this post was submitted on 07 Sep 2025
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I will say this about regular sponsorship - and if you're a company bribing Youtubers to shill your shit, take heed:
Whenever a Youtuber interrupts their content to sell me garbage I don't want (and SponsorBlock doesn't catch it), I take note of the company and it goes in the very long shit-list of companies I try to avoid patronizing.
The more Youtubers that company bribes, the higher it rises in my shit-list.
The more the Youtuber tries to seamlessly weave the plug into their narrative, to sneakily make me watch it by not realizing they've switched to the plug, the higher the company they shill for rises in my shit-list - and this one annoys me no end, so the companies that pay Youtubers to make clever seamless transitions to the plugs go very quickly to the top. If you're going to waste my time with your fucking shill job, at least be honest about it.
When a company is on my shit-list, I will go the extra mile and then some to never buy anything from it, even if it sells the best and only product I really want. Fortunately, they rarely do: it's always shit.
Examples of companies at the very top of my shit-list:
NordVPN (or any VPN supplier I hear about on Youtube really)
BetterHelp
Brilliant
...
They can all fuck right off.
I do make an exception for those Youtubers who shill for quality content platforms that are alternatives to Youtube, for documentary and science videos and such, like Curiosity Stream. Not because I like the shilling, but because they advertise a service that competes with Google and that always gets my vote.
My personal issue with brilliant is that Khan Academy is so much better and has existed for years longer. You never see any adverts for them.
My personal issue with Brilliant is that I never want to hear about Brilliant, but somehow they regularly force me to.
Sponsorblock doesn't catch sponsored segments, viewers do that. Do your part, add the timestamps when you see a sponsor.
Some youtubers make in depth documentaries, then ruin it replacing the conclusion with a sponsor segment. This airport has a website and now so can you with our sponsor!
SuperRaeDizzle once did a video about Amazon's scummy practices (I think it was a about the way they take third party bestsellers, find the suppliers and then source their own knockoff version from the exact same supplier). And then she immediately plugs her amazon affiliate links and I think promoted their basics art products. Like, come on.
I'm aware of that. It was just a turn of phrase.
The thing about your turn of phrase that seems odd to me is that you're focusing specifically on the videos you see soon after uploading/before other users have a chance to flag Sponsorblock, and not all sponsors equally. Your boycott shouldn't depend on whether you see the sponsor segment or not; it should depend on whether it's there at all to begin with.
Except for one thing: you can't know who to boycott if you never see their sponsored ad because it was blocked.
Hmm... I bet somebody could make a tool that references the Sponsorblock database to download all the sponsored segments, apply some AI to figure out who the sponsor is, and then insert it into another database of statistics about who is sponsoring Youtubers, on which channels, and how often.
Then folks like @ExtremeDullard@piefed.social could avoid them easily simply by checking that handy list.
There was a YouTuber I used to respect and looked up to when I was a teenager and I hadn't checked his channel for years. Last year I looked at one of his videos after the US election and he was using the fact that it's a dangerous time for queer people as his segue into shilling for BetterHelp. Not a chance any YouTuber is unaware of the issues with it by now, anyone who shills it knows damn well how dangerous that platform is, and I don't think my opinion of someone has dropped as quickly as that. It's bad enough to shill that awful company but to exploit your young queer audience's fears post-election and people's mental health issues and act like they're doing them a favour? Absolutely fuck that.
Never heard about Better Help. What are they and why are they shit?
They're a company that offers therapy & counseling online, and they were fined for sharing their customer/patient data with advertising companies. I think there are other controversies, but that's the one I remember.
I wish they were fined enough to absolutely kill the company, because what they did is absolutely egregious.
Didn't they also get exposed for having fake therapists? Like people who just applied for the role of therapist, but weren't in any way verified? It's been years, but that was the first controversy I heard about with them and it was all over youtube. The fact that they are still making sponsorship deals with creators and everybosy has just seemed to accept them without a thought is super concerning to me.
The other controversies involved their therapists being poorly vetted, and when they entered the UK they were called out for poor hiring practices, ignoring safeguarding, things like that. They'd promise people licensed therapists and link them to crystal healers and homeopathists. They're the Uber of mental health in many ways.
There's other shitty YouTuber-sponsored companies out there like NordVPN but I don't unsubscribe from people promoting them because the issues aren't as well known and the product isn't targeting someone for something as important as mental health. Every YouTuber knows how bad that company is because they all dropped it for a few years until the controversy died down, and the ones who don't care about their fans wellbeing picked it up again as soon as they thought they could get away with it. BetterHelp is just an immediate unsubscribe because you don't get to make a quick buck from fucking with people's mental health and sending your audience to shitty unvetted digital therapy and leaving them with worse problems in the long run. I remember unsubscribing from Johnny Harris (who has many other problems anyway), Yes Theory, and the one I mentioned above was Connor Franta. That one stung because I really liked him when I was a teenager, he came out around the same time I realised I was gay, and coming back to his channel ten years later to see him promoting this to his young and vulnerable audience knowing that they were feeling especially vulnerable after the election really disgusted me. Like not just to promote it, but to promote it to them as something to help their mental health if they feel scared about their rights being rolled back. Especially with them leaking private data, a trans person in Trump's America would be in so much danger having that information leaked by this awful company and you're sending your LGBTQ fans there for therapy?
Anyway sorry, rant over, this company and its shills are one of the things that get me very riled up.
Me too. Sadly they're still going and YouTubers who want their sweet sponsorship $$$$ now have a long page of copium to justify it.
https://m.youtube.com/post/UgkxVcIh5LvQX5gJDVxsJEhcAuyf8CRLF4Dj
An exception to this I make is when the product or company is relevant to the youtuber's area of focus. Youtube channel Stumpy Nubs (Real name not important), woodworker, often seeks sponsorships from small mom & pop tool businesses. That I find acceptable.
Yeah you're right. I forgot about those. That's cool.
But there aren't many Youtubers who do that.
Way to shill for curiosity stream. Also people aren’t going to stream out of the kindness of their hearts, they have to make money to survive. If we want people to do things out of the kindness of their hearts, society has to provide for their needs somehow.
So you think I'm a Curiosity Stream shill and my comment is an elaborate way to plug their name here do you? 🙂
I dump on NordVPN because I think they're shite and I praise Curiosity Stream because I think they're not. It goes both ways: not everything positive is suspicious - although I understand where your cynicism is coming from, in this age of falseness, con artistry, psyops and manufacturing of consent on a grand scale.