GoKawiilRita El Khoury / Android Authority
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.
Have you used YouTube's Jump Ahead feature? 23 votes Yes, all the time since it launched. 57 % From time to time. 9 % No, I didn't notice it. 26 % I don't have Premium and/or I skip sponsors with third-party YouTube apps. 9 %
Jump Ahead is the most time-saving YouTube feature
Rita El Khoury / Android Authority
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.
Jump Ahead skips the most unplayed parts, which are often sponsored segments. It's the one feature that makes Premium truly ad-free.
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