In-video sponsors are a form of contextual ad but ads inserted by YouTube are personalized (that doesn't mean context is not also a factor).

Channels like MKBHD (and LTT) need more revenue than what they get from YouTube ads because their expenses have greatly increased, particularly staff.

You can't automate contextual ads in news media, otherwise you get airline ads next to stories about airplane crashes. Or travel ads for places experiencing natural disasters or political upheaval. People pairing ads with stories increases the labor costs and there's already not enough money being paid for actual journalism to increase the cost of having ads.

This is an interesting point you make. But didn't we solve all of these context issues already? I don't remember getting any ads like his in Duckduckgo since I've started using it. Nor do for the ads we used to get when everybody used contextual ads.

The only issue is going to be that you will have to handle this when you implement ads for your website/app. And each of them will have to do it.

Of course e.g. MKBHD wants more ad revenue. To do so his only option is to put additional contextual ads as part of the video itself, so he does. MKBHD has no way to make a section of the video target individual viewers based on their history. YouTube does, so they do - because they know it makes them more money to do it that way.

Yes. It makes more money for the middle-man. Neither the advertisers nor user gets enough value.

There are so many articles on why your FB or Google ads are not doing well. They show ads the way THEY can make money. Not value for you. This is theh same going when you use adwords.

When 30-40% of your audience uses ad-blockers, it's hard to make it on just that.

They won't say this, the children in their audience will throw a fit, but tech audiences are stacked with content freeloaders.

The ad blockers are for behavioural ads. The api end-points which tracks you through tabs, listens to what you are saying through your phone's microphone.

Not contextual ads which you will setup for just your website / app. They are just <img> tags or equivalent. The entire reason why people use ad-blockers are because it is bad UX, anti-privacy and just sheer garbage amount of data gathering. Use a website with and without ad-blockers. You will see the difference. With middlemen comes problems for users.