- 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.
Go right ahead. If they actually manage to do it, that will be the end of my YouTube watching. Except on extremely rare occasions. I don’t need it badly enough to deal with that.
As we learned from the reddit app changes, the ending of Netflix account sharing, etc etc the people who will take this action are few enough not to matter. Regretfully.
People will accept anything to not be inconvenienced in a purely consumer society.
That doesn’t matter to me. When a company does shit like this, I won’t use it and will actively avoid it. People can do what they want and if they want to be abused constantly that’s on them. I don’t really care. I make my choice and I stick with it. Change will never happen with companies, they don’t care unless they actually get charged more then the money they make from their abuse and we all know that will never happen .
It does matter because it inspires newer platforms that aren’t as shitty like Lemmy, PixelFed, Mbin, and PeerTube.
We’re about to have a great big shattering of the internet and I’m all for it. Collating the pieces will be a pain in the ass for a couple years but some handful of nerds out there blessed by the spirit of Ritchie will create a tool for it, and what’s left of our world will be a better place for it.
This one’s on my bingo card.
Well I don’t know about the Reddit stuff not mattering—I occasionally still check on it for a couple of niche communities and the Reddit I used to enjoy has basically died, it’s like the place is filled with angry idiots now. Those people were always there before but usually buried under a load of downvotes where you could mostly ignore them; they now seem to be a majority of those left contributing over there.
They killed the golden goose in scaring off enough of the people contributing most interesting posts and comments (who were doing it entirely for free!) that the lunatics have taken over and shat on everything
Each of these exoduses moves the bar a little bit. We only lose if we give up. Eventually the bad decisions will catch up to them, as long as we keep pushing.
Same.
I’m excited for YouTube to end my YouTube addiction lol.
Please, Google. Do it. Dare ya.
I genuinely spend too much time on that site, but I haven’t seen an ad in years. If that changes, then I guess I’ll have to change, too.
Ngl, I’m torn on this because I’m honestly not sure I could stop using YouTube.
I hate ads with a burning passion, though, so we’ll see which wolf wins out there.
If i can’t get around this using something like SponsorBlock, I feel like I’ll probably just set up some kind of pipeline to download videos and remove the ads myself (maybe using AI if it’s that bad) and just serve them over Jellyfin or something. Gonna be a pain, though.
I wouldn’t particularly like it, that’s for sure. But I would ultimately just bite the bullet and do it. At some point, you’re just pushed too far and it’s just not worth dealing with.
Hope folks will actually stick to claims such as this when the time comes
Go right ahead. If they actually manage to do it, that will be the end of my YouTube watching.
…
Except on extremely rare occasions.
I’m sorry, I just find it funny that you walked back the “I’m done with Youtube” claim in the very next sentence.
I don’t think it can be completely avoided, but it can definitely be trimmed down a hell of a lot. As an example, if you watch YouTube for an hour a day and they make a change like this and you start watching it for 10 minutes a week, that’s a serious reduction.
Hey Googoo, I ain’t gonna watch YouTube if it got ads
(I think that’s their goal, either ads or no watch)
Shhh. It is a huge “fuck you” to google to not use their bandwidth or servers for free. Not the actual goal of this.
Damn, this could stop Invidious, Piped and Newpipe from being able to block ads.
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.
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 content a good chunk of upcoming content, so there’s enough upcoming video material to check.
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.
In Germany, you can’t just show advertisement in a YouTube video without marking it. Same rules for sponsorship…
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.
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.
deleted by creator
It will if the ads are different lengths for different viewers
OK, can I be real about this for a second?
I’m torn about Youtube ad stuff. Genuinely.
On the one hand the ads suck, we have a good way to bypass them and I certainly don’t want to watch Youtube videos if the ads are unskippable.
On the other hand, if I’m being honest I watch more Youtube than Netflix or Amazon Prime and I sure give those guys money for a subscription. If I counted the cost per watched minute, Youtube Premium would make way more sense than a bunch of subs I do pay.
But I also don’t want to watch a Youtube that is a paid service. That was never the point. The reason I engage with it so much is it’s supposed to be UGC, not TV.
So yeah, torn. Youtube is very weird and the relationship we all have with it is super dysfunctional, creators and viewers alike. We made a very strange future and now we have to deal with it.
I pay for YouTube Premium. I get a lot of value from it, and streaming video isn’t cheap. I don’t think it’s reasonable for anyone to think they should provide it for free.
Yeeeah, but my issue with that is they generated the expectation that it’d be free by using their investment money to muscle out smaller competitors. There was a time where Youtube was the biggest of a set of UGC video sites and some of the others were competitive. Now it’s the only real alternative.
So from that perspective they made their bed, now they sleep in it.
Oh sure servers do cost money but Google wants to have their cake and eat it to with the creators that make people actually want to use the site despite all their bullshit. Changing standards of what is and isn’t not acceptable coming from the top has made every creator dance and squirm to escape the very real eventuality of having weeks of work mean nothing. Google doesn’t respect the people making the product they are selling so I refuse to respect the bill they try to send me
I don’t give a shit if it’s reasonable anymore.
Google has done enough terrible things over the years, ruined enough services, some of them paid services, continually harmed content creators with their trash algorithm, refused to defend them from bogus copyright strikes, refused to provide meaningful support to anybody but advertisers, all the while hosting hate on their platform, for profit. So I don’t give a damn what’s fair to them.
They won’t get a penny from me ever again. I’ll continue to find every way of accessing any content on that platform that I choose, without ads, and without paying them, and it has absolutely nothing to do with ethics or reason. It is entirely, 100%, because fuck Google.
Fuck their ad network, fuck manifest 3, fuck their “integrity” checking, fuck all of this. I’d rather see it all burn to the ground than help them turn the internet into cable tv.
If you’re not actively blocking connections to their servers (by any number of means) it doesn’t matter whether you consciously give them money or not.
There is so much third party tracking in apps and websites that it’s really got to be at the network level. They make bank by tracking you and selling that data for profit.
I’ve been Google-free for months now and so far the only inconvenience has been ReCAPTCHAs not loading, but that’s limited to just a handful of websites that I don’t care enough to use in the first place.
The problem is that user generated content still takes time. Which means money. Also, people don’t want vlogs with a drywall background anymore and the number of creators who can get away with simple prop free skits are double digit, at best. So making the videos also cost money.
People make up this fantaasy land where art should be done with no compensation to be pure. Which ignores that the vast majority of art in human history was either made by the independently wealthy or as a “patron” system where… an independently wealthy person paid an artist to make them look good.
And that even extends to the modern day. People get angry about “nepo babies” but… it takes a lot of time and money to refine your music to a meaningful degree. The garage bands that get discovered playing at a local bar are VERY much the exception and almost everyone universally considers their best albums to be the first couple after they got signed by a label and could drill down and refine it.
Youtube and the like are basically the first time that “the everyperson” could make art for a living. Unfortunately… that means they need to get paid. Ads are of very questionable use. Youtube Premium is almost universally praised by any creator who is willing to talk about it. But we need some way of paying those mid tier creators who are popular enough to do it for a living but not popular enough to get 120 bucks a year from their fans to upload MAYBE one video (looking at you Michael Reeves).
Early youtube with the drywall backgrounds in skits or just random bits of life were what made it fun. The fact that the majority of the content now means it is just another streaming service with an expected income for someone instead of being something they did in their spare time. The switch from amateur to professional content ruined youtube.
I used to whitelist yt on my ad block because a I know portion of it goes to the creators. Then yt took advantage of me by adding more and more intrusive ads. Now I support creators directly whenever I can.
That’s a fair point, I do pay for subs in some smaller sites. A lot of the time I still watch the Youtube version because… well, that way the creators get paid twice and I’m probably already on YT, but still.
The problem is that the patreon model inherently only supports the big creators. Many of whom only BECAME big because they had alternative funding sources for so long.
For example: Giant Bomb more or less imploded a few years back. Nextlander (Alex, Brad, and Vinny), Remap (Formerly Waypoint but Patrick Klepek, Rob Zachny, Cado Contreras) , and Jeff Gerstmann (hmmm? I wonder who that could be) and even Giant Bomb (Fandom) are doing great. But people like Abby Russel or Renata Price very much immediately fell into that “Well, I like her but she is one person and I am already blowing 20 or 30 bucks a month on patreons…” hole.
And we see that on youtube/twitch. Creators will mostly not care and then suddenly do a year long subathon because they understand… they are in that threshold where they make just enough off of ad and sponsor revenue that they can just keep their resume updated but are fucked if Youtube/twitch change ANYTHING. They need to get to that threshold where people will subscribe to a patreon.
And the “Well, I will just subscribe to the creators I think are worth it” inherently fucks them over.
I’ll add on that, for all his many flaws, Ludwig Ahlgren (?) has done a lot of good discussion on this topic. Because as twitch and youtube stop giving streamers giant signing bonuses, it gets harder and harder for the next crop of big streamers to come into existence. Because if there isn’t money to get people out of that O(100) concurrents mid-tier… yeah.
I do try to block ads, but tbh it’s impossible to be mad at Google for pushing them. YouTube is a modern miracle of engineering – no other platform on the planet hosts the scale of video it does, indefinitely, with instant access, for free. It is more than fair for them to recoup the massive cost. Personally, if they had a cheaper version of Premium without the music features, I’d pay for it in a heartbeat.
I feel really bad for smaller creators because they spend so much of their time on the algorithm treadmill just trying to get more views. There’s a channel size threshold where you really have to work more than you get out and I see a lot of people getting burned out trying to make a living from yt.
Then clearly it’s not a smart choice to make videos and have them uploaded to a scummy place like YouTube.
Their issues are not my problem. I have my own stresses at work, you don’t see me bitching about it to strangers online.
Don’t like your job or the terms your forced to adhere too, quit.
That’s why we should kill it
So… because you had a bad they should not even attempt to pursue their dreams and make art/“art”?
Also… I really hope your job is a perfect wonderland with no ethical or moral complications. Otherwise, it is your fault for working there instead of somewhere else, obviously.
We live in a late stage capitalistic hellscape and still snipe each other constantly. Everybody would rather fuck over everyone else than show any degree of solidarity.
Not once did I say they shouldn’t persue anything…if I’m presented with a contract from work which I don’t agree with,I’m looking for a new job…
Also… I really hope your job is a perfect wonderland with no ethical or moral complications. Otherwise, it is your fault for working there instead of somewhere else, obviously.
It would be my fault for staying somewhere that is objectively bad for me…yes…it’s not your problem, it’s mine…
Why is it the customers responsibility to fix the companies problem for the employees…explain.
I think Google created a model that is unsustainable from the get go, because they have infinite money glitches and used this to monopolize the market and lure in creators.
It could be sustainable for non-premium users if the amount of ads was similar to what it was, idk, 10 years ago, 14 years ago. However back then they were not making nearly enough to cover their costs and pay creators handsomely.
I like to support creators but I also liked youtube better when it was mostly common people doing their thing however the fuck they wanted, instead of this hyper-profissionalized tv-wannabe corporate channels that grow to be mammoths.
Problem is, we accepted the weird assumption that successful content creators on the internet are entitled to be millionaires, or to make a lot more money per month than say, a successful person in a common profession. If content creators got into youtube with the mindset that at best they’d live a life that is middle class instead of trying to become rich, then youtube would need a lot less money than it needs today, and content would go back to being more relaxed not mega professional and extremely polished videos from channels that employ dozens of people.
But alas, I guess successful video creators on youtube are supposed to be rich and deserve to earn more money than a doctor, and youtube is supposed to be a viable source of income for mega corporations that used to be mainly TV and other traditional media but then freaked out about losing people to the internet.
That’s what I thought at first but who am I kidding, if content creators got paid less youtube would still be very popular and google would still do whatever the fuck they want and shove more ads in it anyways. And also, paying top creators so much money is another way to prevent competition, creators won’t choose another platform if they can’t match the pay.
It’s worth paying for but not if it includes DRM, proprietary software and preferably not giving money to Don’t Be Evil company.
If only I had a client with support for fast forward… Oh right. I do. Neat.
Some people said that skipping is blocked during the ad. But if that is the case I am sure either the timestamp is predictable or somewhere on the client side you could find the information about the timestamp.
My client pre-downloads videos, so I can fast forward and rewind at will.
That’s neat, it’d be identifiable in a fashion similar to missile logic. You know where ads are based on where they aren’t. Actually skipping it would be difficult but muting and doing something else for a predetermined period has been a workaround since radio.
Google’s own Shaka sdk (video playback with ads) gives ad markers in the initial video manifest so that they can be marked on the timeline, so hopefully it’ll be trivial. Usually (but not always) with SSAI, the ads are spliced into the stream just before being sent to the client. That way if a user has just recently watched an ad pod, the server can choose to ignore that marker for a better UX in hopes that they don’t bounce if ads are too frequent.
That’s ok, I don’t need to visit YouTube at all!
It sounds like this would be easy for tools like SponsorBlock to label and skip segments as ads. However, it would be tough on smaller channels where people might not be labeling them as such.
Nah, it would be very hard. Presumably this only works if they can insert ads on the fly so they can cycle ads based on region and time. Static ads on videos would have been easy to do and easy to bypass.
If you don’t know how many ads there are or what they look like or how long they are it becomes very hard to do timeline nonsense to avoid them. It also seems like it’d be expensive to do at the scale Youtube needs it, but maybe they figured it out. That would suck. We’ll see, I suppose.
A solution would be for an extension to download the entire video 2x and delete the difference. But if you want to watch on 4k you’d need a connection that is pretty fast (although still in the range of what many people already have). However if they find a way to throttle the max speed on the server side for each client based on the quality they are watching, that would kill this possibility. You could block their cookies and throttling by IP on IPv4 would not be a possibility for them, but when everyone is on IPv6 idk.
But also processing the video on the fly to delete the difference in real time would be heavy, though at least I think it is possible to access the GPU with browser extensions via webGL but I am not sure if for HD and 4k that would be realistic for most people.
This assumes the exact same ads will be injected in the same time markers for every viewer, every time. I doubt any of these will be true.
Edit: I got this backwards…
A less expensive method could be to retrieve the subtitle twice, or the subtitle from a premium account and check where the time offsets are.
A solution would be for an extension to download the entire video 2x and delete the difference.
I don’t think that would work. It would be trivial for YT to put different ads in different time slots which would leave a differencing engine with no way to tell what was content and what was ad. However that thought gave me another one; the core problem is the ability to differentiate between content and ad. That problem is probably solvable by leveraging the NPU that everyone is so desperate to cram into computers today.
Nearly all of the YT content I watch, and it’s a lot, has predictable elements. As examples the host(s) are commonly in frame and when they’re not their voices are, their equipment is usually in frame somewhere and often features distinctive markings. Even in the cases where those things aren’t true an Ad often stands out because its so different in light, motion, and audio volume.
With those things in mind it should be possible to train software, similar to an LLM, to recognize the difference between content and ad. So an extension could D/L the video, in part or in whole, and then start chewing through it. If you were willing to wait for a whole D/L of the video then it could show you an ad free version, if you wanted to stream and ran out of ad-removed buffer then it could simply stop the stream (or show you something else) until it has more ad-free content to show you.
A great way to improve this would be by sharing the results of the local NPU ad detection. Once an ad is detected and its hash shared then everyone else using the extension can now reliably predict what that ad looks like and remove it from the content stream which would minimize the load on the local NPU. It should also be possible for the YT Premium users to contribute so that the hash of an ad-free stream, perhaps in small time based chunks, could be used to speed up ad identification for everyone else.
It wouldn’t be trivial but it’s not really new territory either. It’s just assembling existing tech in a new way.
I guess saying the difference wasn’t quite specific. It works by deleting everything which is not the same between the two versions of the video, all the parts that are the same in the 2 videos are kept, everything else must be an ad. It breaks down if there is the same ad at the same time on both videos.
Then, I’ll use AI to filter it out.
I’ll just use I and stop using YouTube. I won’t purposefully poison my mind with ads.
As is, I can’t make it through a 30 sec ad. I will peace out 100% of the time.
Guess I’ll just be blocking YouTube.com on my DNS server and all subsequent Google URLs. I am fed up with their nonsense anyway.
Sponsor block has entered the chat
Problem is the ads are not widely rolled out so user timestemps would be off depending if there’s an ad or not
sometimes the best move is not to play
How bout a nice game of chess?
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.
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
I am experiencinf this. The ads are unskippable, and they replace the video until they end
Don’t get why they don’t just embed them in the middle like a few growing and actually good channels I watch do with their content.
I just fast-forward but they’re embedded in the content so there’s not really a way to “block” them but I don’t mind skipping if im not interested like 45-60 secs.
Ads are the worst at the start and more tolerable in the middle, altho that is reversed for music where the content needs to maintain continuity
Ads are the worst regardless of where they are. I have never once given a shit about whatever garbage they try to push. I don’t give a rats ass about them, their ads or anything they do. Provide a service and thats it. I actively avoid companies that try to shove ads in my face. I basically buy NOTHING anymore because of it and my bank account is SOOOO much better off these days. Constantly saving tons of money because of my fuck you companies attitude.
Oh, absolutely! I would never pay for YT+ because its paying for me to still be G’s product and I won’t do it. Just saying that its interesting that what I’ve seen is tolerable (not that it isn’t a thistle in the side) and they want to overengineer some grand final solution that will alienate a lot of people
The next decade or two are going to be interesting in that consumer habits by necessity and choice are shifting so radically that a lot of dumb legacy industries and models are gonna have serious existential difficulties and are dead corps walking.
