That feels like a deliberate misrepresentation of how sponsorship works.

The sponsors are not paying directly for viewings or sales (though number of eyeballs is one consideration in negotiating the worth for a sponsored block) but for the potential opportunity for sales offered by increases market awareness. It is far more subtle than paying for impressions/clicks like other advertising models.

If no one watched them, the creator would get zero dollars full stop because the sponsorship simply wouldn't happen.

> A better option is YouTube Premium + Sponsorblock.

I'll stop using youtube completely long before I pay them to stalk me (you may not get the ads on premium, but you are still being tracked to the fullest extent possible).

And in that case you are not contributing by watching the ads. There's also a ton of sponsorship where the creator has a referral code that the viewer uses to purchase a product. In these cases they make money if you buy the product.

If you're not going to buy anything, you are not helping the creator at all by watching any ads. Your are better off just blocking the ads to not waste your time.

Of course, if you are so anti-advert that you can't accept the slightest possibility that a sponsor segment relevant to the clip you are consuming can't ever possibly be of interest to you, or you'd avoid it even if it would otherwise interest you simply because you were informed about it by a sponsor segment, then yes, automatically skipping won't make any difference. But I consider that thought process to be somewhat blinkered, perhaps even reductio ad absurdum.

In theory nor do I, as long as paying gets rid of the tracking as well as the adverts which I'm sure it won't, so for now I'll keep blocking the stalking (and adverts while they are intimately linked) and accepting sponsor segments.