There's a difference between product placement and intrusive ads that interrupt content for minutes at a time. YouTube Premium customers paid to get rid of the latter.
YouTube Premium customers paid to get rid of ads placed by YouTube. A simple solution for channels that embed ads in their videos themselves (or have any other kind of content that you don't like for any reason) is to simply unsubscribe.
Yes but that is like not visiting a site after you found out it uses tracking or like peeing in your pants for warmth. It only work if you never see videos you haven't already subscribed to beforehand.
All of that started because people were ad blocking in the first place. More competition and less eyeballs meant CPMs have been crashing for decades now.
Sure, you can do it (piracy is okay too) but let the creators support themselves somehow.
No ad blocking is going to get rid of that though, until you run something analyzing the actual video/audio content and not just the source of streams or how they're loaded.
SponsorBlock doesn't detect sponsored segments. Users mark the segments and submit them to a database.
If Google did try to automate it, you can be sure that people would just move to integrating the sponsorship into the content. Those are the worst kind of videos and I don't want to encourage more of them.
Google could certainly detect when sponsored ads start in YouTube content and skip them to honor their "no ads" agreement with YouTube Premium customers.
That, or they could pay content creators fairly so that they don't have to shill for NordVPN in every video they release.
> I'm not confident any automated system could properly detect a sponsored segment. Some creators are quite sly with how they're worked in.
SponsorBlock does it, and Google could make it part of their policy for content creators to mark sponsored ad segments in their videos so that they can be skipped.