> 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?
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).