When a free experience can do better than the premium experience, your product have a problem.
I’m not even sorry about SponsorBlock, creators still get their money, I don’t have to watch the sponsored segment, and advertisers have no way to know I didn’t watch it. So it’s zero impact on the creator, big impact on my sanity.
> advertisers have no way to know I didn’t watch it
Actually per-segment viewership gets tracked by YouTube and displayed in the YouTube creator tools. I wouldn't be surprised if those statistics get used when negotiating deals with sponsors.
Yeah, it's unquestionably tracked what exact portions of a YT video your browser actually loads and plays. All playback is controlled by JS and there's no reason YT doesn't hook into those actions and record metrics of every play/pause/seek/mute/etc. user action (in addition to actual network requests made by the browser).
When a free experience can do better than the premium experience, your product have a problem.
I’m not even sorry about SponsorBlock, creators still get their money, I don’t have to watch the sponsored segment, and advertisers have no way to know I didn’t watch it. So it’s zero impact on the creator, big impact on my sanity.