- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
- YouTube is testing server-side ad injection to counter ad blockers, integrating ads directly into videos to make them indistinguishable from the main content.
- This new method complicates ad blocking, including tools like SponsorBlock, which now face challenges in accurately identifying and skipping sponsored segments.
- The feature is currently in testing and not widely rolled out, with YouTube encouraging users to subscribe to YouTube Premium for an ad-free experience.
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Next up: all web pages are full resolution bitmap files.
I’m surprised DRM’d webpages haven’t been a thing until now.
They’re trying. Give them some time. Users will lap it up like idiots instead of just saying no.
Google was working on a feature that would do just that, but I can’t recall the name of it.
They backed down for now due to public outcry, but I expect they’re just biding their time.
Web environment integrity
Thank you! I was struggling to remember the proposal name.
Here’s an image viewer example with 0 exposed HTML elements (all UI rendered through a single canvas) and 0 human readable code (all client side code compiled to webassembly bytecode). Trying to block unwanted content in this kind of site would be closer to cracking a video game or patching an android app.
Nah, computer vision for standalone image processing (I mean, not batch processing dozens to thousands of files at the same time) today is pretty lightweight and can be done easily on consumer laptops and smartphones. It is just a different technique and takes people with different skills to do it, but completely doable. Gor example, even face detection AI models can run on your laptop, if AI can learn to classify faces, objects and animals it can learn to classify ads.
As is, I can’t make it through a 30 sec ad. I will peace out 100% of the time.
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Reloading usually works, but gets old.
Mobile Firefox seems to still work
This is really putting a dent in my enjoyment of YouTube
How nice of them trying to make ad blocker better
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Problem is the ads are not widely rolled out so user timestemps would be off depending if there’s an ad or not
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I wouldn’t mind sitting through an ad or possibly another one mid-video.
Small issue with that for me is that their ads are privacy nightmare but what isn’t these days…
Biggest issue is that their ads are ridiculously annoying and so inappropriate. They just don’t even try. They are sexist, fraudulent, and often times plain illegal.
So unless they fix these issues, I won’t watch them without ads blocked.
As much as I hate that prime added ads to a paid service (absolute horse shit), the way they’ve implemented it so far is one of the better methods. They’ll do a single ad at the beginning that’s like “this show is brought to you uninterrupted by Samsung”. Then no more ads until the next episode.
YouTube is trash with it.
For now. That’s how YouTube was originally too, and ad free before that.
Seriously. YouTube is at its current place because it actually didn’t suck ass.
You’re ok with paying to watch ads? Hard pass for me.
I agree and I also wouldn’t mind so much if the ads were in proportion to the length of the video and at natural breaks. I don’t want to watch a 30 second ad to see a 15 second video.
New ad-free meta: DVR
YouTivo
Didn’t they roll out Manifest V3 to counter ad blockers already? The hell happened to that?
In order to fuck with everyone that is using browsers with built in ad blocking like brave and opera and people using firefox with ublock origin and custom clients
Different set of ideas. Plus, manifest V3 only cages chrome users. Firefox users never had to deal with that dumb bullshit
community driven skippable timestamps and remove click bait thumbnails.
Cool, but that doesn’t work when ads are inserted randomly
yeah, i realized it later. i don’t see normal ads, forgot they’re injected randomly. still a great plugin
I can imagine a plugin system that gets submissions of hashes of specific frames - or just entire frames - when users play them, then checks those frames to detect which parts of the video are unique vs common, then automatically requests new frames to narrow down the timestamps and carve out the additions.
Probably wouldn’t take more than a handful of views across the entire network to get a pretty solid ad removal system. Even better it wouldn’t even rely on user input, which itself is already pretty fast. I have never encountered even the newest video that wasn’t already in the sponsorblock system.
Honestly this sounds like a fun project, I imagine it wouldn’t take the heroes that develop things like sponsorblock very long to figure it out. Plus they have spite on their side.
Edit: actually, rather than rely on randomised frame checks to find the collisions, have the clients submit frames then send frames out and ask clients to see if those frames appear in their videos. Then you very quickly determine which frames are unique.
you might be onto something.
now if only we could fund this project… maybe through advertising
Time to switch to odysee fully I guess
I don’t know why you’d go with a crypto scheme if what you actually need is video.
Peertube is federated just like lemmy, so it doesn’t have to cook the planet to achieve decentralisation.
Fair enough. I completely forgot about peertube. Been using newpipe predominantly and odysee was the first alternative that came to mind.
Thanks for reminding me about peer tube. A client recommendation would be great. I’ve used p2play.
Edit: I actually looked into the whole odysee debacle and it’s disgusting,so I will try to use peertube (newpipe also supports it,but,again,completely forgot about it).
I’ve heard that some versions of the Blockchain are not based on computing power and therefore are not nearly as awful re: emissions. But I don’t really know much about it so I decided to look into Odysee.
Instead I found out all about how the company that created the protocol was blasted out of existence by the SEC for selling unregistered securities & the website is full of Nazis because they don’t do anything about fucking Nazis.
Never did reach a conclusion about the blockchain thing. Kinda stopped caring. Sounds like a clusterfuck.
Proof of stake is what it’s called, but then it’s even more of a ponzi scheme because you have to buy in. Like they’re literally recreating coconut island.
Also nobody seems to actually be doing it, possibly for exactly that reason. It’s just a green-washing promise of an idea.
Federation and crypto are two completely opposite philosophies of decentralisation.
Crypto is based on zero-trust, which sounds cool and edgy if you’re 15, but in practice it turns out that the people drawn to a zero trust system are untrustworthy. It’s not surprising that it’s full of Nazis.
Federation is designed around trust, which is the way our meatspace social networks actually work, and I think it’s the only reasonable way forward.
Damn, this could stop Invidious, Piped and Newpipe from being able to block ads.
Once several different instances have downloaded the same video, they could share information on which segments are the same?
Ads would change for each download based on all the factors used in the automated ad auctions.
Lol this would mean that every website running a looped video in the bg will now haved ads play. Nice.
That could also make them okay with those existing, since they’ll now play ads. Third party clients wouldn’t be such a threat anymore to their bottomline, and people can get the privacy benefits of going through those proxies.
people can get the privacy benefits of going through those proxies.
Exactly. This is why it will still be a threat to data hungry Google.
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It will if the ads are different lengths for different viewers
It might take a lot more effort, but I don’t think this will be the end. Google is required by law to label ads as such, giving these tools an opportunity to detect and skip them.
Maybe not skip them, but instead play something else over top of them like another video you like, a music segment, or cat videos.
What law (and jurisdiction) are you thinking of?
My understanding is that this would be covered with a blanket note on the page if it detects you aren’t running Premium.
At the very least I’d say that UK/Germany would be a good bet. Though the idea of just plastering the note over the whole video might do the trick, considering that’s what some German channels already do if they are sponsored to stay on the safe side.
You still aren’t referencing a law. You are just saying you don’t like it.
I ANAL and am not a lawyer but: There ARE laws about saying if a video contains paid advertisement. That is why basically every single video on youtube has the “contains sponsored content” tag.
There is no law saying that the specific seconds of the video need to be tagged. Which makes sense. It has been a minute since I watched network TV but I don’t recall giant “AD” on my screen any time Hikaru Shida wasn’t.
Germany has the “Medienstaatsvertrag” §8.3, which requires advertisements to be easily recognizable as such and also adequately separated through audio or visual cues.
I do recall a giant “Werbung” screen ahead of all a-blocs on TV.
In Germany, you can’t just show advertisement in a YouTube video without marking it. Same rules for sponsorship…
Is there a loophole where they could delay the ad marking like 5 seconds into a longer ad so you’d have to watch at least 5 seconds before an extension can detect it? Is the law specific about it having to be marked as an ad for the entire duration?
It will be after the inevitable lawsuit happens about 0.0002 seconds after they fully roll this out.
That would mean running an unmarked ad for five seconds, which would create an interesting legal question. But YouTube also buffers a good chunk of upcoming content, so there’s enough upcoming video material to check.
With the state of AI and computer vision, and legal requirements to disclose ads, i wonder if a ytdl + editing script will he the nicest way to watch at some point
I have a ytdl script download my “subscriptions” automatically to my jellyfin media server and an invidious server for everything else.
Its already is a much nicer way to watch content right now.
I don’t get why so many people begrudge YouTube for trying make money. They serve up 5TB of video data every second. Somebody’s got to pay for all of that. They know ads suck, that’s why they sell no ad subscriptions.
Their ads not just suck. They are oftentimes sexist, fraudulent, disgusting and a huge privacy concern.
YouTube makes 8 billion per quarter selling ads. I think they will be able to eat tonight.
Out of curiosity, I looked up the numbers. This is correct, they make 9.2 billion per quarter from ads and 10.7 billion from subscriptions. I can’t find expenses per-segment, but in 2023 their total “Cost of revenues” was 37 billion. I doubt everything other than youtube costs less than 17 billion, so they’re definitely making a profit.
Source: https://abc.xyz/assets/95/eb/9cef90184e09bac553796896c633/2023q4-alphabet-earnings-release.pdf
Google used investor funding to create youtube at a loss for years to crush any competition, so we should be mad that there isn’t an easy option to just switch to a comparable alternative.
Ok, but equally any competition would need to be profitable earlier, you can’t complain you got a service operating at a loss which is now operating at a profit when that’s exactly what any alternative you’d feasibly switch to would do
Google used investor funding to create youtube at a loss for years to crush any competition
There is a difference between needing to operate at a loss when first starting a business because it is necessary and using funding to prop yourself up so much that is undermines all of the competition. Like the difference between being a very successful business and abusing a monopoly.
Oh yeah I absolutely agree with monopoly abuse being a bad thing with a huge caveat that it’s so much worse for essential services and not quite as bad for extras, like youtube. I personally can’t see any competition to youtube being able to provide a better service - it’s in a similar niche to Netflix where they were great until they got competition at which point the userbase and content fragmented, which meant they had to provide a worse service to make money as the content rights agreements made it into several small monopolies and so they were literally unable to compete, which is frankly worse
I’ll just write a greasemonkey script that detects unskippable time and mute audio. Let’s play this game google, fuckin I dare ya.
this one? https://gist.github.com/BrockA/2625891
Ha, nope. But i see I’m not alone. There is hope dear people.
Youtube 2026: you are no longer allowed to skip ahead in videos in order to blend the video and ad “experience” together.
what a time to be alive…
Can you have it replace the video screen portion with cat videos from another source during the unskippable part?
At this point you can just replace the video with the same video using a timestamped link from just before the ad started. Under IPv4 they can’t tell if it is the same person/device requesting the same video. So unless they put the ad at exactly the same timestamp (which they won’t) you can just blank out the video when an ad starts and replace the stream with the same video using the timestamp to start the video where you left off.
But think of the cats!!!
Sure, popover video of cute cats and turtles eating strawberries
Instant millions of installs
Only other thing I need is a button to click to pause the video once the ad is over because I’m going to the bathroom.
I’m pretty sure ads will likely be different audio level or light level that would be detectable. If there is no option to detect the ad via API that would be one way to know when the ads begin and end.
The idea here is that ads will be unskippable, aka, you skip ahead 10-20 seconds but can’t. They’re will be controls that appear to catch this. If they incorporate ads and I can just fast forward, then who cares. This is google, they want to watch ads.
Even if it becomes impossible to block the ads out I will cover my ears, close my eyes and shout ‘lalala’ to avoid them.
An appropriate response to this nonsense.
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Or use it to implement a script that just downloads the video and cuts the ads out entirely for later watching.
Or, failing any of those, a script that pops up a reminder that YouTube has unskippable ads so you can back out and just do something else with your time.
