About SponsorBlock
SponsorBlock rests on a simple idea: people who watch a video can mark where the sponsor read starts and ends, and everyone else's player skips it. Volunteers submit segments from inside the extension, other users vote on them, and the extension jumps past the good ones. It is made by Ajay Ramachandran, and the code and the whole segment database are public.
Sponsors are the headline, but the extension also skips other categories, such as intros, outros and reminders to subscribe, and can jump straight to the highlight of a video. The project describes its server lookups as a privacy-preserving query system, and the extension supports Invidious as well as YouTube.
The weak spot is coverage. A small channel's upload may have no segments yet, and the crowd can be wrong. On Safari you pay for a separate app. The project suggests running it alongside YouTube Premium and uBlock Origin, since it only skips segments baked into videos. For almost anyone who watches sponsored content, this is the first YouTube extension to install.
Pros and cons
- Skips sponsors, intros, outros and reminders automatically
- Open source, with a public database anyone can download
- The project describes its lookups as privacy-preserving
- Free in Chrome, Firefox and Edge, with donations welcome
- Only as good as the community's submissions for a video
- Safari version is a separate paid app
- New or niche videos often have no segments yet
Permissions
It needs access to YouTube pages so it can read the video and skip segments, and to the SponsorBlock server to fetch them. In Chrome, access to other sites is optional.
