This article covers a free browser extension that can auto-skip sponsored segments of YouTube videos. The whole entertainment experience on YouTube is kind of annoying for a user’s perspective. First, you have to deal with the double-ads and then there are sponsored segments within the videos. While we can’t do anything much about the ads, there is a way to skip the sponsored segments at least.
SponserBlock is a free browser extension that can automatically skip over sponsored segments of YouTube videos. This is actually a crowdsourced project where anyone can submit the sponsored segments of YouTube videos. This extension uses that crowdsource data to detect and skip the sponsored segments within the videos. So, let’s check it out in detail.
Also read: How to Find Specific Word in YouTube Videos?
Auto-skip Sponsored Segments of YouTube Videos
SponserBlock is an open-source browser extension available for Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox. To skip over sponsored segments of YouTube videos, all you have to do is add this extension to your browser and that’s it. No, need for sign up or anything.
After installing this extension, when you play a YouTube video, it automatically detects the sponsored segment in the video timeline and highlights it in green color. By default, it shows a 5-second countdown pop up before skipping over the sponsored segment. The pop up gives you options to pick the default action for sponsored segments. You can either choose ‘Unskip’ to not skip the sponsored segment or go with ‘Never Show’ to automatically skip over the sponsored segments. You can also leave it as it is and it will show you the same countdown every time prior to the sponsored segments in the video.
This extension uses a user-submitted database to detect the sponsored segments on thousands of videos. If this extension does not pick a sponsored segment of a video, you can mark that sponsored segment and submit it to the database. You can do that using the extension button present alongside the video controls.
The developer of this extension has made a leaderboard where you can track the leading contributors along with their submission stats. From the extension options, you can set a username and contribute to the database. You can also keybind the sponsor-segment capture options to your keyboard and easily contribute to the project.
Wrap Up
This is how you can easily auto-skip sponsored segments of YouTube videos using SponsorBlock. The developer made the source code and the database widely available to everyone. Hopefully, someone will apply Machine Learning algorithms on this and make a neural network to predict sponsored segments and expand the project to millions of videos.
