YouTube has been spotted testing server-side ads, which could pose a problem to ad blockers.
If only there were hundreds of other sites on the Internet that stream video. If porn sites can make it work, anyone can make it work.
how i wish there was a good alternative for youtube
Support candidates who want to limit the ability for large tech companies to acquire their competitors. Maybe even those that wish to see their acquisitions rolled back. Maybe even those that wish to see them broken up.
The alternatives are around now, and we know that many YouTube content creators are exploring other revenue streams, so it’ll be interesting to see how exodus works. Clearly YouTube is going to continue to get worse and some people are going to leave. What’s next? I’m excited.
It’s always interesting to watch companies implode. Apparently Reddit is blocking non-Google search engines from indexing them, and Twitter wants you to be logged in to view people’s profiles. Those types of moves guarantee that the platform won’t be relevant a decade from now and possibly sooner than that.
Piped. It uses SponsorBlock to also skip ads by the creator in the video, I am very sure they will update it to remove ads injected by YouTube as well. It is also very privacy-friendly.
P-Peertube?
Not a great alternative. The second it becomes actually successful it will collapse.
Shucks.
peertube would be great, if there were more content creators. out of 330 or something channels that i follow on youtube, 4 are on peertube.
4 out of 330 is quite a lot. Are they tech youtubers or something?
yeah, linux-oriented youtubers
I’ve tried it. Every server i choose is either slow af, has no videos or the videos just stay at 00:00.
Not a great experience.
Grayjay has been useful for that. I still follow people on YouTube, but if they setup a channel anywhere else I can switch my feed to draw from those sources instead.
Oh cool! Is there any non-mobile app/service that does something similar?
The source code for GrayJay is available if you’re concerned or want to work on a non-mobile app/service yourself, but otherwise I don’t know of anything that combines the services like that.
I got the server-side ads a few weeks ago. Switched to another account and was ad-free again. I’d be happy to pay for Premium as it supports the creators I watch, but for ad-free alone it’s not worth the £13/mo. The other features jacking up the price aren’t much use to me.
Fuck youtube
Just got hit with this for the first time, and at first I was like what the fuck is this happening here, I’m running Firefox latest, and UBlock origin latest, never seen this before. Happening for every video, two injected video ads before the video, seem skippable, but i’m not clicking on them. Hope UBlock catches up to this quick, this sucks.
Mine are getting trapped by pihole. They take 10 seconds to time out and just show a banner ad that won’t automatically go away without hitting the skip button. It’s really frustrating since I liked letting videos auto play as I fall asleep.
at least it’s not currently spawning an actual video advertisement, so, small blessings, the two injected ads stay static for 10 seconds a piece (makes sense), and if you don’t click skip, the first tiers to the second then tiers to the video (was thinking of going pihole but you just confirmed it won’t make a difference, if they start injecting autoplay video ads, then it’ll be back on my todo list)
There’s a comment in this thread with a ubo custom filter that’s working for me.
yup, just tried that too, and after a reboot, it’s working for me too
And that’s when I moved to Invidious and haven’t looked back
What makes you think they won’t block them or force ads to them as well?
You do know that Invidious is still YouTube, right?
It’s an open source front end to youtube, yes. So no ads on the sidebar, no bullshit about logging in, no garbage algorithm to be harassed by.
And no commercials yet. If YT streams the ads and invidious doesn’t block them and adblocker doesn’t block them and PiHole doesn’t block them, I will not watch them.
Death to Advertisement.
I don’t think YouTube cares if you refuses to watch their videos on another platform or not.
They probably prefer if you didn’t. You only cost them money with no revenue whatsoever.
They are still a metric they can peddle to their advertisers to show “how many people see this ad in a month.”
You don’t think they know how many watch their videos with adblockers or third party clients?
I highly doubt they accept views from third party clients as valid ad views or probably views at all since that would likely make abuse easier.
It still goes to active user counts though. There will still be a footprint left by any view and that can be marketed as “we have X million users daily!”
I doubt the really big advertisers (the only ones that maybe can negotiate) think that’s enough statistics.
I’ll download it so I can skip the bullshit if it comes down to it.
Considering I can’t get Invidious to serve me a video in a higher res than 480p, no thanks.
Those ads do look good in 1080p!
I give it 5 hours from mass release before ad blockers catch up.
I mean I’ll settle for the ad being blacked out and muted while I wait for the content. Or have it play elevator music while I wait.
or do some back end trickery where they can buffer the video for longer than youtube allows, then selectively clip out the ad parts so you can continue to seemlessly watch.
I wonder if the server throttles that ads so you can’t 2x the playback speed. Sounds like a good way to detect when the ads are being served.
Have a sneaking suspicion that google is doing the classic spend 100 dollars to save 1 cent type scenario, cause all the money they’ve dumped into this anti-adblock shit? theres no way its less than what they’ve not made from adblockers.
Especially when all this money could have been spent on improving their ad service so people don’t have to view 2 hour ads, or malware laden bullshit, or just blatant pornographic advertising.
but why spend money moderating their own service, when they can spend 10x the money trying to force their open septic tank of a service on everyone.
There are already sponsorship-skipping add-ons. YouTube lost before they began.
I’m not sure if a sponsorblock like solution will work. Sponsorblock is entirely reliant on timestamps provided by users.
A similar solution for YouTube’s ads will only work if the ads always happen at the same timestamps and have the same length. This is not necessarily the case, as ads can happen at any point.
Yeah they just need to range the ad from x->y time into video playback starts.
There’s already a filter for UBO that blocks it. That was much quicker than I expected. Works and is further down this thread.
It’s only a matter of time until YouTube stops that as well.
Then on to the next one. Google won’t get a dime from me. They can’t stop it, even if I have to set up something for my computer to record my videos while I sleep so I can watch them on a video player the next day, I will not watch ads.
It’s an arms race. But there’s not a weapon that doesn’t have a counter, even if that counter is mutually assured destruction. YouTube’s efforts are inevitably a futile chase that does little more than keep their shareholders happy that they’re chasing the dragon.
Possibly, but as long as they are not completely server-side (which they can’t be, they want to target people) then they are fighting on hostile ground.
Of course there are attempts to lock down PCs so that ad companies can tell it what to do (probably with some DRM argument), but we’re not there yet.
I remember using MythTV in the beforetimes, and you’d record the show off the cable tuner, then it would process the file and remove the commercials based on volume levels and light signatures. It was remarkably good at it and was how I watched all TV until streaming came around.
I would imagine someone could do the same even better today with an AI model that would recognize all the ads and deliver an edited stream. The problem is that the video would have to be downloaded beforehand and then the streams stored elsewhere and referenced by an addon that redirects you.
then it would process the file and remove the commercials
This still exists today, for example in Plex’s DVR. Practically everything that blocks commercials these days uses comskip or a fork of it.
if you’re downloading the video locally it would be incredibly trivial to remove the segment of the ad. There are various different mechanisms i can think of that would work.
obviously, beginning and end ads are super trivial.
Ideally, youtube won’t be natively encoding the ads into the videos, because that would be a nightmare, so presumably they’re doing injection instead, that would be pretty obvious from the get go.
If not, they have to have some kind of interface for the advertisement you could very easily use that to track the ad placement itself, though that might be problematic.
There are likely other clever things that can be done, we’ll have to see what happens.
Ideally, youtube won’t be natively encoding the ads into the videos, because that would be a nightmare
I’m afraid this is what they’re going for.
if they did, the only way it would work is if they live encode every video on request, which as we know from twitch, is incredibly cost prohibitive. So i doubt it. This could mostly be assuaged through caching, but i’m not sure how long the economics hold up on that compared to just not doing any live encoding at all.
No, that’s not necessary. The only thing they need to do is to find an I-Frame (which there are plenty of), make a cut at that frame, show the ad instead, and then resume to the original video after the ad is done. No extra encoding is involved. It’s just like concatenating video files together.
I’ve done similar stuff like this. It’s not too difficult, at least not in H264. Not sure about YouTube’s own format, but I guess it’s quite similar.
that’s what im saying. Maybe not in this thread, idk, i’ve had a few of these now, but they’re almost certainly just injecting the AD somewhere through the middle of the video.
There will have to be designated points where midroll ads can happen, just like the current system has, so the ads aren’t inserted mid-sentence or destroy an important sequence in the video. Nobody would accept it otherwise.
It’s a matter of detecting those points, mapping them to specific frames in the video, then automatically detecting when an ad is inserted on that basis.
It’s slightly harder to do, but not impossible.
Unfortunately I think there’s been a good bit of evidence recently that people WILL accept it. As a prime example lemmy hasn’t exactly replaced reddit despite the relative uproar that the API changes caused. Netflix & co just keep hiking prices and people just keep buying it.
And then on the technical side, if the ads are coming from the server it’s possible youtube might just refuse to serve the rest of the video stream until all or most the ad’s runtime has passed. It depends on how serious they want to get about capturing the revenue lost to adblock users.
Sure, but then that’s an even worse enshittification if they do make it random.
The mandatory wait-time will stop people from seeking through videos organically. Yet another thing that makes it worse for everyone.
And even then, it should still be possible to detect which frames are part of the original video and which are not, either by detecting original video frames, or building a database of ads and detecting them within videos.
The fact that lots of people still use reddit is just due to inertia. Platforms don’t die immediately overnight. Digg still exists. It still calls itself “The homepage of the internet.” The process of transitioning to a federated internet is going to take many years.
Reddit is still dying however. There’s been a marked drop in the quality of posts over there, and they’re harder to access, now they’re doing an exclusivity thing with google which is also enshittifying massively. That is making it less and less appealling over time. It won’t last forever as a culturally relevant site.
IIRC the developer of SponsorBlock was asked about this and seemed very unconcerned.
Yea the moment my adblockers don’t work I stop using youtube
I suspect they’re fine with that.
I’m sure I’ll be downvoted to hell, but I just pay for Premium because I use YouTube all the time, don’t want to see ads, and acknowledge that YouTube is an incredible service/product.
Me too, I’ve had YouTube premium since it was called YouTube Red and I was still in middle school lol.
Ah yes, the good 'ol days of RedTube.
Same. My adblockers are still in place, but YouTube premium is by far the best bang for the buck I spend on entertainment. My family uses it every day on multiple devices, and then we get YT music too.
It’s just gonna make premium more expensive because they have to recoup their engineering costs somehow and I don’t think that the extra ad views from bypassing as blockers will cover it.
I’m in the same boat. There are a lot of parts of the Internet that should be free, but YouTube is not one of them. Video hosting is one of the most resource intensive services around, and if we as consumers aren’t paying for it they’ll find a worse way to fund it.
That’s fair.
And people you’re watching are getting money if you’re a premium user.
I also pay, and share to several family members to help justify the cost.
That just makes us shills though; consumerism is a zero sum game. /s
It just makes us normal customers of a product. You want something? You pay for it.
fuck that. you want to be a musician, you play venues and engage with your fans instead of just releasing a one hit wonder that took half a week in the studio to make and made you millions
Hey very valid statement and salute to you.
Personally, I believe this ultimately hurts and affects customers like yourself. Because YT is spending all of this additional effort to effect and crowdout, if looked at a very tiny percentage. Instead of investing into platform improvements for visitors and creators.
YT should of focused on competition which is every other streaming service. If they provided shows still using network ads breaks, instead of these psycho every 4min you 2.5mins of ads unless you pay is just extortion. Plus they aren’t really sharing revenue with creators… sigh
It’s a decent price. I use both the original app and the music one. No regrets at all!
It’s not so decent if you only need YouTube though. The package is good, but not everyone needs the full package.
That’s… True. I suppose I didn’t really think about that.
If YouTube were an independent company, I would be much happier to pay like I do for Spotify and even (borderline) Paramount Plus. I have no problem paying artists for their time, and I have spent thousands and thousands on commissions and merchandise from independent people and art businesses. Google already has enough money. I would rather save my money for small(er) companies who actually need it.
If people stopped supporting these ultra-consolidated megacorporations, we might have a healthier economy and better worker’s rights overall. But what do I know lol
Based on what I’ve heard from creators, they love us premium subscribers. If I get no ads and the people I like get more money, I call that a win. Having just been to the movies which have about an hour of unskippable ads at the beginning - including ads to show more ads - I’m willing to pay to not have that in my life.
I don’t think that’s an unfair thing to say at all.
I want to pay for Premium, but a mixture of oppressive tactics, poor payouts for YouTubers, and constant price hikes has made me reconsider. I watch YouTube more than most streaming providers, and that list continues to shrink because the cost has outpaced the value. A few years ago I couldn’t imagine not watching Netflix, but now…eh, cancel it.
The fact that google also tracks and monetizes/exploits every single thing you do should be more than enough payment. Considering thats how they got to be where they are in the first place.
Besides. If google moderated its fucking ads to begin with, people wouldnt have overwhelmingly adopted adblocking, since google adsense is like the biggest adserver on the internet.
I would settle for something that simply turns the screen black and turns audio off whenever ads play. I don’t care if YouTube gets paid for it, I just want to decrease the value of ads and prevent myself from seeing them.
I don’t care if YouTube gets paid for it
Legally, YouTube have to detect if ads were blocked and and mark the impression as non-billable. They can’t charge advertisers for blocked ads.
They can only tell that something is blocked because the ad wasn’t loaded from a server. If it’s not loaded, then they can’t count it as “viewed.”
If the ad is just blacked over, it is still loaded, and they wouldn’t know.
Well they also infest the client side since they likely developed the main part of your web browser, so they can still know there’s a black cover in the DOM.
If the ad is just blacked over, it is still loaded, and they wouldn’t know.
If it became a common thing, they’d have to add detection for it. Not necessarily to stop people doing it, but to ensure advertisers aren’t charged for invalid impressions. Practically every major ad network has adblocking detection; they just don’t always make it obvious (e.g. they might silently log it).
If they were effectively able to detect it they would be able to block you watching the rest of the video.
I already put my phone down on my desk and turn the audio down whenever an ad pops up, they can’t tell it isn’t being viewed.
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fucking YouTube, am i right?
no seriously, havent used it in months, and weirdly dont Miss it. i used to watch YouTube the whole day.
May I ask what do you use for content instead of YouTube? A lot of certain people I follow are on YouTube and music that I listen to are often only on YouTube these days. Not even Spotify has the niche songs (mainly Arabic and Japanese songs).
well, i would never even think of using it for music (except downloading what i cant find) same with spotify (i hate streaming). I just watched regular videos, which I just suddenly don’t do anymore, I started binging TV shows instead, -no ads .
I just couldn’t bare the ads, they’re that bad. and when I think of stuff that makes me mad, I can’t do anything associated with it, I.e. watch YouTube -know there will be ads (or not, because i have an adblocker) the mere thought that there WOULD be ads is so annoying to me, that I cannot stand watching YouTube.
but yeah back to the point, TV shows, and books, especially books have been my replacement, and I must say, they are much better.
What do you mean by “regular videos”?
Not music videos.
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this isn’t working since YouTube inserts the ads at random at random location in videos. so each user gets ads on different videos and locations in the video.
sponsorblock works specially because the locations in the video stay the same. But with this random inserts by youtube this also can break sponsorblock since now the locations of sponsorblock segments change too if ads are inserted.
