at times.
Sure, but creators don’t have many other avenues for revenue when you’re already using YouTube-dl(p) to download videos without watching ads. I imagine sponsor spots will be devalued over time as sponsorblock usage continues to grow, especially for creators with audiences that watch content on desktop more than mobile.
Is it apparent to the sponsor when someone is watching using youtube-dlp versus a regular view? I'd imagine most sponsored segments are negotiated based on subscriber count or view numbers.
Sponsors might ask for some of the creator's analytics, eg. raid: shadow legends probably isn't going to sponsor channels that have very low mobile viewership compared to desktop. There are also paid analytics tools, eg. VidIQ, which can make good guesses about some metrics.
How would Google's backend know whether the traffic comes from their own frontend vs a utility like youtube-dl (assume for the sake of argument that the utility is trying to make the traffic look like normal YouTube traffic)?
Youtube proper does a lot of JS, eg. a view is usually only counted after ~30 seconds[0] and does other things like logging the current timecode so that it can return to that time in case the user clicks off the video and returns to it later[1].
It does, it shows up as a "Other YouTube features" for the source.
Though, YouTube seems to do some aggressive deduping here, if I download from 5 different IPs, excluding the IP I'm logged into YouTube's services, I see 5 views. If I download 50 times from one IP, I see one view.
You conveniently skipped the rest of his comment which was really the important part...
There is no need to state the obvious. Nobody would miss any kind of advertisement in the media they consume but that doesn't answer how content creators are supposed to be compensated for the effort they put in.
For me, the issue is that overwhelmingly the sponsor blocks are for products and services not available in or relevant to my country. Unlike the regular ads loaded through YouTube, they can’t be customized based on the viewer’s region. They will just assume that viewers of English-language content are in the USA, mostly. When you subtract mobile games, which I don’t play, I would say that maybe 1 in 20 of them are things I could buy even if I wanted to. So it just feels pointless, they see no benefit from my seeing the sponsorships and it wastes my time.
As for what sponsored content people are streaming: where I live Internet providers provide unlimited bandwidth during off peak hours (midnight to 8AM) but give you a monthly data limit outside those hours. If you are in an area not wired for high-speed internet, you might be relying on 4G which can have a monthly limit of as little as 50 GB… which isn’t much at all for a family. So it’s nice to be able to queue up all the videos you want to watch to download overnight, making the answer “everything/anything.”
(And that is the chief use of YouTube-DL for me. YouTube premium lets you save videos to watch offline, but only on mobile devices —- which typically have little storage for them —- and you can’t schedule it, you’d have to get up at midnight to manually select each video. With YouTube-DL I can schedule downloads of all my subscriptions and bookmarks to a nice big hard drive and then automatically put my PC to sleep.)
At first I saw the sponsor segments, later it became too repetitive so I started doing the double-touch action (skip 10 or 20 seconds forward) when a video would start talking once again about the VPN service of the month (really, it seems to always be VPN services!), and later I ended up having to actually pause the video, scroll forward even a couple minutes (some sponsor segments have gone wild in duration lately).
Then I started using[1] SponsorBlock, and now we're back at square 0.
[1]: I had known about it for a long time but didn't feel like using it, until I did (or you can see it as "they made me feel like using it"...)
All marketing is bad. It's essentially mindhacking.
> I want indie people to make enough money to produce high quality content
If people have something to say, they will say it whether they get paid for it or not. That's what I want. Real opinions from real people. Not some sponsored content you can't trust is real.
> otherwise media is just what a few biggies want to fund
It already is. All they have to do to lose funding is say or do something those sponsors don't like.
How many youtubers have you seen shilling out raid shadow legends? They all praise it like it's the next coming of Jesus while everyone knows that the game is absolute garbage.
How many times will I get ad for NordVPN? Why would I use such a widely known and blocked VPN for streaming services? It is literal noob trap.
Worst is the reybud or whatever ear buds. Everyone says how good they sound and how amazing they are, but realistically if a brand comes out of nowhere with no other products what are the chances that they are good or even decent?
All of these are terrible sponsor ads for me. All they do is annoy me and waste my time. At least many video makers I follow have the decency to somehow indicate in the video how long the ad will go on so it is easier to skip. Only reason I don't use the automatic extension is that anyone can mark any segment of any video as an ad and it will be automatically skipped and I don't like that idea. Maybe if it was just some friends who I trust.
Some people, like Internet Historian puts some effort in and the sponsor segments are actually entertaining and I don't mind watching those. Some people also do the quick shout out that takes some 10 seconds and they're fine too.
I also watch some meme compilations with my SO and they're usually pretty different. I appreciate that compiling those memes into one video is for the convenience of the viewer but the original video creators don't benefit from those, only the ones making the compilations so I don't want to support that. On top of that, there are some channels that have several minutes long product ads inside the video, not the normal YouTube adverts. I simply hate those.
Bad? No, not really. If you ask me, (almost?) nothing is inherently bad. But it's a nice and obvious feature to skip them if you want, so it's pretty amazing that such options are possible now. (However, I don't think I'll use it, because there is an mpv plugin for that, and it feels pretty weird, to actually skip parts of the video when downloading. I mean, what if I'll need it one time: do I have to re-download the video?)
There is only a certain number of times a person can watch a video where the creator mentions they are sponsored by Raid Shadow Legends before a person will go mad.
I usually see sponsorships for products that I already know about. If it's a creator's first sponsorship or if it's a new product (I check the description links to see) then I watch it through but otherwise, it's a massive waste of time to sit through a bunch 1 minute sponsorship in the middle of a 10 minute video.
Ads are a terrible monetization model and I will never willingly consume them. What was wrong with the original model of supporting artists via patronage anyway? Now with platforms like Patreon it's very simple to set up.
It depends. Some Creators get pretty creative with their sponsor blocks. JayzTwoCents comes to mind with his "iFixit" ad - it's hilarous every time it appears.
I never buy anything based on ads, so it makes no difference for the advertiser whether I remove the sponsored part or not, they won’t see a dime from me either way.
It doesn't make any difference to the channel whether you watch the sponsored segment or not. If you want to archive some videos then sponsored segments are just a waste of space. I archive any useful information that I intend to use. For example, an instructional video showing how to repair my car.
Man I thought I was in heaven when I accidentally stumbled upon SponsorBlock. Now you're telling me about this?! Amazing! How does the video quality fare after stripping? Is it re-encoding the video or somehow stripping it without altering the quality?
I doubt it would have to re-encode. First it would split the video into separate files which don’t include the sponsored content.
Then would use something like the ffmpeg concat demuxer which will adjust timestamps of the input streams, and then output a concatenated result stream (no reencode) (https://ffmpeg.org/ffmpeg-formats.html#concat-1). So it should probably have zero quality loss.
It re-encodes. Actually, I think it defaults to marking the sponsor bits ... somehow. Whatever it's doing wasn't enough for my player to notice.
That said, for this stuff, I've only downloaded audio, and of that mostly talking head type stuff, where I let it cut out the segments. Whatever re-encoding is done would have to be pretty bad before I'd care.
$ yt-dlp -x --sponskrub --sponskrub-cut "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_7vPNcnYWQ4"
[youtube] _7vPNcnYWQ4: Downloading webpage
[youtube] _7vPNcnYWQ4: Downloading android player API JSON
[info] _7vPNcnYWQ4: Downloading 1 format(s): 251
[download] Destination: Making an unpickable lock. Calling locksmiths [_7vPNcnYWQ4].webm
[download] 100% of 12.72MiB in 00:00
[ExtractAudio] Destination: Making an unpickable lock. Calling locksmiths [_7vPNcnYWQ4].opus
Deleting original file Making an unpickable lock. Calling locksmiths [_7vPNcnYWQ4].webm (pass -k to keep)
[SponSkrub] Trying to remove sponsor sections
WARNING: Cutting out sponsor segments will cause the subtitles to go out of sync.
[libopus @ 0x5462c20] No bit rate set. Defaulting to 96000 bps.
size= 3515kB time=00:04:33.53 bitrate= 105.3kbits/s speed= 26x
Without the audio only option, it's more clear it's re-encoding:
[SponSkrub] Trying to remove sponsor sections
WARNING: Cutting out sponsor segments will cause the subtitles to go out of sync.
[libopus @ 0x5575420] No bit rate set. Defaulting to 96000 bps.
frame= 51 fps=8.5 q=0.0 size= 1kB time=00:00:01.95 bitrate= 3.5kbits/s speed=0.326x
> It integrates with sponskrub to call into the SponsorBlock database and with the right options will strip the sponsor segments from downloaded videos.
Also here is a fork of NewPipe with SponsorBlock functionality.[0]
So dlc is a fork of dl, but dl itself has actually a bunch of fairly recent commits which dlc does not have. And dlp nor dlc are 'forks' in the Github sense of forking. So how does one figure out whether recent dl commits are in dlp? And does this matter? Is this the downside of 'if you don't like it then just fork it and fix it'?
Other than a few commits [1], everything in youtube-dl is already in yt-dlp. You can see upto which upstream commit is merged into yt-dlp in the changelog [2]
Edit: Correct typo