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Comment by twothreeone | Hacker News Reader

yes? It's called pay-per-view. Many creators will insert a segment in the video with a sponsor who will pay them based on their reach. These are typically not blocked, since they're inserted into the video before uploading. YouTube inserts random ads on top of that for every view (which can be blocked).

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> These are typically not blocked

sponsorblock would like a word with that!

Though that’s a bit of a dick move to use that. I don’t have a problem with the author making money, I just don’t like the tracking and the politics of youtube. Also those ads are skippable, where yt ones aren’t.

Fortunately, YouTube doesn't tell creators how many of their viewers have SponsorBlock, which means the sponsors have no way to know that either.

It was great business on YouTube's part to make customers feel adblocking is a dick move though.

In a way agree with that, and I don't use sponsorblock because of that, but there's another side too: sponsored segments are a dick move too. Well, probably not all of them, but certainly a lot of them. YouTubers proudly proclaiming they use the sponsored product and they are oh so happy with it is lying, most of the time, plain and simple. And the products that are advertised on YouTube are very often on the shady side of things too.

When I see an embedded ad I will immediately know from the type of product if I should ignore it or intentionally avoid that product because most embedded ads come from the worst of the worst companies. Why would they want me watching their ad if it makes me NOT want to buy their product?

Aren’t those segments deals between the creator and the sponsors and nothing to do with Youtube?

yeah, FWIU they are an increasingly popular monetization channel in addition to YT's built-in ad-rev system (which is famously very bad for creators)

*) and conveniently for YT that out-of-band monetization channel - which they don't profit from - is the exact thing that's negatively affected by an overall drop in view counts

Indeed. But they typically are contingent on a certain number of views. If adblockers cause that stat to go down, then you get the opposite of what you are aiming to achieve: the user will see the "message from our sponsor" but their view does bot contribute to providing that sponsor with the data that the youtuber held up their end of the deal. Ends up bring an unpaid ad.

Ok but Youtube shouldn't payout.

Views might be important to get the attention of a potential advertising partner, but once the relationship has started then keeping it going will likely be dependent on much more relevant metrics for the advertiser. And those metrics will usually be tracked on their end, rather than via YouTube. I'm referring to metrics like click-through rate, propensity to order, revenue on advertising spend, etc. Personalized referral URLs and discount codes are what allow the advertisers to connect their tracking and reporting to the originating YouTuber.

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