Sponsor Skipper

Sponsor Skipper skips the sponsor reads baked into YouTube videos — the "this part of the video is brought to you by…" segments the creator recorded — so you get back to the content you came for. PLEASE READ FIRST: THIS IS NOT AN AD BLOCKER Sponsor Skipper does not block, hide, skip, or interfere with YouTube's own advertising. It declares no ad-blocking or network-interception permissions. It only moves the playback position past sponsor segments that are part of the creator's uploaded video. HOW IT FINDS SPONSORS SponsorBlock first. For each video it makes one read-only lookup to the SponsorBlock community database and uses only "sponsor" segments marked as skippable. Overlapping segments are merged. Responses whose timestamps do not match the video are rejected. Private local caption rules as a fallback. If SponsorBlock has nothing for the video, or you have it turned off, Sponsor Skipper reads the video's own English captions and applies a fixed set of rules on your device. There is no AI, no model API, and no transcript ever leaves your browser. A local match has to clear a high bar before anything is skipped automatically: an explicit sponsor opening, several distinct commercial signals nearby, a clear return-to-content phrase, a sufficient score, and a sensible 8–120 second length. If the ending is not clear, you get a suggestion you can act on yourself instead of a silent jump. YOU STAY IN CONTROL • Every skip shows a notification with Undo for seven seconds. Undo takes you right back to the start of the segment. • Per-channel settings: enabled, disabled, or SponsorBlock-only for creators whose reads you actually want to hear. • Turn off automatic skipping entirely and keep only the manual suggestion button. • Three detection modes — Conservative (default), Balanced, Aggressive. Conservative favours precision: it would rather miss a sponsor than cut into the video. • A single global switch pauses all lookups, detection, and skipping. • "Check again" re-runs detection for the current video on demand. PRIVACY • No accounts, no sign-up, no analytics, no telemetry, no fingerprinting, no advertising, no monetisation. • No developer-operated server exists. Nothing is sent anywhere the extension does not have to reach. • SponsorBlock lookups send only the first four characters of the video ID's SHA-256 hash — not the video ID, channel, title, or captions — with no cookies and no referrer. Matching happens on your device. SponsorBlock still sees ordinary network information such as your IP address, as any web request does. • Captions are fetched directly from YouTube, which already knows what you are watching. No proxy, translation service, or third-party caption endpoint is involved. • Stored locally: your preferences, channels you explicitly excluded, and a capped 150-entry segment cache. No transcripts, no titles, no watch history. Clear it any time from Settings. • Sponsor Skipper never submits, votes on, or reports anything to SponsorBlock. PERMISSIONS, AND WHY EACH ONE EXISTS • storage — keep your settings, channel exclusions, and the segment cache on this device. • sponsor.ajay.app — the read-only SponsorBlock lookup. Nothing else is contacted. • youtube.com — notice when you navigate to a video, read the public player metadata, fetch captions, and move the playback position. It does not request tabs, history, webRequest, declarativeNetRequest, scripting, or broad host access. SCOPE AND HONEST LIMITS • Standard youtube.com/watch pages only. Shorts, embeds, and the mobile site are not covered in this version. • Local rules need English captions. Videos without them fall back to SponsorBlock alone. • Rule-based detection is not perfect. It can miss a sponsor, and it can occasionally react to marketing language inside the content itself. Conservative mode and the Undo button exist for exactly that reason. • Skipping is suspended during YouTube ads, live streams, premieres, and any state where the player's timeline cannot be trusted. • Sponsor timing scores are deterministic rule outputs, not calibrated probabilities. Free and open source under the MIT licence, Manifest V3, no remote code. All JavaScript ships inside the package, and you can read every line of it. Sponsor timestamps come from SponsorBlock contributors, licensed CC BY-NC-SA 4.0. Sponsor Skipper is an independent client and is not an official SponsorBlock release, nor is it affiliated with or endorsed by YouTube or Google.