The Jump Ahead feature is unarguably one of my top reasons to be Premium user. As a user, it completed the promise of an ad free YouTube experience. The final nail to the advertisement coffin - skipping the increasingly well embedded YouTube Sponsorships. Launched as an experiment in early 2024(using old school traditional, non-LLM AI), this feature would no doubt score well above the 40% on its Sean Ellis Test. For a feature which can directly effect a part of the creator revenue(which excludes YouTube), there’s suspiciously little to no writing, discussion or noise around it.
Re-imagining how the product was built, took me down a realisation that this is possibly a unique example of a product which gives us a view into a new internet class where the free users are doing the “work” of finding the “points of interest” in the video and by implicit nature, allow the premium user to skip right ahead.
Granted, skipping ads aren’t the only use case. Jump ahead also lets us skip bits of the video the general viewer audience deems less view-worthy. That section of the video where the creator goes on a rant about their nuanced gripe with why (fill in) or that learning video which is going through the bits you already know, it is useful.
Long videos where the creator has not labelled chapters or if you want a skip to a part within the chapter which skips the consensus agreement of “more useful”,
One of the main reasons I subscribe to YouTube Premium is it’s ability to turn off ads. And yet, with sponsorships, the creators found ways to show us ads (much less intrusive, yet still annoying when it is so well weaved in within a video that it makes you consider whether the video was made for the ad and not the other way around. ). A way Sure enough, as a viewer, I skip right ahead. Early 2024, YouTube launched an experimental feature called Jump Ahead
It wasn’t long before in video sponsorships became the norm for most of the full time YouTubers. The break in the promise that YouTube Premium had
YouTube’s Jump Ahead feature is one that I have seen very little discussion about. The very few scarce conversations are around the implications of