[patrickyeon]

No ad blocking is going to get rid of that though, until you run something analyzing the actual video/audio content and not just the source of streams or how they're loaded.

[phantom784]

There's an extension called SponsorBlock that does exactly that. It uses user-submitted timestamps.

[heavyset_go]

This exists and was posted on HN recently[1]. If an extension developer can detect when sponsored ads play on YouTube, so could Google.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26886275

[ziml77]

SponsorBlock doesn't detect sponsored segments. Users mark the segments and submit them to a database.

If Google did try to automate it, you can be sure that people would just move to integrating the sponsorship into the content. Those are the worst kind of videos and I don't want to encourage more of them.