YouTube has been spotted testing server-side ads, which could pose a problem to ad blockers.
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.
I’m in the same boat here. My digital addictions are literally solved by the platforms itself
Yup, YouTube is my crack. This could be a good thing.
A few more years till they measure engagement via your camera
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
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.
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
Yet another reason I’m glad I use youtube-dl.
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.
At least if still downloads them you can edit them out if it’s something you want to save.
At least I can trim those away if needed.
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.
Weird, I don’t use any add-ons and the subscription page by default works exactly like I think you want.
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
YouTube: oh no, the freeloaders costing us money are going away, what will we ever do!?
FAFO
I mean, if you’re not paying for it, and they can’t advertise to you, what do they need you for?
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.
YouTube advertising is more than 10% of Google services total profits.
That’s not a bonus, that’s a dependant revenue stream.
Yeah no, that is revenue. Youtube is 10% of total Google/Alphabet revenue. That doesnt necessarily equate to 10% of profits.
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.
Does YouTube have competition? Your line of inquiry doesn’t mean much if the content is only on YouTube.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
how i wish there was a good alternative for youtube
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.
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.
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.
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.
P-Peertube?
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.
Not a great alternative. The second it becomes actually successful it will collapse.
Shucks.
Since it is server side, will this effect the alternative front ends?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
That’s what I figured, but I’m not expert on how things work so wanted someone who knows more chime in. Sad times
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
I stll haven’t get any ads with just stock ubo but when it does I’ll try this filter, thanks
Thank you!
Do I need to add this filter or are the uBO devs going to update the extension to include it ootb?
i’d be shocked if they didn’t update it but i just timed myself doing it and it took less than 10 seconds
This worked for me. Thanks!
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!
👑
So in theory… can reVanced come up with something like this,
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.
The ublock origin guys are wizards, I tell you…
I am amazed how they didn’t spell like others did in that market.
Prolly should donate.
Fuck youtube
I know there’s a significant part of the market that’d just say yeah, fuck it, i’ll pay for
RedtubeYoutube RedYoutube 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
I’d 100% pay for it if the pricing made any sense.
When it was 9 bucks, it was worth it. Certainly isn’t now.
The price is absolutely obscene. No fucking way i’m paying that
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.
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
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.
Redtube is a porn site, lol.
Yeah, that’s the joke
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.
Since AI has caused them to complete abandoned any illusions about their carbon zero footprint I think they just stopped caring.
If they only do it for very popular videos, the additional cost will be trivial.
I’d guess its a solution similar to DASH that dynamically streams different content.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I mean, you can sit here and make up a bunch of different reasons, but the simplest explanation is usually the correct one.
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.
deleted by creator
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.