Bye-bye sponsored cards

Some time ago, YouTube introduced a feature called "Cards" to allow supplemental links to be added into an expandable panel on the side of a video.  This was their replacement for the ill-fated Annotations feature that got overused to the point where almost every YouTube viewer disabled them.  I've happily used Cards to link to related or suggested videos that are either referenced in the content you're watching or likely to be of interest to you once you're done & ready to move on.

I don't recall when, but YouTube eventually started sneaking in "Sponsored Cards" that usually point viewers to vendor sites where they can buy the item featured in the video.  Sponsored Cards only ever show when the video owner has not used any regular Cards of their own.  I was okay with some of this at first, as it was very, very contextual, but the algorithms have gotten pretty aggressive and most of my videos now have a whole bunch of scrollable Sponsored Card ads that I had nothing to do with.  The worst part is that the existence of the literal word "Sponsored" within each Sponsored Card sends the occasional, let's just say, contextually oblivious viewer into a real tizzy, leading to nonsense comments the likes of "PROOF! It says you're sponsored! You're a liar and a horrible person, I'm telling everyone on the Internet, unsubbed."  Ugh.

Today I'm happy to kill two birds with one stone (that's a common metaphorical expression, not literal*) by disabling sponsored cards on all of my 3,400+ videos on the JANGBRiCKS channel and all future ones as well.  This will ensure that any card "teaser" icon or text snippet you see on one of my videos was put there by me.  No more unwanted confusion.  The YouTube user experience is becoming too ad-dense anyhow.


* If I didn't clarify that, someone would actually accuse me of murdering birds. Seriously, what has this world come to?