The Ad blocking feature could strongly benefit from Sponsorblock.
From Sponsorblock : “SponsorBlock is an open-source crowdsourced browser extension and open API for skipping sponsor segments in YouTube videos. Users submit when a sponsor happens from the extension, and the extension automatically skips sponsors …”
In other words, Sponsorblock offers a quick and for my experience until now, very reliable ad skipping of in video ads that have been flagged by previous users.
This feature could be disabled at install and maybe have a pop up when the user is visiting youtube for the first time.
And also, the more users use it, the more flags there are and the more accurate the skipping.
I may have been unclear, on YouTube there is still lots of advertising that is done directly in the video that the creator included in it’s content like ads for video games that the creator promotes or simple products.
Sponsorblock logs the « position » of those integrated ads in the video that when you come to that ad « segment », it is automatically skipped.
Looks like a decent extension, but I gather it would be require a rewrite to integrate with Shields. I do remember seeing this option on Smart Tube Android TV app, thinking my youtube was bugged when it randomly skipped for reasons (I didn’t know what it did or anything).
I’d gather many others who knew less about this would find it not a good experience. “Why is my youtube skipping, Youtube on Brave is so buggy” . I think this extension should be optional, it would just disrupt too much.
A good way to have this enabled by default would be to have a button that shows up while you’re watching the YouTube video that says “skip sponsored segment” (and same for other categories) then the user has the option to change the setting to auto-skip sponsors