Louis Rossman/FUTO's YouTube app, GrayJay, now supports Sponsorblock... and shames you if you use it
Seriously this was very surprising. I've been experimenting with GrayJay since it was announced and I largely think it's a pretty sweet app. I know there are concerns over how it isn't "true open source" but it's a hell of a lot more open than ReVanced. Plus, I like the general design and philosophy of the app.
I updated the YouTube backend recently and to my surprise and delight they had added support for SponsorBlock. However, when I went to enable it, it warned me "turning this on harms creators" and made me click a box before I could continue.
Bruh, you're literally an ad-blocking YouTube frontend. What kind of mental gymnastics does it take to be facilitating ad-blocking and then at the same time shame the end-user for using an extension which simply automates seeking ahead in videos. Are you seriously gonna tell me that even without Sponsorblock, if I skip ahead past the sponsored ad read in a video, that I'm "harming the creator"?
Real sponsors pay up front, or only add an additional bonus for affiliate link sales, if a creator accepts a deal on affiliate link money only, it's their own fault. So if you always fast forward through sponsors and don't care, you might as well enable it to save the bandwidth and power.
Skipping sponsors automatically means you definitely won't be influenced by the marketing, so it hurts the creator because the sponsor might not work with them again because of low sales impact.
Anyway, I'll continue to use NewPipe x SponsorBlock and the Firefox addon.
Do these particular advertisers asks the influencers to show their statistics?
I mean, wouldn't the creator have to take a screenshot and send that info in? How do the advertisers even know people are skipping through sponsored segments?
Also I've never understood. I'm not going to buy a subscription service because someone I watch is offering it. If I want it I'm going to buy it regardless whether I've seen its ad or not, and the creators are just offering a discount code that can help them as well.
That's why the ad-funded internet is referred to as a bubble and people are saying that the bubble will burst. It's money-making based on the promise it'll make the company paying the advertiser money, without any guarantee. You can't make money out of nothing, people have tried and failed for years if not decades, it always comes crashing down, either through crypto scams, pyramid/ponzi scemes or though worthless investments like the Dot-com crash, it'll always blow up in your face sooner or later. Which is what is slowly happening with the ad-funded internet, it is becoming overvalued similar to the dot-com investments.