Most of the UI features that YT added over the last few years can be thought of as a way to skip sponsor ads. e.g., thumbnail previews on the seek bar, the little histogram on the seek bar, auto-chapter detection, and playing at 2x when you click and hold on the video.

I'm pretty sure that skip ahead is deliberately broken to satisfy advertisers.

Sponsorblock has zero issue jumping to the precise moment after the sponsor vs jump ahead always leaves just enough time to still hear the name of the sponsor.

They make it slightly easier to find the end of a sponsor segment, while still requiring me to manually interact with the video. As an ad blocker I score that either F+ or D-.

Yes it tends to work one at a time, but some videos have two sponsor segments and it doesn’t work the second time. I assumed it skipped to where people often skip to.

that's not blocking though. It's allowing you to skip over the areas people commonly skip in videos where they take the data from everyone. I get them at sponsor slots of course, but also intros often. Because it's not removing it entirely, I would not consider that blocking.

It’s such a great feature, and I see why YouTube gates it to Premium.

Once you’ve transitioned from an ad-watching customer to a paid one, YouTube actually turns into something that treats your product experience and satisfaction as important.

It’s fascinating how it switches that off for non-paying users. Not a lot of companies’ services do that so obviously and blatantly.

In other words, when YouTube is being watched for free, they have that typical engagement incentive: keep you watching as long as possible, watch as many ads as possible, etc.

When you’re paying? Who cares, skip the content if you want. Use Gemini to summarize it, we don’t care if you watch the video.