The article makes it sound like a new concept, but it’s a very old approach for adding ads to video streams. I mean, it’s essentially how regular TV works.
Oh well.
YouTube can be past-tense. There’s a million places to post a video these days. Spill out some whiskey and read a book. Fuck em.
Only if premium did not have ads. They show you ad videos as if they’re part of your “recommendations”. They also allow creators to get sponsorships within videos. So even the premium experience isn’t really ad-free and they tout that shit everywhere.
So AdGuard works on the YouTube website. I haven’t been there for some time - I use 2 other methods to watch YouTube ad-free.
- Newpipe - Android app that works by parsing the website, will probably be affected?
- YouTube Kodi add-on - works with Google YouTube API, I was wondering when this loophole is going to be plugged…
Anyone with knowledge of the matter care to comment? So far my YouTube watching is still ad-free.
I also run pi-hole in front of my WiFi. Nothing gets through. Or will it?
I noticed some podcasts these days have random server injected ads - usually the same ad repeated 2 or 3 times, is this going to be my video stream soon?
Nothing gets through. Or will it?
You would have to block the video itself to get rid of them
If ads are injected server-side like the article is taking about, your downloads in Newpipe and Kodi are going to have the ads in them.
Pihole will not work because it works on the DNS queries. With server side injection it’s gonna be tougher to block ads, but I’m sure we’ll find a way
I just want the Temu ads to stop
So, instead of iterating the ancient concept of frontal assault ads towards something less intrusive and more engaging, they go the black mirror path of force feeding ads?
Sounds about right regarding the decision makers have as much creativity as a Vogon.
Man I really hate those suit MBA circlejerk idiots in positions of power.
The sad thing is they inject ads to your feed even if you have premium. I keep seeing product videos in my feed named “Meet the x product”. Youtube and google is just shameless and I’m pretty sure they’re breaking a bunch of laws.
Quick! Everyone! Hurry up and climb over one another to proclaim your hatred for YouTube and their practices so that you can have more time to go watch more YouTube videos!
😆
awe, I’m so proud of you; you figured out what a monopoly is!!
Oh I’ve known. The difference is I’m not dumb enough to continue using shit I hate.
Unfortunately you’re kind of stuck if what you want to watch is only being uploaded there. That’s why these alternatives exist. So you can watch their shit without contributing back to the site.
If what I want to watch is one a platform that I despise so much that I feel I need to whine about it online- and is a platform that takes advantage of people that create content for it to the point that it makes it to headline news articles-
Then no, I’m going to tell you that I’m not stuck at all. Those that feel they have no choice are.
I have enough strength of conviction to not support such a thing because I’m not weak-minded and addicted to watching videos like they are.
I can very easily walk away from anything I feel is hurtful to others, or just plain shitty. Basically, I just find it easy to not support things I hate.
You’d think this would be a simple and popular way to be- but ironically, if you suggest people stop using a shit platform that hosts things they like, like YouTube- they will turn on you in a second- but if you hate something that offers them nothing in return, like Norton Antivirus well… that’s just fine.
Kids are fucking weird.
So if YouTube is now serving up the ads directly to me, does that mean they’re finally liable for the content of those ads? Can we have them investigated for all the malware, phishing, illegal hate speech, etc.?
No, at least not in the USA. They’re still protected under Section 230, which makes them immune from liability of third-party content on their platform.
now serving up the ads directly to me
What do you think they were doing before? 🤔
Great, now it’s Russian roulette every time you hit that pause button. <clickPause> ¡BOOM ZERODAY MALWARE!
No, because that would be communism, and that killed 100 million people. You also think genocide is bad, aren’t you? And besides of that, if there were less regulations, you could make your own video platform to challenge Google’s monopoly!
This kind of messages should have a “/s” attached. IMHO, that’s just proper Netiquette.
i think people may have missed that you’re not serious
Well… Communism is directly responsible for multiple famines that killed into the hundreds of millions. Then there are the inevitable purges that have taken millions of lives and hosts of terrors as well.
You’re free to dispute history if you need to, and claim that theoretically communism is nice, but in practice, history tells us that living under communism reaaaalllyy sucks.
that’s like saying capitalism is directly responsible for school shootings because it happens all the time in the US. but no one’s dumb enough to claim that because that’s not how things work.
There are people here not from western europe or north america, we felt all of that and beyond with capitalism too. Do you think Asia and Africa, who received aid and support from the soviet union to free themselves from capitalist Europeans will fall for that ? Where did you arrive at ''multiple famines that killed into the hundreds of millions" ? Even the soviet famines of 1930s and chinese great famine ‘only’ killed at maximum intervals of estimation 9 and 50 millions each, and this article over-viewing all atrocities maxes at 150 million, with a low 10-20 million estimation, not hundreds of millions in famines alone.
Are you paraphrasing that ‘Black Book of Communism’ shtick ? It is a propaganda tool not valid in actual academic research, even by liberals that are not fraudsters, because the author twists every single communist countries-adjacent deaths as ‘‘mass killing caused by communism’’, including brilliant takes like total number of abortions (ex: France, that practices 250.000 abortions per year must be enraged with a capitalist regime that killed 5 million people only in the 21st century !) and all WW2 eastern front deaths (so both the nazi germans and allies that invaded USSR and USSR soldiers and civilians killed count as ‘killed by communism’).
Last but not least, the USSR had much higher GDP per capita and living standards than the average third world capitalist country (which is where the demographic majority of capitalist people live), so even if the USSR could not equate Switzerland, they achieved a good quality of life better than the world average.
It’s not possible for everyone to just tell if it’s supposed to be sarcasm. ADHD makes it hard. A bad day makes it hard. A tiring day makes it hard.
The downside of the misunderstanding isn’t just downvotes. It’s possibly a proliferation of misinformation and an impression that there are people who DO think that way.
Being not serious while saying something grim is not a globally understood culture either. It’s more common and acceptable in the Western world as a joke.
So… call it accessibility, but it’s just more approachable for everyone to just put an “/s”.
Poe’s law
The problem with pretending to be a dumbass on the Internet, is it’s almost impossible to outdo the professionals.
Reading comprehension is for people who paid attention in school. Nerds.
This is a good question.
[Enshittification intensifies]
Well it’s what people want. No one even is complaining about the ads wants to pay for anything. And stuff costs money no matter what people choose to believe. Creators need to eat YouTube has costs. Money has to come from somewhere.
Honestly, if there was a remotely reasonably priced premium version of just youtube, no music or movies or whatever they try to shove down your throat nowadays, I would pay for that. But instead they rather price hike and make the ads more intrusive.
Ads will always be detectable because you cannot speed up or skip an ad like you can the rest of the video.
If they do make it so you can speed up or skip the ad sections of a video, mission accomplished.
If all else fails, I’d enjoy a plugin that just blanks the video and mutes the sound whenever an ad is playing–whenever it’s no possible to speed up or skip ahead. I’ll enjoy the few seconds of quiet, and hopefully I can use that time to break out of the mentally unhealthy doom spiral that is the typical YouTube experience.
i remember when i put a video at 2x speed the next ad i got was also at 2x speed lmao
No you don’t have to be able to detect it if you can’t skip. Since they’re injecting the stream directly every time you hit skip they move the counter and when you come back in it just continues to stream you the ad. Just let the time code go negative at the end of the video if you skipped.
All they have to do is not really care about minutes and seconds displaying correctly exactly if you’re working around with fast forward. Alternately they could also just disable fast forward and rewind if they detect you’re using it to abuse commercials.
I think Sooner or later, pretty much all blocking becomes a store the entire video with commercials and strip the commercials out with comskip end. If you’re just storing the buffer off, and stripping it out privately there’s not really a lot they can do about that.
I may not like it, but you do make an interesting technical argument.
I think it would still be detectable though because of buffering.
What you’re saying assumes that videos are streamed frame-by-frame: “here’s a frame”, “okay, I watched that frame”, “okay, here’s the next frame”.
With buffering videos will preload the next 30 seconds of video, and so if you pressed a button to skip ahead 10 seconds, that often happens instantly because the computer has already stored the next 30 seconds of video. Your plan to just pretend to skip ahead doesn’t work in this case, because my computer can know whether or not it really did skip ahead, because of buffering.
That depends on what video player you use. Of we have control of that, then sure it works. I use mpv to play things, so for radio streams or live videos I can go back/forward as long as it’s cached.
But if it’s the web service, even though the browser video player has something cached, the player is still controlled by the website. And considering most of the people use chrome/chromium derivatives or YouTube app, it wouldn’t be hard for them to make it so that the player itself will collaborate with whatever they want to do.
If YouTube was a separate organization it wouldn’t have been the problem it is because of how Google has been taking over all the different parts they need for advertising.
There will probably be a hundred different tits for tats that we can only both dream of.
In the end, they have some form of knowledge of how many minutes of data they’ve sent you. You have the entirety of the MPEG stream and a cell phone powerful enough to do things to it.
There are different levels of crazy that can be waged If they were to do something like custom stream encryption to their client. We’d be playing cat and mouse with keys much like satellite dish hacking back in the day.
Unless you are watching live content, you are correct
always be detectable
Maybe with some content ID system… but you’ve just predicted their 2025 update which we might imagine would go something like this:
I briefly touched on this in a lengthy comment when this scheme was originally floated a few months ago. Your prediction, which granted is something that Youtube/Google absolutely would try if they thought they could get away with it, would only work on viewers that remained within the confines of Youtube’s native player.
Any third party app capable of bullying or tricking Youtube into handing them the video data is free to do whatever it wants to with it afterwards, even if this ultimately means impeccably pretending to be the official Youtube player in order to get the server to fork over the data. Furthermore, video playback is buffered so a hypothetical pirate client would have several seconds worth of upcoming video to analyze and determine what it wants to do with it.
Youtube could certainly make this process rather difficult by including some kind of end-to-end DRM or something, but at the end of the day you need to make a playable video stream arrive on the client’s device or computer somehow, and if you can’t guarantee full control of the entire environment in which that happens, dedicated nerds will find a away to screw with that data.
Oh, the year is 2100 and YouTube only plays on dedicated Alphabet-produced hardware (available “free” of course) with cam-proof screens? Storytelling will come back in style with a vengeance overnight!
…and then, with the passion of a man whose next meal depends on it, he pleads:
”like and subscribe.”
OK kids good night!
If they do make it so you can speed up or skip the ad sections of a video, mission accomplished.
Mission failed sucessfully, if people can speed up or scroll through the ad, then it kind of defeats the point since people can skip ahead or increase the speed.
Hence “mission accomplished”
that just blanks the video
My brain just does that anyway, after decades of ads I just tune them out. And at home I use ad blockers.
The reason we’re absolutely fucking blasted away with ads is because even if they only have a 0.01% success rate, that’s enough to make them super profitable. So if you and 998 other people all pay zero attention to ads, they still make money.
There’s also lots of people (like one of my family members) who become absolutely irate by ads but still buy the shit they’re shilling anyway.
Advertisers claim that it’ll work eventually which is how they can justify companies paying them to display ads, and how they can justify paying for ads on a service like YouTube or even a website. In a sense they are being hung out to dry, many of the big companies seen in ads these days don’t actually need to convince you to buy their product because they have an almost complete monopoly on the market, they’re only technically not monopolies, so you’re going to buy their products anyway or live without the convenience. This is why among other things Ad-funded internet is considered a bubble in a sense, because advertisers are spending money paying websites to show people things they don’t think or care about, but somehow this translates into profits? Seems like the only one profiting is the site being paid, and the creator on it.
I’m sure Nestle, Pepsi Co. P&G, CocaCola Bottling Co. Walmart, Amazon, and the other big boys really need to tell others about them or people wouldn’t know they exist and buy from them. Get real, these companies have their foot in the door, when it comes to the whole consumers buying from them. You can’t not buy from them and live as anyone else would, it takes effort to cut them out, and in many cases living without the convenience they bring.
That’s not how it works. Or, rather, that’s not only how it works. Sure, advertisers dream of users who see an ad once and run to buy a product. But ad effects are spread over time. They build brand recognition. They fake familiarity. Say you are in a supermarket and you want to buy a new type of product that you haven’t bought before. Very likely you’ll pick something familiar-sounding, which you heard in an ad. Ads pollute the mind even if the most obvious effects are, well, obvious and easily discarded, more subtle influence remains.
I think the main problem is that this type of reasoning can’t actually be proven scientifically, even if we have a study there’s not a guarantee it’s unbiased (who do you think funds research on advertising effectiveness). Then there is the problem that every product or brand in modern advertising is likely one of the handful of pseudo monopoly brands. One might argue that a person bought their product because they heard it in an ad, but in reality they might not have really had much choice, that makes it hard to say if people buy the products because they’re familiar or if they just don’t have much option.
The main point I’d like to make is that advertisers would like to believe they aren’t wasting money or time, they need people to believe it in some capacity, because if enough people don’t, eventually the dumb and blind companies who give them money will realize it too and stop giving them money. That’s why the ad-funded internet is considered a bubble, it’s not worth it, or necessary in a lot of cases, and the moment the dumb and blind corpos realize that, they’ll stop dumping money into a hole.
If it makes you feel any better, I intentionally never use products that have intentionally repetitive messaging or earworm tendencies out of spite. Though I know I’m probably in the minority
Do we unintentionally use products we didn’t realize repetitively messaged us?
We’ll never know…
Just kidding, we can be sure it’s incredibly well studied given the billions and billions of dollars going into ads!
Totally no bias in these studies at all either, they totally wouldn’t try to skew these studies for personal gain and to try and justify the huge spending on ad money right?
You can fool some of the people some of the time… right? :)
I’d expect nothing less than executives at a number of the Fortune 50 to be ruthlessly cutthroat, including when it comes to vetting the claims of their marketing teams.
(I know I’m speaking about studies I only assume to exist by the way, will have to research it later)
Yep. YouTube must include a manifest with each video to tell the player what time ranges are un-skippable. Baked in ads were doomed from the beginning 🤡
I wish I had more upvotes to give this comment cause you are so on the money.
Seeing as these ads will be targeted and of varying length, I wonder if a SponsorBlock-like extension with the ability to accept training data from users to help identify ads.
The Plex server application has a feature which scrubs videos and identifies intros so you can skip them like you can on Netflix. Wouldn’t it be sort of like that?
Seems like a good use of AI/ML.
The fucked up part is that I have to use SponsorBlock even with Premium. I thought I was paying for no ads…like wtf?
I wonder if a SponsorBlock-like extension with the ability to accept training data from users to help identify ads.
That’s…how SponsorBlock works? The ads come at different entry and exit points for every user. Otherwise it wouldn’t be a problem for sponsorblock.
The Plex server application has a feature which scrubs videos and identifies intros
Pretty sure they just use timestamps from a crowdsourced database, just like sponsorblock.
Pretty sure they just use timestamps from a crowdsourced database, just like sponsorblock.
Nope, it’s analyzing the sound to guess where the intro starts and ends. Turns out this is pretty simple to implement, but quite reliable. Source: worked for Plex
That’s great, but it won’t work if each user receives a different file.
This is about intro detection in TV shows, not ad blocking. I’m not proposing this as a good way to block ads, just noting that this feature in Plex doesn’t use a database.
The ads come at different entry and exit points for every user.
They’re not referring to the YouTube ads, but the “let’s take a minute to talk about today’s sponsor nordvpn that I used on my trip to Antarctica.” This is a part of the video file itself, and it starts and ends at the same time for all users.
This is a part of the video file itself, and it starts and ends at the same time for all users.
Except it doesn’t when a YouTube ad is injected in the middle. Then all timestamps after the ad are offset by the length of the ad. That’s not from me, that’s from SponsorBlock themselves in the OP.
Well it sounds more scary than it realistically will be.
YouTube must pass to the player the metadata of where the ads start/end. Why? Because they need to be unskippable/unseekable/etc. If the metadata is there it is possible to force the seek 🤷♂️
Just matter of time
Why would that be the case? The player can simply be locked into ad mode till it gets the cue from the server all of the ads have been streamed. Only then will the player unlock. When watching what amounts to a video stream, this doesn’t have to be handled clientside.
Well the player and its controls are client side.
I’m not talking about the player or the controls being server-side. I’m talking about the player being locked into a streaming mode where it does nothing but stream the ads. After the ads are streamed, the player returns to normal video mode and the server sends the actual video data.
This means no metadata about the ads are required on the player side about the ads.
Sure you can hack the player into not being locked during the streaming of the ads. But that won’t get you very far, since it’s a live stream. You can’t skip forward, because the data isn’t sent yet. You can skip backwards if you’d like, with what’s in the current buffer, but why would you want to? You can have the player not display the ads, but that means staring at a blank screen till the ads are over. And that’s always the case, one can simply walk away during the ads, that’s always been the case.
Technically I can think of several ways to implement this, without the client having meta data about the ads. And with little to none ways of getting around the ads. Once the video starts it’s business as usual, so it doesn’t impact regular viewing.
I just read your list and it confirms mine.
Small buffer AND can’t skip ahead on a boring video because you can only get served the ads to unlock further video after time equal to the served video duration has passed.
That is not YouTube, it’s online TV and there will be an impact on the product. Preloading a video via a 3rd party client will still easily beat this scheme. Just get a headstart equal to the first ad break.
No, you misunderstand. You get seconds assigned to your token. It doesn’t matter where in the video you use those seconds.
So if you watch an ad you get say 60 secs of video until you need to watch an ad again. You can watch 30 secs, then skip 2 minutes ahead and watch another 30 secs, then you get an ad. In reality the times would be larger, but to illustrate a point.
In the current setup YT uses, if you watch an ad, watch 2 secs of video, then skip ahead of the next adbreak, you get more ads.
And yes as stated, a separate client can get around this. But as also stated there will always be ways around it, it’s just a matter of making it harder. If it’s beyond what a simple browser plugin can do, it’s good enough. And YT has been banning 3rd party clients anyways, so that makes it even harder.
Sure if you fundamentally change what YouTube you can make it work.
You need very small buffers or complete disablement of seeking even outside of ads. Otherwise a client can reconstruct the video without viewer interruption.
People however expect to be able to skip ahead in YouTube videos, otherwise its just TV.
Nope that’s not necessary at all, the client experience can be the same as it’s always been. See my other response for what I was thinking of.
So you would need buffer barrieres essentially.
Still user watches video. Ad avoidance skips forward to buffer barrier for ad in the background. Streamed ad is thrown away and new buffer data is received. User does not notice if the video is long enough.
Yeah I’m thinking of a system like this:
A user opens a session to watch a video, the user is assigned a token to watch the requested video. When the user isn’t a premium subscriber and the video is monetized the token is used to enforce ads. To get video data from the server, the user needs to supply the token. That token contains a “credit” with how many seconds (or whatever they use internally) the user can watch for that video. In order to get seconds credited to the token, the user needs to stream ad content to their player. New ad content is only available to stream, once the number of seconds they were credited have been elapsed.
One way to get around this is to have something in the background “watch” the video for you, invisible, including the ads. Then records the video data, so it’s available for you to watch without ads. But it would be easy to rate limit the number of tokens a user can have. There’s ways to get around that as well. But this seems to me well beyond what a simple browser plugin can do, this would require a dedicated client.
The idea is to make it harder for users to get around the ads, so they’ll watch them instead of looking for a way to block ads. In the end there isn’t anything to be done, users can get around the ads. Big streaming services use DRM and everything and their content gets ripped and shared. With YouTube it would be easy for someone to have a Premium account, rip the vids and share them. But by putting up a barrier, people watch the ads. YouTube doesn’t care if a percentage of users doesn’t watch the ads, as long as most of them do.
My point was, there’s ways to implement the ads without sending metadata about the ads to the client.
and making them server site, while possible would introduce tremendous amounts of lag, and put that much more load on the servers. Imagine a server that has to handle playback of billions of users all at once. That’s probably quite a bit worse than most average, or even high-level DDoS attacks.
If YouTube offered premium without music for a discounted price I’d probably be willing to pay for it. But I just want no ads, not a bunch of bundled stuff.
yep, we’re back at “piracy is a service issue”
And then there are people like me, who aren’t opposed to paying for access in theory, but will never be okay with having the videos I watch be tied to an account. It’s inconvenient and I don’t trust Google with my watch history, even when the option is turned off.
Also I wouldn’t pay until: Youtube stops showing ads for hate groups; stops its manipulative recommendations and push towards right-leaning and extremist content; stops manipulating creators to all make the same kind of video in order to please the algorithm; removes hate content and extremist content; stops auto-flagging and removing fair-use content.
Why are we the ones that need to pay?
Bandwidth and storage is not free. So the person uploading something and using the platform to distribute that content should be the one paying? Right? Or did we totally forget that?
So then you have to pay the content creator to watch their videos? Like float plane? Creators aren’t doing this for free and they need to make a living.
The ones that pay are the ones running the ads. If the content creators have to pay, they will be the ones doing ads. This is how AV content has worked since the dawn of broadcast radio.
I’ve said it many times but I would gladly pay for Premium if they would just make the first-party experience not absolute garbage. My experience has been better with literally every other 3rd party app/service. It’s not that hard. Just stop cramming shit down my throat and give me control over what I want to see.
Also they need to do something about the midroll ads.
I’m a bit surprised they don’t do this actually. Premium is good valued off you use the music side of it as well, which I do, but not for just ad free YouTube.
This is exactly me.
I’ve been paying £5 a month by using a VPN to sign up for Premium from Ukraine. Been doing so for the past couple of years without complaint. Literally all I need from them is to fuck off the adverts. I have Apple Music for music and I’m happy with it.
Now they’ve rumbled us and will be cutting off our Premium next month.
I am fucked if I’m paying those ratfuckers £20 a month just so I can watch other people’s hard work without the adverts they force in. Fuck that noise.
So I’m now researching ways to get my subs onto Plex so I can carry on watching on my Apple TV.
Even then it doesn’t have sponsorblock or a customisable UI like revanced does.
It’s crazy how unofficial free is actually better than official paid.
See, I don’t really mind the sponsored segments. Some creators actually have fun with their ad reads, like the Map Men or Colin Furze. But if it’s boring I just tap the forward button on my Apple TV remote and skip past.
If I’m paying for premium, I just don’t want ads! But they keep trying to shove it down my throat regardless
Different ads though. One is from YouTube and one is from the creator.
Irrelevant
Exactly. In my opinion, that’s Google’s biggest mistake, and I can’t believe some people are okay with it. Everyone attacks YouTube as if they are the biggest villains, but let’s not forget that without them, most creators would be nothing. Most people here are aware of how difficult it is to maintain such a platform, yet they are unrealistic with their attacks. And yes, I am someone who has LineageOS installed, which says enough about what I think of Google, but sometimes you have to be fair. If they banned creators from having ads within their videos, I might even consider paying for premium.
I get what you’re saying, but YouTube music is pretty much just a different front end for the normal site.
Sure, it does some filtering to attempt to be music only (though I’ve seen non music stuff sneak in before) but in the end, you get pretty much the same core experience if you open up the YouTube app and start “watching” a song (with premium for the background play capability).
I’d be willing to bet this is why they won’t go the route you’re talking about.
I’d prefer some kind of limited amount of viewing. I don’t watch a ton of YT, so give me some kind of reasonable ad-free cap. I’m willing to pay to not see ads, but I don’t watch enough to be worth their asking price.
I would rather micro transactions. Like just load up a dollar and get like 1000 minutes ad free…with the ability to turn off and save for later.
Don’t think a dollar is going to give you anywheee near 1000 minutes of ad free video.
The arms race continues.
MythTV solved this long ago. We already have the tech to bypass this shit.
Could you supply a source for this?
Go download MythTV yourself. Shit’s been available for decades. I used to use it with a capture card to timeshift/DVR cable television. The source is me. I used it. It was great. It auto-removed TV ads when it recorded your shows.
https://www.mythtv.org/wiki/Removing_Commercials#Automatically_removing_commercials
