YouTube Premium has a hidden way to skip in-video sponsors. Here's how to use it

A lot of people equate YouTube Premium with an ad-free watching experience, background playback, and offline downloads, but the paid subscription has way more perks than this. Some of my favorites include the ability to manage playing queues on my phone, “Continue Watching” to seamlessly switch in the middle of videos between my phone and TV, and smart offline downloads when I’m traveling.

Recently, though, a new feature has become the absolute must-have extra perk of my Premium subscription. It’s the ability to skip lesser-watched parts inside videos, and if you know anything about YouTube videos and people who watch them, you’d know those are almost always in-video sponsor bits. Here’s how to use it if you haven’t tried it yet.

Jump Ahead is the most time-saving YouTube feature

For a while now, YouTube has shown a heatmap of viewer interest on top of any video’s progress bar. Try to scrub back and forth a bit, and you see the graph pinpoint the least engaging parts of a video as well as highlight some peaks for the “Most Replayed” moments.  YouTube Premium uses that graph — and some other black-box algorithmic magic — to figure out which parts of a video users are skipping and let you do the same thing with a tap.

In 99.9% of the cases (at least in my experience so far), the bits that viewers skip the most are sponsored in-video segments. You know, the “ad” that isn’t an ad according to YouTube because it’s organically included in the video, so it doesn’t get blocked or removed with the Premium subscription’s ad-free experience. Well, now it goes away thanks to the “Jump Ahead” feature.

Jump Ahead pops up on YouTube on mobile, web, and TV. With one tap, it jumps to the next most replayed part, often a second or two before the sponsored bit ends. No manual scrubbing, no trying to find the exact end of a boring segment, no skipping too slowly or too far ahead. It’s perfect. And every time I’ve used it in the past months on my TV, I’ve thanked the persons who devised it, the developers who implemented it, and the product managers who approved it. It’s a time-saver, a boredom saver, and a finger-tapping saver, and it’s the only feature that makes Premium a truly ad-free experience.

I know creators need to make money, and these sponsored bits are by far their biggest income drivers, but I’ll sit through a sponsor once to see what they’re about and take notes if I’m interested. Not more. If I don’t want to hate a creator or a channel after three videos, I need to skip the repetitive sponsored segments. (The only exception is Jolly, especially when Ollie makes songs about the sponsors.)

YouTube is one of the most-watched streaming services in my household, especially on my Google TV Streamer and XGIMI projector, so Jump Ahead has become an indispensable part of the experience. From tech reviews to cooking videos, travel recommendations, interior design ideas, funny dog videos, and more, I’ll give a sponsor bit one listen, then skip them forever.

How to trigger Jump Ahead on YouTube

The Jump Ahead bubble doesn’t pop up on all videos by default. New videos, videos with limited views, or live streams typically won’t show it because it requires the engagement heat map to function, and there’s no heat map without a good idea of how viewers are reacting to each part of a video.

In my experience, the odds of seeing it are much higher than not seeing it, though. As long as you watch a video a couple of hours after it’s been out, you should be good. You shouldn’t miss it unless you receive a notification from a channel and click it right away, or if you’re delving into a very niche topic or channel.

To trigger the pop-up, you need to do different things depending on the platform you’re watching on.

• On mobile:
  • Double-tap on the right side of the screen, as if you’re skipping forward. If you’re in a sponsor segment, you should see “Jump Ahead” on the bottom right. It remains there for a few seconds before disappearing.
  • Tap that. The video will jump to the next most-replayed bit, often a couple of seconds before the end of the sponsor segment.
  • Done.

• On computer/web:
  • You need to skip forward or back in the middle of a sponsor segment. To do this, the right arrow key of your keyboard or the L key should do the trick. Manually scrubbing also triggers it.
  • Once the Jump Ahead button appears, tap it in the next few seconds before it goes away. That’ll do it.
• On your TV:
  • There’s no pill to hunt for on the interface here, but a dot that highlights a skipped segment. To trigger it, click the right arrow on your remote, which brings up the seek bar.
  • Look for the white dot in the progress bar. If it’s there, that means YouTube has identified a jump section. Press the right arrow on your remote again, and that’ll do the skipping for you. You’ll see a “Jumping over commonly skipped section” message on your TV.
  • Press OK on your remote to continue playback from this new spot.

And that’s it. It’s one of the most useful features YouTube has rolled out in ages, and another reason why paying for Premium just makes sense.