What? I don't see any ads unless they're embedded in the video by the creator...?

Those are still ads and there are solutions to filter them out that Youtube could be more proactive about surfacing to premium users.

I think you're being ridiculous. Like, would you want YouTube to skip over this entire scene in the Wayne's World movie?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8lgLYGBbDNs

Should it not let me see a product review if it was sponsored by the company that makes the product? Or only if the reviewers didn't have full editorial control?

Wherever you would want to draw the line, someone else would tell you that you drew it wrong.

I think you're being unnecessarily adversarial here.

Sponsored ads in videos are everywhere, and well delineated. Third party tools exist to skip them already -- and YouTube already has the data on where they start and end. They even show them on the timeline, although they call "end of sponsored advertisement" "most replayed"… presumedly because of everyone skipping the ad, losing their place, and then having to step back to try to find where the content begins again.

Here's how this could work. I would pay an additional $10/month for YouTube Scarlet. Content creators would have three options -- declare that their videos have no sources of revenue outside of YouTube revenue; provide start and end time stamps for any external-revenue-generating segments; or do nothing.

For my $10/month, videos in the second category would skip their promotion. In exchange, some portion of my $10/month would go to the video creator, just like ad/Premium revenue does today, and the metrics on number of videos where this segment was skipped would be made available in analytics for sharing with sponsors. Finally, I'd have access to a user preference to suppress videos in the third category for appearing in recommendations, ever.

Does this deal with every case? No. Would it make YouTube more pleasant for me and potentially others who share my values, without impacting current regular and Premium users, and with a neutral or positive impact on content creators? I assert yes.

Would it have a negative impact on the businesses who promote those videos?

Yes.

If it's a negative impact on the businesses who promote videos, how can you say your idea doesn't impact content creators?

Why would it have a negative impact on either the promoted businesses or the content creators?

Promoted businesses currently pay based on (an estimate of) the number of views that the video will get. This would trivially adjust to paying based on the number of views that the sponsorship within the video gets -- that's why I mentioned the requirement to make this available through analytics. If the cost per view stays the same for sponsors, they're now paying for a self-selecting audience of people who are not actively bothered by their ads. (I doubt I'm the only person who, if I as going to pay money for a VPN, would choose literally anything other than Nord VPN just as petty "revenge" for how much of my life they've wasted.) If this slightly-reduced audience does not sufficiently eat their marketing budget, they can find new creators to sponsor.

For the content creators, presumedly the target amount paid directly per skipped ad would be chosen to slightly exceed the expected payout of showing the ad. This is the same conceptual model Premium uses today. So even though the sponsor may be paying them for a 9.5 M view video instead of a 10 M view video -- the payout should more than cover the difference.

I agree that these marginal wins run into systematic concerns if more than, say, 5% or so of users start opting out of embedded advertising this way. But besides being incredibly unlikely -- what would it say about the business model of embedded advertising if 5% of YouTube customers were willing to pay to avoid it!?

So, you appear to dismiss my concerns completely, demand a feature, and then insist... that hardly anyone will use it? And that because hardly anyone will use it, that means promoters are safe... unless they're not, in which case, they had it coming?

A sponsor pays $10,000 to a content creator.

And then, they get zero views of their embedded ad in the video.

They got literally nothing for their $10,000 investment.

And let's say, for the sake of argument, that YouTube does not pay $10,000 for the same video, or ones like it.

Now, the content creator gets less money than they would have before.

It's almost like content creators have already done this calculus, and concluded that the best way to create content is to promote things.

It's funny to me when someone is like, "Why doesn't YouTube do X," and then they answer their own question, but then they still act like it's weird that YouTube doesn't do that thing.

Sponsors don't pay a fixed amount to creators. They pay for (estimated) views.

What I'm proposing is exactly, 100% symmetric to how advertisers who pay Google for YouTube ad placement are already treated -- they pay for views, and YouTube can and does choose to not show those ads to some users, those who pay for Premium. Is that unfair for the ad buyers? Sure, if you squint right… but they're not being deprived something they paid for, they're just not being offered the option to put in ads in front of that particular market.

Before Youtube Premium, I would have said the same thing about blocking first-party ads in YouTube. It was weird they didn't do that thing. And then they did it. So now it's not weird I guess?

> Sponsors don't pay a fixed amount to creators. They pay for (estimated) views.

This can't be right, I've seen many videos from creators that say the opposite, it is a fixed amount per contract which can be one or more videos. Maybe it is different with creators that have more than 1M subscribers.

You're correct, for at least a large fraction of the sponsored videos I've ever seen.

The estimation is on the front end of the contract, not the back end -- the amount offered to a creator whose videos average 10M views is 10x than what is offered to one whose videos average 1M views, in general. If you think about it from the advertiser's point of view, this is the only sane way to manage the risk of a video going viral and exceeding expected number of views, while still providing a reasonably constant valuation of a view event.

A sponsorship in a video paid directly to the YouTuber is very different from a targeted ad that YouTube runs. It doesn't interrupt the content in unexpected ways (only ways planned by the creator), it's targeted based on content rather than data mining, and the creator usually tries to add a bit of personality to it. Not to mention you can skip them using the regular scrubbing controls rather than being forced to watch at least 5 seconds.

Yes. It is a somewhat-less-bad form of even more advertising. If you think paying to avoid some advertising is reasonable, why is paying more to avoid more advertising unreasonable?

It's unreasonable to expect YouTube Premium to filter out content inserted by the video creator when that's not the terms either you or the creator were given. I pay for Nebula and don't see any ads or sponsorships there, but I don't begrudge the sponsorships on regular YouTube.

If the sponsorships bug you that much, use sponsorblock.

Yes, I agree that it is unreasonable to expect this of Youtube Premium, as that is not the value proposition of that product.

The original comment was proposing a new product, at a higher price point to reflect its higher costs, that /does/ cater to this expectation.

It's totally reasonable: users would be happier, YouTube can charge more for it (YT Premium+?), and YT analytics can detect when a sponsor segment (which many videos already label, and which are known to be about 60s long) is skipped and pass those metrics on to the content creator so the sponsor isn't being cheated.

Everybody wins. (Yes this doesn't work for heavily integrated sponsorships but it'd still get most of them.)

Frequently you can pay more to individual YouTubers for that service, many have Patreon or other methods of providing early ad free versions of their content.

Yes. This is a very, very good answer when it's available as an option.

I do think, though, that if the best answer to "YouTube doesn't let me do <x>" is "pay an alternate service provider instead," it might suggest a market opportunity for YouTube to provide the same service with much less friction.

Sponsorblock is a thing that exists if in-video ads annoy you.

I don’t believe there’s a way to run it on AppleTV, though I would love to be wrong.

That's why i'm happy with SmartTubeNext with Sponsorblock on Android TV.

I don’t mind the promotional/sponsorship content in the Youtube channels I follow. Some people make them funny, and others are smaller so I don’t mind supporting them. Also, they’re always 100% skippable simply by scrubbing forward past them (which isn’t always the case with Youtube-injected preroll ads). That said, I don’t know how offensive these are across the entire Youtube landscape, and I could see them being a nuisance.

Have you tried SponsorBlock? It basically allows auto-skipping of all that fluff.