YouTube has been spotted testing server-side ads, which could pose a problem to ad blockers.

  • @Abnorc@lemm.ee
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    271 year ago

    It was going to happen eventually. It sucks since so much good content is still housed on youtube. The bright side is that I’ll probably read more when uBlock stops working so well.

  • Zengen
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    91 year ago

    Let’s develop an AI that can detect where ads in videos start and end. And cut them out client side. Anti corporate advertising AI :D

  • psychOdelic
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    171 year ago

    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.

    • InfiniteGlitch
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      151 year ago

      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).

      • psychOdelic
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        51 year ago

        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.

  • downpunxxOP
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    481 year ago

    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.

    • @ShunkW@lemmy.world
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      241 year ago

      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.

      • downpunxxOP
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        81 year ago

        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)

          • downpunxxOP
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            31 year ago

            yup, just tried that too, and after a reboot, it’s working for me too

    • @empireOfLove2@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      1 year ago

      If they’re truly server-side injected, then they would also appear permanently in any downloaded copy because the server would be telling the client what pieces are available-including the ad pieces with no way to differentiate.

      • aedelred
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        131 year ago

        At least if still downloads them you can edit them out if it’s something you want to save.

      • m-p{3}
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        111 year ago

        At least I can trim those away if needed.

  • @schizo@forum.uncomfortable.business
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    111 year ago

    I’ll be the devils advocate: if this lets them stop trying to fucking break all the 3rd party tools, then I’m almost willing to say it’s half a win.

    I only half use 3rd party tools to block ads, the MORE important half is that the 3rd party apps fucking show me my subscriptions in chronological order and NOTHING FUCKING ELSE.

    I’d trade off ads you could skip by hopping forward 30 seconds in a video stream vs. missing things you’re actually subscribed to, and having to deal with all the garbage google shovels at you.

    • @Azzu@lemm.ee
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      21 year ago

      Weird, I don’t use any add-ons and the subscription page by default works exactly like I think you want.

  • @shortwavesurfer@lemmy.zip
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    1 year ago

    New article title. YouTube tests more ways of making their service shit and driving away users.

    Edit: TIFO Scott Manley is on Odysee so i will start watching him there instead. One less yt channel is always a good thing

    • Sippy Cup
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      511 year ago

      I mean, if you’re not paying for it, and they can’t advertise to you, what do they need you for?

      • @unexposedhazard@discuss.tchncs.de
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        71 year ago

        Youtube is google No 1 source of machine learning content. Fuckloads of video, audio and subtitle data they can use to feed and train their systems. Youtube itself doesnt need to make profit, thats just a bonus for them.

        • Sippy Cup
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          131 year ago

          YouTube advertising is more than 10% of Google services total profits.

          That’s not a bonus, that’s a dependant revenue stream.

      • FiveMacs
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        601 year ago

        To keep claiming they have x billion accounts…

        There’s a big reason why these companies don’t remove the bots and willingly allow them to do whatever. It boosts their numbers to inflate their actual worth.

      • @tabular@lemmy.world
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        151 year ago

        Does YouTube have competition? Your line of inquiry doesn’t mean much if the content is only on YouTube.

        • Sippy Cup
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          131 year ago

          I’m not sure what point you think you’re making.

          YouTube doesn’t want you visiting if they can’t either put ads in front of you or get you to subscribe to premium. I appreciate wanting to access YouTube without ads, but from where they’re sitting, if they scare you off with server side ads all the better.

          • @tabular@lemmy.world
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            121 year ago

            Simply put: why care about their point of view? Google does not have your best interests in mind, often the opposite. There’s no where else to get almost all of the content, why do without or waste time with ads in this short life.

            • Sippy Cup
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              111 year ago

              YouTube could fall off the face of the earth and I would probably see my quality of life improve slightly.

              I don’t give a shit about Google. Perspective here is important when you threaten to leave the platform all together, as if they would care. If you’re one of the users they gain no ad revenue or subscription revenue from, they’re probably happy to see you go.

              Could they be doing more to try to turn Adblock users in to paid subscribers? Sure. I’m not here to defend their methods. I’m just saying that if you’re not paying, and you can’t be served ads, they really don’t care if you continue to use the service or not.

      • @Cypher@lemmy.world
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        91 year ago

        I did pay for it but they massively increased the price while the recommendation algorithm was deliberately made worse and they wouldn’t stop pushing short format videos.

      • Eager Eagle
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        151 year ago

        at least on my part, what they get from channel memberships (a whopping 30%) I’m sure exceeds the amount in ad revenue they lose from me

    • @QuadratureSurfer@lemmy.world
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      111 year ago

      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.

    • Max Günther
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      1 year ago

      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.

    • @orcrist@lemm.ee
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      51 year ago

      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.

    • @some_guy@lemmy.sdf.org
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      241 year ago

      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.

  • @illi@lemm.ee
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    61 year ago

    Since it is server side, will this effect the alternative front ends?

    • magic_lobster_party
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      61 year ago

      That’s the point. They want to stop people bypassing ads by using alternative front ends. If they succeed with server side ads, then it’s going to be difficult to block ads. Maybe not impossible, but difficult.

      • @roofuskit@lemmy.world
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        31 year ago

        It won’t, you’ll just use an app that pre downloads all your favorite channels and scans them for ads so it can auto skip them.

        • magic_lobster_party
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          21 year ago

          It’s maybe doable, but figuring out where ads start and end in a video file isn’t necessarily trivial. The app must know what to look for, and YouTube might try to obfuscate it to make it harder.

          • @Restaldt@lemmy.world
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            31 year ago

            Trust in the Foss.

            If it pisses people off enough they will manually create a database of videos and ad timestamps for removal if it can’t be easily automated.

            • magic_lobster_party
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              1 year ago

              Database of ad timestamps like sponsorblock only works if ads happens at the same timestamps (and are of equal length). This is not necessarily the case.

              The only reliable way I can come up with is a database of ads to look for, but that can be huge to accommodate for all possible ads. There’s also risk of false positives (risk of skipping video when there are no ad).

      • @illi@lemm.ee
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        41 year ago

        That’s what I figured, but I’m not expert on how things work so wanted someone who knows more chime in. Sad times

  • polonius-rex
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    1 year ago
    www.youtube.com##+js(json-prune-fetch-response, playerAds adPlacements adSlots playerResponse.playerAds playerResponse.adPlacements playerResponse.adSlots, , propsToMatch, /player?)
    

    Click on uBO icon > ⚙ Dashboard button > Add the filter(s) in “My filters” pane > ✓ Apply changes > Open new tab and test again.

    from the reddit page idk if it works but most comments say it does

    and if it does, that’s fucking hilarious

    this will have taken a team months of work and one ublock dev just threw it in the toilet within an hour

    • @ColdWater@lemmy.ca
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      31 year ago

      I stll haven’t get any ads with just stock ubo but when it does I’ll try this filter, thanks

    • @Mercury@lemmy.world
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      11 year ago

      Do I need to add this filter or are the uBO devs going to update the extension to include it ootb?

      • polonius-rex
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        1 year ago

        i’d be shocked if they didn’t update it but i just timed myself doing it and it took less than 10 seconds

    • downpunxxOP
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      1 year ago

      ok, so i added this code to my ublock origin filter list, then went to youtube, and the injected ads were still showing up in about half the vids. closed firefox, reopened, same. rebooted my win11 machine, now the injected ads are NOT showing up any longer. not sure if youtube switched it off because they’re still beta testing this bullshit or if the code is working but it SEEMS to be working. if it stops i’ll come back to edit this comment. thanks for the tip man!

    • Kokesh
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      221 year ago

      So in theory… can reVanced come up with something like this,

      • @viking@infosec.pub
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        161 year ago

        NewPipe works, so I’m sure reVanced can/could do it as well. SmartTube (Android TV exclusive) also implemented it weeks ago, I never have seen a single ad.

      • sunzu
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        41 year ago

        I am amazed how they didn’t spell like others did in that market.

        Prolly should donate.

  • dinckel
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    261 year ago

    I know there’s a significant part of the market that’d just say yeah, fuck it, i’ll pay for Redtube Youtube Red Youtube Premium, but there’s also a significant part of it, where a lot of people would rather just stop watching stuff entirely.

    It’s just like Hulu back in the days. You’d have no choice but to pay for a premium tier, just to have 14 unskippable ads forced down your throat, all in a span of a 19 minute long tv episode. I stopped paying after that month and resorted to piracy.

    Piracy is always a service issue, except now it’s legitimately going to harm individual creators, who have just about everything to lose, rathen that a rotten husk of some corporation, that’s going to print free money, no matter what you do

      • dinckel
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        111 year ago

        The price is absolutely obscene. No fucking way i’m paying that

    • TimeSquirrel
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      1 year ago

      except now it’s legitimately going to harm individual creators,

      I know it isn’t the world we live in anymore, and there’s nothing we can do about it…but maybe we shouldn’t have treated YouTube like a job and just kept it as a hobby video website between ordinary people. Like what it started out as.

      • dinckel
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        131 year ago

        To be honest, whether we want it or not, art is a necessary aspect of society. The issue here is that we put a lot of trust in a corporate environment, the entire goal of which is to pocket as much as possible, while riding the success of the people creating stuff

        • TimeSquirrel
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          Yeah that’s what I mean. People created entire careers which are 100% dependent on the whims of a mega corporation. It never seemed like a stable source of income to me. I’ve always treated it like it’s just a silly video site, nothing more.

  • @RonnyZittledong@lemmy.world
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    371 year ago

    This must consume a tremendous amount of processing to do since they would have to transcode copies for every ad region/campaign and every resolution on demand. I am interested in how they made this financially viable.

    • @roofuskit@lemmy.world
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      151 year ago

      Since AI has caused them to complete abandoned any illusions about their carbon zero footprint I think they just stopped caring.

    • @Nollij@sopuli.xyz
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      171 year ago

      Not necessarily. They could split the video in advance, assuming the ads will always be at the same point. Even if not, they could still use the direct, unaltered source with a range. The big challenge would be keeping it all synced, which I think is safe to say that they will get right.

      But even if it did need to be transcoded, YouTube automatically transcodes every single video uploaded, multiple times. They are clearly not afraid of it.

      • EleventhHour
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        1 year ago

        If you’ve ever used yt-dl, you’ll know that YT vids are all split into multiple files. Presumably, this is where the ads get injected.

        • SaltySalamander
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          21 year ago

          No, they’re not split. Each one of those results you get from yt-dlp is a different version of the same video. I.e. different resolutions, different codecs. Some of them are the audio, some of them are the video, but they’re not split.

          • EleventhHour
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            1 year ago

            They are also that. But when you watch YouTube-dl download a video, it downloads several parts, then ffmpeg recombines them into a single output file.

            • @whats_all_this_then@lemmy.world
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              31 year ago

              That may be to speed up the download using multiple connections. Other downloaders do it on other sites as well, doesn’t mean the files are split on the server.

              • EleventhHour
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                11 year ago

                I mean, you can sit here and make up a bunch of different reasons, but the simplest explanation is usually the correct one.

    • magic_lobster_party
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      51 year ago

      They don’t need to do any extra transcoding. It’s not that costly to stitch videos together. If done at specific strategic locations, it’s like copying a text file into another.

    • @Cyyy@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      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.