this post was submitted on 24 Apr 2026
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Sponsors don't see if you skipped their ad segment.
Citation needed. When you hover over a video's progress bar, there is displayed a little graph showing something resembling a probability density function for timestamps users most frequently skip to. Advertisers can use this information to determine how likely a user is to sit through a sponsorship for a given channel.
Not that that matters. Don't feel like you need to watch ads. Advertising is bad in all its forms.
Sure they do.
Edit: I have a YouTube channel. The metrics are exportable. This is not a debate — advertisers often ask for these metrics. They absolutely can see when big channels have high SponsorBlock rates.
How, exactly, do they see that?
YouTube knows exactly where you start and stop the video, what segments you skip, etc., etc. and the channel has access to those analytics. Not saying that anyone shares that with the sponsors, but the mechanism IS in place.
That's my point. The sponsors of individual youtubers don't have access to that information
I don't know anything about sponsor agreements. Just because the sponsors don't have direct access, that doesn't mean there aren't other ways for them to get that information.
Of course, the creator has an interest to show this data to the advertisers if they have a good audience retention during these sponsored segments. The creators that want to hide this probably can be assumed to have a worse retention... So the advertisers can just ask for the data and know how much money that ad space is worth, and make decent estimates even when the creator refuses to share that data.
In the end, that data may very well influence how much the creator receives.
They don't require it as they already have metrics and data, by the unique promo code from each ad read. That tells them viewers of X will go to the website and buy something.
But I have never done that, because I don't buy something because one person I like to watch was paid to talk about it.
Have you never seen this when skipping through a video? The spikes are the most watched parts. They absolutely track what individual parts of a video get the most views.
Only creators and YT know the numbers and they don't share it.
The creators sell adventisement space and want the advertisers to know that their channel is a good investment, so the more they can prove to the advertisers that their sponsor segments arent skipped, the more they can charge for it.
What youtube interface is that?
I don't remember seeing that.
It's the default web interface - it doesn't show on all videos, but in my experience it's on nearly everything.
Do you have proof it harms them?
Unless you personally click the link and sign up using code WeAreAScam at checkout, they don't get anything extra. They already have been paid for the ad read.
It's like saying you're stealing from a TV station because you took a piss during the ad break.
Youtube does provide info on which portions of videos are the most watched - while most advertisers aren't the kind of people that do due diligence, quite a few of the big management groups have started introducing contracts that base payout for sponsor reads off of actual watch count. AFAIK it hasn't made too much of a difference yet (though channels with high skip-counts are less likely to be given the decent sponsor deals) but if youtube makes the analytics easier to access it probably will have a pretty big impact.
If they're that paranoid, they aren't worth taking the money because a YouTuber forgot to include a capital letter in their pre-approved script.
What?
If they personally scan the timeline on a video, they are the same company that gets mad at an ad being wrong because they read it as ThingLy and not Thing-ly.
If they are that paranoid, they don't deserve to your money.
oh, thank you for clarifying. I'm not arguing they're decent people - just that this sort of thing could potentially harm a creator. Unfortunately while in an ideal world creators would be able to tell the companies with this sort of overbearing contract to go fuck themselves, that's not the one we live in. "Creators don't have the power in the relationship: a capitalism story..."