If you are on YouTube’s free tier, you’re probably familiar with ads. They can pop up anywhere and can totally spoil your viewing experience. Now, you do have some clever tricks to block ads on YouTube, but that doesn’t stop those multi-minute-long sponsor slots that eat into your viewing time.
Now, these sponsored slots are vital to most creators, but let’s face it: most of the time, they’re a pain to endure, which is exactly why I’ve started using SponsorBlock.
System behind every skip
SponsorBlock is not an AI tool guessing where the ad might be and blocking it. It’s a crowdsourced database where real people mark the exact start and end time of a sponsored segment in a video. Everyone else who has the extension installed skips it automatically the next time they load that video.
When you open a YouTube video, the extension quietly checks the database for submissions. If a match pops up, it jumps straight past the segment and shows a small note for a few seconds so you can undo the skip, upvote it, or flag it as wrong. Popular videos have sponsor segments submitted within minutes of going live. So, most of the time you will not notice it working.
Once a submission is placed, a weighted voting system ranks it. So a lucky first submission doesn’t get stuck as the official one forever. Newer entries get a fair shot at replacing the bad ones, which also lets you skip the exact part of the sponsorship ad in a video.
This is one clever way to avoid watching sponsored content, because most of the time you are either wasting time waiting for an unskippable ad to end or listening to your favorite creator talk about a product that isn’t useful to you.
Your watch history remains private
While skipping sponsors is great, one thing I was skeptical about with SponsorBlock was what it does with the videos I watch. Is my watch history also shared with this SponsorBlock tool? Turns out it does not. SponsorBlock uses a k-anonymity system that only sends a partial hash of the video ID to the server. And because of this, the server never learns exactly which video you are on.
The good part is that, aside from sponsors, SponsorBlock also lets you auto-skip subscription reminders, self-promotion, intro animations, recap montages, and even the non-music stretches in a music video.
Additionally, there is a feature called Highlight. Creators or viewers can mark the single most important moment in a video, and you can jump straight to that point. Setting up SponsorBlock is super simple:
- Head over to the Google Chrome Web Store or Firefox Add-ons page.
- Open any YouTube video like you normally would.
- Let it run. When it hits a marked segment, it skips automatically and shows a brief notice.
- Use that notice to upvote, downvote, or unskip if it got something wrong.
You are not required to sign in, create an account, or download any config file. You download it, and it starts blocking unwanted parts of a video.
It’s not limited to desktop
You can add to the Database too
SponsorBlock not only works on desktop, but you can also use it on your Android, iOS, Edge browser, and Safari. On smartphones, you can use the Firefox browser and install its extension. If you already use open-source YouTube client apps like NewPipe or one of its forks, the sponsor-skipping feature is likely already built in, since many of these privacy-focused apps build directly on SponsorBlock’s open API.
Since the whole thing runs on submission, nothing stops you from contributing when you spot a segment nobody’s flagged yet. To do that, you can click on the SponsorBlock extension’s icon or click the icon in the player itself, mark where the segment starts, and then mark where it ends. Pick the correct category from the list and submit it. It goes live for the next viewer almost immediately. This is the reason why its database stays this current.
In my testing, I didn’t come across a video where I couldn’t skip a sponsored segment. It’s a nice, small tool to skip unwanted segments in a YouTube video. You get a clean video-watching experience. And for those who just cannot stand clickbait thumbnails, the developer’s other extension, DeArrow, tackles that side of things.