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”?
Yeah, I see video monetization as running on a similar model to that of free to play games. The majority of people either don’t make you any money or only very little money, but they boost your engagement and popularity metrics so that you get more ‘whales’ that do things like donating on Patreon, choosing to watch sponsors and use affiliate codes, and buying merch.
Ads are only the worth the actual amount of business they generate. I know that a lot of people don’t realize that even if they never intentionally buy something from an ad, the familiarity of seeing things in an ad makes them more likely to pick it over something else down the line. However, this still only works if you have any disposable income and don’t immediately hit mute, close your eyes, and count to 30 when an ad comes on. A lot of people using ad blockers would just devalue the ads themselves if they were forced to watch them. The people with the money just pay for Premium.