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Comment by squeaky-clean | Hacker News Reader

Just because lots of people seem to be getting confused, "pre-roll ad" isn't the right term for this. Pre-roll is one of those ads YouTube forces you to watch 5-30 seconds of before you can skip it, and when they play before the video starts. Mid-roll ads are the same thing, but interrupting the middle of the video. And Post-roll are ones that play after the video is over.

What you're referring to are usually called sponsored segments. They're ads, but they're just a part of the video file you're being served. They're not dynamically targeted or cycled out. So if a LTT video is sponsored by ASUS, every viewer will see the same sponsored bit about ASUS because as far as youtube knows, it's a genuine part of your video, not a slot for an ad bid.

They're still annoying, but it's not a pre-roll ad. You don't get those with Premium.

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Thanks for clarifying. I was worried that the parent was actually seeing real pre-roll ads with the subscription that would eventually get rolled out to everyone.

Doesn’t matter how the pre-roll ad is served or who is serving it. The customer wants to pay for no ads, and that includes removing ads otherwise embedded into the video. The fact that ads people see this as out-of-scope demonstrates how little ads people want to make a product that users want. It’s all about burning the dumb money of advertisers and abusing the users along the way.

If you had just said ad, I would agree with you. But a pre-roll ad is a specific type of youtube that many people are familiar with but don't know the proper name of. That's my point. The OP comment does not get pre-roll ads with premium. But they still get sponsor segment ads.

Hopefully OP understands this, but I can confirm folks like my parents do not distinguish the difference. It's mind boggling

That's an implementation detail leak: for the end user it's just an advertisement. Call it as you want, but when I pay premium and you write "no ads" I want no ads. That's it.

I don't care that the content provider found a way to show ads. I have a contract with you - you have to figure it out.

Ah right, I forgot: they don't want to do content moderation, because then they become gatekeepers etc.

They just want our money. Twice.

Youtube doesn't get any money from sponsored segments. It's a direct deal between the channel owner and the sponsor.

The only way it gets YouTube additional money is because it lets those channels put out more frequent or higher budget videos, which usually leads to more views.

When I said "they" I meant: content providers, service providers and so on.

I frankly don't care at all, I will never buy Youtube TV. However, justifying this behavior is ludicrous, even if YouTube doesn't monetize on such content.

It's just unfair - you pay for no ads, and ...well you do get them because "the file..."

Yeah, but life has never been that simple

I am more of the opinion that things were actually simpler before, even with analog TV. You knew what to expect. Now you pay 70$ per month, but hey, the file (?) you are streaming (?) contains an advertisement. Who cares?

I just want to watch a show. Without ads, because I paid to have no ads.

But hey we're a young generation, so we understand that it's not Youtube's fault... (?). Sorry, but no way! You are the service provider - you choose what goes through your platform. When I pay, you can't treat me like "you're (still) the product, sorry". That's for me unacceptable.

So if you pay for premium you're blocked from watching movie trailers?

Movie trailers are a bit different than coca cola ads, come on...

Plus, offer the chance to choose: with the amount of metadata flying through our networks, they are even able to guess what I ate for lunch, ... can't they really offer a checkbox like "show/don't show movie trailers"?

They are Youtube, not random startup run by a guy working on it over the weekends...

Where it gets really confusing is podcast networks (like Spotify exclusives, but also others) offer the ability to cycle out the sponsored segment. So you may be listening to a Conan O'Briend podcast episode from 2016 and hear an ad break of Conan recommending you check out some tv show airing this Saturday, October 16 2023.

But YouTube doesn't let video makes swap out parts of a video without re-uploading the whole thing and losing your viewcount. From what I've heard they have let some very big channels swap out things without it being considered a new video. But that's for the sake of avoiding copyright or fixing a dangerous error. Not for sponsorships.

You can use SponsorBlock to skip those.

Will get more and more difficult. This morning Youtube kicked me out because I was using adblock origin. And update fixed it, but if they start putting DRM...

That and you can also see certain youtubers chopping off sponsored ads block into multiple parts and integrating it with their video

SponsorBlock helps with this also, even when it's incorporated into the video (via muting the audio).

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