Sponsorblock has been a Godsend for me; it's something you don't really think about but adds up. The sponsored segments are not even really the biggest advantage, it also skips intros and outros and interaction reminders, which are huge.
I am convinced that being really aggressive about blocking advertisements helps with my ADHD and helps me focus better. I don't have science to back that up, just my anecdotal self-reported experience -- but I see improvements every time I get a little bit more purposeful about blocking ads (and not just ads but intros, boot screens, social reminders, suggested articles, etc -- basically interruptions). And when I see ads now that I'm no longer desensitized to them, they stick out so much and they're so hard to ignore. Our brains are good at filtering things out, but I do wonder if there's a focus cost in addition to a time cost. My mood improves when my house is clean and organized; my mood also improves when my media consumption is organized and de-cluttered.
Long intros are the worst. You had a nice click bait title and thumbnail fucking get to the content instead of telling me how busy you have been and how you feel/sound sick or entire history of everything and everyone even remotely related to the topic if the video.
It's like their primary goal is to dump their opinion-drama on their seemingly captive audience, and any actual 'content' is far secondary to first-order-thinking-limited outrage.
Fuck all of them, and fuck the average human's susceptibility to being brain-hacked like that.
(Yes, there's plenty of good content and presenters out there, but there's about 1000x more dressed-up trash that also seem to have an unexplainable gazillion-and-one appropriately named "followers").
I use sponsor block on youtube too (I have youtube premium but that does not remove these sponsor blocks automatically) and the only videos I'm kinda sad not to see the sponsor blocks are videos by "Internet Historian".
He does it funny enough not to be annoying. Worst example on the other hand is Linus Tech Tips in my opinion
Most SponsorBlock clients offer a way to whitelist certain channels so they aren’t skipped (iSponsorBlockTV does it), so that’s a good option if you like their sponsor segments
I didn’t know about this, just installed and it works amazing. I have premium but I hate the sponsor segments in the videos. If Google breaks this app, I’ll try out the iSponsorBlockTV but this is a better fit for my situation now.
Recommend this one too. I normally use an AppleTV for all my TV needs, but I bought a FireTV stick just to install this app and be able to watch YouTube without ads and sponsored content.
You can sideload a YouTube client with integrated sponsorblock on your AppleTV. But this will require apple developer account ($99 per year). Not q perfect solution and cost money but just wanted to say that is an option for people inside Apple ecosystem.
On the other hand, youtube is trying hard to stop adblock use in general on browsers.. down to the level of having to update ublock lists hourly, get popup mssages, and playlists stopping playback after three videos.
After disabling my adblock for YT I noticed the video player has gotten much worse. I always saw preroll ads still but now all of them are completely jarring. My previous player seemed to play them inline whereas now they load separately, jump abruptly, much more annoying.
i can almost nod my head in acceptance for a :30 ad before a new piece of content. at :45, i'm starting to get annoyed. at :60, i'm wondering if this is really worth it. then, youtube steps up to the plate, points to the fences, and serves up a 2minute30second (i've seen longer) short film on some clearly fake as fuck scam type of 4am paid programming type of crap. on top of serving some mind bendingly annoying long ad break, they don't even attempt to prevent serving clearly malicious ads. if you're going to be heartless and force ads, don't be soulless and at least vet the ads from obvious scams.
There's a channel I like to watch "Mini Air Crash Investigation" who does 5-15 minute long summaries of airplane crashes and the results of the ensuing investigations.
I once got an ad on one of their videos for a 45 minute long video of an air crash investigation from a copycat channel narrated by someone with a very similar voice. I got about 10 minutes in before thinking "wow, this is a pretty weak episode from this channel" before noticing what was going on.
(I don't mean to imply all air crash investigation style channels are copying this one. But that video was a straight copy of their style, narrative order, and even voice and speaking style).
Like Already__Taken says, if you go a while without skipping ads, youtube seems to intentionally show you longer and longer ads.
I have premium now, and while I enjoy it, I really feel like I got bullied into subscribing. If all the ads breaks were 60 seconds total or less I would have been fine staying a free user. But they punish me for not diligently having my finger ready to press "skip".
I left a playlist on while working, so an anonymous account. A full on hour self-help seminar was playing as an ad.
if you don't skip the ads you get to some weird places.
Its weird too because the ad-player doesn't like you scrub the timeline or go forward-back. So even if it was an interesting ad you can't go back or interact at all. Its so similar to a late-night infomercial and unlike a YT video its uncanny.
Vinegar for iOS and macOS uses the native player. Along with adblocking I rarely see the FOPRA (flash of pre-roll ads). Whenever I use a native app (FireTV, Apple TV) I’m annoyed by the now ≥10s unskippable ads.
I'm a YouTube (Red? Premium?) subscription so I don't see ads, but I'm very pleased to see SponsorBlock-like services spreading. Would love to see it for podcasts.
I'd say there are a lot of creators, depending on the content type. As long as you're not looking for travel vloggers or unboxing/review videos or "lifestyle" vloggers there's plenty. Pretty much all science/history/urbanism/aviation YouTubers I follow are on Nebula as well.
Issue is that the UX isn't great (e.g. there are no playlists nor queues, and downloads don't work as well as they do on YouTube).
On my phone so I can't easily timestamp but showing monetary amounts begins at 6:50
Brilliant, $4500 for 3 videos. Blinkist, $2000 for one video. VPN, specific brand not named, $5800 for a 90 second ad read. Raid Shadow Legends, $2000-6000 depending on if he's willing to dedicate time in his video to just playing the game on camera. Skillshare $2000 for a 90 second ad read.
The most interesting part to me was these are often not directly offered by these companies. They are from advertising partners who have a referral program with the primary company. So he would often get multiple emails to advertise the same product from different senders and offering different amounts of money.
This video has been viewed 134,000 times. At $2000 per video, that would be a cost of 1.5 cents per-view, and that's assuming no one else after this point would pay for the video. Inline sponsorships are probably the best form of advertising out there in terms of creator payout, but the reality is that even at its best, advertising for creators pays so low that it is really feasible for you to just sponsor the creators you're following for even just a buck a month and you'll probably be more valuable to them as a contributor than any of the people who are leaving ads enabled.
Especially if they're small creators. There really is a threshold in advertising where a lot of indie creators are not going to be offered this kind of money.
I don't blame creators for doing what they need to do to make money, the state of advertising is not their fault. But as an ecosystem of users and developers and as an industry, we can make a choice about whether a system that encourages influencers to lie about product recommendations and directly influences their content and the topics they can talk about is more or less exploitative and regressive than asking people to give money to creators directly.
Advertising is often phrased as an alternative to regressive taxes on content -- it allows us to give content to people who couldn't pay otherwise. But advertising is itself a regressive tax; advertisers would not be paying any money for advertising if it didn't change purchaser behavior. And for the social cost of that regressive tax, content creators get very little payout in return. $2000-6000 for a video sounds good only because we're thinking about it in comparison to Youtube payout. But it's not very much money for a video that likely required multiple workers and several weeks to a month to produce.
>Overcast (iOS) supposedly can block ads and skip intros/outros
Overcast intro and outro skip is a thing (that I use for most podcasts), but I've never seen anything like an ad-skipping feature. I listen to the developer's podcast (Accidental Tech Podcast) and he mentioned that ad detection and skipping is something that he's looked into and considering, but as far as I know it's not an overcast feature today.
I have an overcast next chapter action triggered by a Siri shortcut called “skip ad” — so I can just say “Siri, Skip Ad”. It works only if the podcast pervasively chapterizes of course, but thankfully most of mine do.
Paying $100 a year for a freaking podcast seems ridiculous to me, especially when there is no special cause behind it and the hosts are already rich af. But of course they are free to charge whatever they want.
I don’t think it can skip automatically. I’m an Overcast user, and haven’t heard of this - and can’t find the feature now that I look.
It does have configurable “skip forward” and “skip backward” _times_, and will skip to and resume from between words instead of inside words - so it’s easier to manually skip than in some other apps - but I don’t think there’s anything automatic.
[Edit: Oh! It can skip a configurable amount of time from the start and end of playback of any podcast! It’s still manual though.]
I used Audacity to excerpt a clip from a podcast the other day and the ads were obvious just from the shape of the waveform. The ad section waveforms were half the height of the rest of the podcast. I don't know how representative that one podcast is.
Note that you can configure Sponsorblock not to skip sponsored segments but to still skip intros/outros and subscription/interaction reminders.
Adblocking is definitely the thing it's advertised on, but sponsored segments are only one labeled category. For longer lets-plays it's great to have the equivalent of Netflix's "skip the intro/credits" option. It is an adblocking extension first and foremost, but I still kind of recommend checking it out even if you don't plan to block ads with it because you might still find the other categories useful.
I don't - the creator already got paid... and if it devalues ads to the point of sponsors no longer trying to inject marketing into videos and creators relying on patreon/similar I think we'd be in a better world.
I don't. If the video is streamed to my machine I get to filter it before I consume it. Youtubers make money from merch sales, donations, subscriptions, live events and more. If I want to support someone I find out how to donate to them but I don't feel bad about filtering out ad reads.
Yeah, sponsor sections of content is usually done respectfully of the audience. There's no javascript being run on my machine, the sponsor is usually tangentially related to the content, and the creator has an incentive to deliver it in either a humorous or relevant manner.
>Yeah, sponsor sections of content is usually done respectfully of the audience.
I literally just LOL'd and spit water at my screen reading that. They are the most condescending over the top waaaaay too long of a segment. Even in the 1950's, sponsors were just mentioned along the lines of "This segment is brought to you by Ovaltine. Remember to drink your Ovaltine!" and then moves right the fuck along. But nooooo, youtube sponsors took the SNL idea of play it until it's uncomfortably long, then keep going until it's just funny that they haven't stopped, but then continue until you just feel like a sad sap for continuing to have this product/service talked about like it is the second coming. Respectful. As. If.
Maybe you should watch other creators then. IME better creators have higher respect for their audiences and create better, even entertaining sponsor segments.
I have even been introduced to services I pay for now via these segments. Nebula, Backblaze, DBrand, and Audible are some of them.
I used to think that too, but then i installed sponsorblock. It's like the skipped segment wasn't even there (well, duh). What i mean is that if i skip a segment of the video and not notice it, was it really relevant and well-integrated?
You weren't introduced to these services, you got advertised to. How many raid shadow legend ads did you sit through to hear about backblaze once? Did you ever hear about backblaze from a more reputable source? Did you consider alternatives to backblaze before paying for their services?
>IME better creators have higher respect for their audiences and create better, even entertaining sponsor segments.
This teeters on the verge of being a shill's comment. This concept of "creators" being any different than any other social media "influencer" that is doing things for clicks/likes/subscribes opposed to "respecting" their audience is just farcical. Are there various degrees of their insincerity, of course.
I never drank the social media Kool-aid. I find it very disconcerting how many people from the social media generations actually believe that these "creators" shilling products are anything more than what they actually are.
I already pay for Youtube Premium which pays the creator in return for ad-free viewing. I don't really see a difference between ads from youtube's platform vs ones embedded in the video content.
This is a godsend for my yt premium subscription. Now I can really enjoy watching yt on my tv without watching ads since I pay anyway, will test this weekend.
Big thanks to developers!
I don't understand how can people trust a random app or extension just to have a little convinience. When it comes to big tech people are very privacy conscious. But it's not always big tech may have privacy leaks or would sell your data directly to data brokers most of the time, it's small apps like this.
I'm not saying developer is doing that, but they have power to do so. This app sends every video you're watching to their api, https://sponsor.ajay.app/api/ , and they can do whatever they want with this data. When small apps like this becames popular, they start receiving offers from data brokers/malware business and sometimes developers sell the data or the whole app without even knowing that the data will be used for bad purposes.
I had a peek and it looks like it's the youtube lounge API. Basically this is casting with some bonus features. If you are playing on a Screen (a tv or console) then Remotes (usually your phone) can automatically notice it and automatically show what is playing, let you use controls, add stuff to the playlist etc.
This program registers a remote and automatically skips forward when a sponsorblock segment is present.
It blocks sponsored content using SponsorBlock[0], which uses crowdsourced data to detect segments in video's and skips them (basically fast forwards over the content).
> "Basically this is casting with some bonus features. If you are playing on a Screen (a tv or console) then Remotes (usually your phone) can automatically notice it and automatically show what is playing, let you use controls, add stuff to the playlist etc. This program registers a remote and automatically skips forward when a sponsorblock segment is present. "
Not dmunozv04 - you need to install the 64bit version of Raspberry Pi OS (unfortunately not the default) as the project does not provide ArmV6 images with Docker. Or build your docker image/run it outside of docker.
YouTube recently started showing a graph highlighting what sections of the video are watched more (when seeking with the cursor), so I assume they actually give creators proper metrics about this, and it could hurt revenue if sponsors ask to know the difference in watch time between their segment and the rest of the video
Yea - if you're manually skipping sponsored segments this is actually hilariously useful since when seeking through the video there will be a big spike at the end of every sponsored segment from all the sponsor block users.
Its unclear from the readme, but does this block ads on devices that support casting or only block ads when you are casting? Will it interfere if I have sponsorblock already running on my Android TV?
Also why does this program need to be completely rewritten so many times to eliminate performance issues with the previous version?
There's a docker image with some instructions on Wiki, shouldn't be too tricky to transfer over. If I end up making it work I'll do a PR for the project wiki for Synology install steps.
I spent about a month looking for detailed guides on how to add individual services to my Synology and just constantly being frustrated.
Then I found an extremely detailed but very opinionated guide on how to setup a suite of apps with docker compose and ssh because the author's were very much against the GUI and built in apps. It's been a much smoother and easier experience installing services since I no longer need to seek out half baked guides on someone who got it working good enough for them on their NAS.
seems like a good project to integration with ChatGPT video and figure out ways to automatically insert start & end times for sponsors, interaction reminders, intro, outro, etc. With a little training, this could be fully automated accurately.
Unfortunately I don't think it's possible. The router can only intercept as far as DNS goes, and DNS Blocklists are already incapable of blocking YouTube ads.
Routers run operating systems like everything else does though. What would make my OpenWRT router running this any different from another device on the network?
The service doesn't deal with encrypted payloads. It just integrates with YouTube's lounge api. As long as a machine is able to run this and is connected to the internet, that should be enough.
Looks like the compatible TVs have an interface (UPnP/DLNA?) that can presumably be queried to ask "What video is playing?", and "How far along are you in the video?", as well as accepting commands like "Skip to x:xx".
I am convinced that being really aggressive about blocking advertisements helps with my ADHD and helps me focus better. I don't have science to back that up, just my anecdotal self-reported experience -- but I see improvements every time I get a little bit more purposeful about blocking ads (and not just ads but intros, boot screens, social reminders, suggested articles, etc -- basically interruptions). And when I see ads now that I'm no longer desensitized to them, they stick out so much and they're so hard to ignore. Our brains are good at filtering things out, but I do wonder if there's a focus cost in addition to a time cost. My mood improves when my house is clean and organized; my mood also improves when my media consumption is organized and de-cluttered.