I think I hate ads just as much. But I might cave in and start subscribing to premium again. I just stopped because they don’t allow a family plan here in Korea.

Why don’t you drop the nebula subscription and pay for YouTube premium then? You get rid of the ads and get some extra features and can keep your curated account.

This isn’t a solution for everyone, but those who can afford it could help making YouTube make money and keep it around.

You are missing the point that sponsorblock only works without AI because everyone gets the same video delivered. Once they have targeted ads of variable length and amount you need someone to watch your specific version of the video and do the tagging where the ads ans sponsors are. You could pay someone to do it for you but that is expensive and very slow. Or you can train a ML model to recognize the patterns and tag it for you hopefully pretty fast.

No, they would just do that internally in their own code, why would they need an API for that?

It’s easier and less resource hungry to deliver targeted ads like that.

They could on the fly change them.