Solution: a report ad button for Premium subscribers.

Once a significant (number && percentage) of users report it kt is flagged,

- first to the creator

- and then shortly afterwards - if the creator does not either fix it or verify it - to a review team or even to a customer panel

Some logic can be applied to filter out abuses of the system by:

- looking for reports by new viewers of this channel (brigading)

- dismissing / less weighting for people who have previously attempted to abuse the report button

- look at the clustering of reports in time

Surely as soon as you have this there'll be a service to leak the time codes to non-subscribers so embeds, yt-dl's forks, etc. can auto-skip.

Already happens which us a good thing given how YouTube drag their feet on this.

Maybe there had been less enthusiasm around such projects though if they didn't have legitimate uses?

Why not just use the original sponsorskip at that point?

Im not against sponsorskip.

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.