I often see the sentiment that YouTube and adblockers will be forever locked in a cat-and-mouse game. However, for many years now, Twitch has entirely eliminated adblocking on desktop web.
What is stopping YouTube from replicating Twitch’s advertising strategy of embedding ads directly into their videos?
As others have said, Twitch adblocking still works just fine. There are multiple plugins which block their ads, and you can even paste in a few custom filters to uBlock Origin and bypass them.
In other words, it’s not inevitable.
Think of it this way: YouTube has to pay people to work on anti-adblocking tech, whereas pissed off nerds with a permanent “fuck you I do what I want” energy will figure out how to defeat those measures for free.
Sometimes, those same engineers that put the anti-adblocking in 9-5 come home and share how to disable it.
Job security right there.
Love it lol. “Ah, this one sold weapons to the bad guys…and the good guys.”
Ad blocking will never die!
But you have to wait for the ads to stop playing right? The ads literally replace them video stream
Nope! Worst case the stream quality gets a little lower (some plugins pull from the overlay video that appears at the bottom right) but you don’t miss out on the stream at all.
However, for many years now, Twitch has entirely eliminated adblocking on desktop web.
No they haven’t.
However, for many years now, Twitch has entirely eliminated adblocking on desktop web
Me, having not seen an ad on Twitch in ~forever: 🤷♀️
How?
I think this is the one I’m using https://github.com/younesaassila/ttv-lol-pro This list has others and is updated https://github.com/pixeltris/TwitchAdSolutions
https://github.com/crackededed/Xtra for Android
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Just like the movie industry is bound to win thewar against media piracy.
You got me thinking, have they ever won once?
You could say they’ve won battles, but never any war against piracy.
They’ve made examples out of low-hanging fruit and are trying to legislate compete authority over copyright(they’d legislate parody if they could), but it just isn’t feasible.
Piracy is a decentralized, evolving amalgation of countless methods and technologies bent toward the relatively simple task of sharing media.
They can close down a website or fine a clueless teenager 200,000, But that has no effect on the desire to watch a movie or play a video game without betting your money that the production will be of value.
They very nearly beat piracy when there was basically only one streaming service, Netflix, and everything was on it.
Music piracy used to be the biggest thing and now no one pirates music anymore since there are one or two streaming services with essentially 100% of all the music available
Make going legit easier than piracy and piracy goes away
But unfortunately for the studios everyone wanted to get their own piece of the streaming revenues and fragmented the market. In a lot of ways it’s still better than the old cable tv system (everything on demand, no or at least fewer ads, higher quality programming) but the sheer amount of services someone needs in order to be able to watch everything (and even then it’s not 100%) is really turning people off.
If they’d all stuck with Netflix or whatever and every studio got on board there’d be basically no piracy now
I need a high level of evidence for that claim. I don’t think Netflix made much of a difference in piracy and certainly didn’t nearly “best it”.
Do you have any corroborating statistics?
There would be less piracy if the were only one affordable streaming service, but I would argue that piracy won in that event, since that’s what pirates are looking for: affordable, comprehensive available content.
Many of them pay money every month to sites for that reason.
Speaking to music, there is plenty of piracy going around, it’s not at all eradicated just because there are platforms.
https://dataprot.net/statistics/piracy-statistics/
Over 38 percent of people still pirate music, according to those numbers.
Platforms should be simple, comprehensive and affordable, but that isn’t going to stop piracy or beat piracy any more than the drug war worked.
Colorado and Oregon are legalizing psychedelics, but that doesn’t mean they beat the illegal psychedelic users, it means that two states are finally coming around to a practical approach to psychedelics.
Many countries are way ahead of the states with respect to their policy toward copyright infringement and the absurd sunk cost and pejorative fallacy of targeting media piracy, the states just aren’t there yet.
Twitch has entirely eliminated adblocking on desktop web
Nope, ive not watched an ad on twitch for years.
show me the ways
Xtra app from Fdroid allows ad free twitch watching.
Yeah, same. I just watched a static .PNG a streamer put up for a 3-minute ad break a few days ago.
I think it’s TTV LOL PRO that does it?
Twitch has entirely eliminated adblocking.
Lmao, no they haven’t. For example.
I’m not OP and I don’t understand a thing but ironically Ublock blocked me from opening that link
As another commenter said, that’s because it’s not the official site!
Yeah… Pretty sure it’s just like how antivirus blocks certain apps that have code that looks suspicious.
Or it’s not the official site.
The link goes to the revanced app.
Yeah re-vanced and their affiliate urls got tossed into a few blocklists annoyingly.
No, it’s because that’s a bootleg site. There’s a ton of them for revanced for some reason
True, but I’ve found all their urls to be blocked (.app .info and .net) and all three distribute the official app(s) (verified by comparing the apk hashes).
Doesn’t really matter which one you use.
Annoyingly, it’s more intentionally. Youtube has people working both sides, it makes it easier when two services they’re fighting start blaming each other instead of focusing on YouTube.
Am actual official link: https://revanced.app/patches?pkg=tv.twitch.android.app
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Twitch has all of amazon’s power to code in anti-adblockers. The most they ever get is about 24hours before someone finds a work around to their new updates.
But ya, twitch very much can be adblocked. https://github.com/pixeltris/TwitchAdSolutions
Still incorrect.
If I use streamlink or similar to watch there are no ads. At least, I have yet to see one.
The most significant thing they can do is to force login to watch content, DRM all video, stream the commercials in line as an indistinguishable (to the client) part of the video feed, and stagger the start and stop of each video block randomized to the individual user.
If the client gets absolutely no identification that the stream has changed, and they do a good job with the DRM, It will make it very hard for an individual user to block or skip commercials. People will still be able to screen record entire shows and use commercial skipping technology on it. It might even end up where popular channels end up getting distributed as pirated material through torrent
Realistically though, this is a losing move on their side. The people that are using ads skipping arent about to buy premium, and many if not most are not going to watch ads. They’ll lose what tracking data they get from those people and they’ll lose those people’s engagement boosts and shares. They’ll also introduce a lot of non-paying ad viewers into the pool, making their ads worth even less.
They’ll lose what tracking data they get from those people and they’ll lose those people’s engagement boosts and shares.
enspezzification
If the ads are unavailable to be skipped through with the progress bar normally, then the computer playing the video necessarily has to be told where they are in some way even if indirectly, because it can skip parts of the regular video but not parts of the ads, so an adblocker client could buffer the video a bit and then play it with those parts removed. Unless they got rid of the ability to skip or fast forward parts of video entirely, or let you do that to ads (in which case you’d probably just manually skip so seems unlikely), but even in that case, if ads are in different parts of the video for different users, then some program could periodically take compressed screenshots or other identifying information about a frame and send them to some shared database, and compare what parts each user has in common, so that a program could cut out sections of the video that don’t fit.
For that matter, something that I’ve wondered about of late with all this AI development is if an AI could be trained to distinguish ads from non-ad content, and used to power some kind of adblocker to cut ads out when they’re integrated seamlessly into a video or stream.
I think they could sidestep that.
If server detects request to move forward past a commercial on the stream, it moves the commercial forward a small random time skip ahead. After a few of those it just disables your accounts ability to ff for a timeout.
I suspect it wouldn’t be all that hard to redesign the system from the ground up to force us into screen recording.
As far as AI detect, probably viable. A lot harder with user generated content. Audio levels change, color grading and composition change. The commercials are of a fairly known length at the moment which would make it easier. They can throw it off by making commercials several seconds or even tens of seconds longer. False positives would definitely be a difficult point on game reviewers and reaction youtubers.
People will still be able to screen record entire shows and use commercial skipping technology on it. It might even end up where popular channels end up getting distributed as pirated material through torrent
This already happened with YouTube Red exclusive shows and it will happen again
What’re you talking about? I use a Firefox plugin that blocks ads on Twitch. I haven’t seen one since I started using it.
which plugin?
Youtube (like Reddit) has forgotten that they only exist in the first place because of the uploads of their users. They produce no content themselves. They need us a LOT more than we need them.
Never forget the YouTube rewind video they produced themselves which beacme the most disliked video ever! Lol
The issue with YouTube is that while they don’t produce their own content, they’re currently hosting a wealth of information and there is no competitor at this moment who can come close to consolidating all that archival information.
I don’t mean react videos or mrbeast. If those ever disappeared from the face, nothing of value would have been lost.
I mean science, history and engineering channels. Tutorials and full blown college or university lectures. Documentaries. Archival videos and audio recordings. There is a great wealth of information currently hosted on YouTube and they’re holding it hostage.
Those will have to find a new home and it will likely be spread out over different hosting services so we will lose the convenience of having all this great information under one roof. Look at how dispersed lemmy is at the moment. I have no doubt that Lemmy will eventually match reddit, but lets be honest. We lose a great centralized location for information, tech support and memes.
I don’t think the centralization of information is necessarily a good thing. Besides, having information on different sites is why search engines exist. When I need to learn how to replace, let’s say a toilet shut off valve, I start with a search engine, so it doesn’t matter to me if I find a video on YouTube, Vimeo, or some other service, as long as I don’t have to sign up to view it.
The convenience that YouTube offers is a centralized place for entertainment, like Netflix used to be, and like we’ve had to do with streaming, we’ll adapt if we must.
YouTube was an amazing idea that changed the world, but now it’s being squeezed for every penny that Google can get, a company that found “Don’t be evil” too restrictive. It’s just another example of what happens when a company has to be more profitable every year in order to be considered successful.
Don’t get me wrong. I never said it was a good thing.
But unfortunately its what we have now. Same thing with Wikipedia. If they one day decided they wanted to squeeze a few pennies out of Wikipedia or just close shop overnight, we’d all be shit outta luck because its the only massive scale encyclopedia around. Nothing else comes close.
We should absolutely seek to decentralize that repository of videos yet somehow maintain the ease of having a collective index we can easily scour through to find the information we need.
I apologize if I put words in your mouth.
Fortunately, it’s actually pretty easy to download a copy of Wikipedia and it’s not even that big. For YT, it would be a pretty massive undertaking. I suppose a good way to start would be to download all the content from channels that you found interesting; I’m pretty sure there are tools that facilitate that. Then, ignoring licensing and copyright issues, hosting the content would depend on how big the data is. Maybe something like Plex or Jellyfin? I kinda want to try it now with a smaller channel just to see.
And they’re not losing us any time soon, for years I’ve seen people saying that YouTube is going down because they do shit the users don’t like and yet everyone keeps using them and in general making no effort in changing that.
It’s just like Reddit, a few of us left but that didn’t change anything, everyone’s still using it and they’re not stopping any time soon.
Even if not abandoning the platform, it would only take a decent portion of the users reducing their use of the platform for them to feel a punishment of some sort, but nobody’s really willing to do anything other than complain and automatically dismiss any suggestion of an alternative.
If an alternative presents itself, things can go quicker than you would expect.
There won’t be an alternative. It’s not profitable.
Nah, because no alternative can be a complete replacement and if it’s not the exact same experience, people aren’t willing to put that tiniest bit of effort.
Again, look at Reddit as an example, alternatives exist, yet none of them are the exact same because there’s not a comparable size, and because of that people will just pull down their pants and begrudgingly accept reddit’s problems.
They produce their own content. It’s worse. Never forget Logan Paul’s Hunger Games ripoff YT movie
You realize as revenue and premium subs are the only reason they host video right? They’d rather you quit using their bandwidth. You literally cost them money.
This right here. If you block ads you’re literally worth less than nothing to them and they couldn’t care less where you go. You’re just a bandwidth leech. I use uBlock, but have some self awareness.
Good. Considering that they roll in billions, I have no sympathy for them.
I will not shed a tear at the death of the advertisement based internet. Or the horrible things that it has motivated companies to do to maximize advertisement revenue.
K. Not sure how you think the Internet works if you don’t want to pay for anything and don’t like enforcement of ads. The free money is gone. You’re going to have to start going outside more I guess.
I do know how the Internet works. It used to work so much better. I know it can be much better because I lived it.
It was never free money. This ad based revenue model. That money came from the direct extraction of a social resource. It was a system that turned our labors of love, our very thoughts, our ability to express ourselves into a business venture. It gamified a system where it used our labor for their profit, their product.
These spaces belong to us, not the small handful of companies that aim to monopolize our internet. Federation is a great step in the right direction. And rather than fund sites by ad revenue, where they would be motivated to follow that engagement algorithm, we can have communities rewarded for supporting it’s own.
The massive growth we’ve seen over the last 15 years is where the “free” money came from. Tons of companies didn’t have to make money are now needing to pivot. Everyone’s doing it. Everything is changing because there are no longer investors funding growth.
There’s a distinct difference between the Netflix area of the Internet and then Geocities era. Most people aren’t thinking of the later.
I think video platforms should be hosted by the government, like public libraries. They are very difficult to run at a profitable rate, and YouTube is basically a monopoly in this space. But it has an incredible value to society.
The problem is that we have tried this, there was a period of time when during the Great depression, in order to keep the Arts alive, the Government tried hosting stages for performers to enact plays on.
This did not work because the government kept trying to encourage that the plays promote a piece of propaganda that made the US look good or would punish plays that were accused of showing anti-American sentiment.
Imagine if government did Run YouTube, what would happen the second a Donald Trump got in office?
Suddenly only the alt right are allowed to make videos.
What we need is something like fediverse, but for online videos. Something where the host is an entirely neutral party that does not moderate the videos unless required to in order to comply with law enforcement or in instances where action against the video is obvious, such as a call to arms or if someone starts hosting Kiddie porn
What we need is something like fediverse, but for online videos
That’s Peertube right? I haven’t used it.
That’s pretty much the problem with every federated service right now 😬
Even if it was used it’s unlikely Peertube could compete with YouTube due to the nature of storage space required for HD videos.
To that they will immediately answer - but do you want all your youtube habits to be in the hands of the government?
Is that or a private company. There’s no winning lol
The company anonymises your data and sells it to get the most value out of it.
The state on the other hand will eventually use it to spy on you and controll you if necessary.
I feel like a lot of people don’t realize this, keeping your data a secret is these ad platform’s top priority, knowing what you like (for highly targeted ads) while others don’t is one of the biggest ways they make money
do you want all your youtube habits to be in the hands of the government?
They already are
People out there not really understanding the cooperative roles of the state, government and capitial under capitialism to reinforce bougerois rule.
Yes if it’s good government. Of course there’s problem of getting good government that won’t abuse anything.
Nope.
Piracy/adtech evasion is actually a very similar paradigm to infosec/security: you have to succeed all the time, always; the attackers/exploiters only have to succeed once, and there’s a lot more attackers than your company has employees, let alone security specialists.
Indeed, it’s why Nintendo will never win the war against piracy, the Pirates only have to break the code once. I’m sure Nintendo could update it to make it harder to crack, but it will never be impossible to crack. And it’s not like they are going to support the Nintendo switch forever. Eventually everybody is getting there rare shiny event Pokemon and their smash mods to make Waluigi and whoever the meme character of the week is playable
Twitch has what now? That’s the first (and will be last) time I hear that
Yup! It’s what finally made me stop watching twitch (embarrassing, I know, I’m more of a gamer than I like to admit). Minutes of unskippable ads, way too often, and no adblocker could get rid of them. The best I could find was a twitch redirect that would block the ad, but it couldn’t give you the content back, so when the ads happened the stream would just go dark until they were over. I decided enough was enough and I haven’t gone on twitch since. I’m mentally preparing to do the same with youtube if and when they succeed in breaking adblockers. Which is going to absolutely suck, I watch a lot of youtube, but maybe it’ll actually be a good thing and I’ll be on the internet less.
TTV LOL handles twitch ads without cutting off the stream.
The European Union is about to ban anti-adblockers since they run scripts on your computer without your consent, thus violating GDPR.
How is that any different from any other javascript on a website?
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That sounds like an absolute clusterfuck in the making
How so? I would love to see this in my country.
How do you determine what’s essential?
If I have a script on my site that implements page transitions (eg. when an internal link is clicked, fade out the old page and fade in the new page), is that essential or non-essential? It’s a part of the site’s design, however the site still functions without it.
It’s a slippery slope.
It’s not even a slippery slope, it’s a giant cliff of unattended consequences. Innovation in web technology could be haunted by bureaucracy.
There will just be another popup and everything is fine. Ads are youtube business model, they can ask you to deactivate adblock, pay up or leave the site like a lot of news sites do. Running anti-adblockers is entirely within the law if you get informed about it on the site.
Youtube don’t need to eliminate adblocks; they just need the barrier of entry to be large enough to discourage the general population from blocking ads.
I think the whole reason YouTube started this crackdown is because adblocking has become a lot more mainstream and easily accessible.
Once they make blocking ads more difficult 95% of users will go back to watching ads, and it’s simply not worth the time & money to fight against the remaining 5%.
If you’re tech-literate enough to be on the fediverse, and willing to spend a half hour on adblocking, you’re not who YouTube’s targeting. You’re part of the stubborn 5% who will find a workaround for whatever YT throws at us.
Before this even started I basically fought tooth and nail to “force” my coworkers to install adblockers because just seeing them sit through ads hurt. They still refused to do it… Firefox and an adblock… Basically 2 clicks was too much lol
They don’t even need that. They just need it to be credible to advertisers. YouTube don’t really give a shit if anyone actually watches the ads, they just need the advertisers to believe they do.
They very recently removed the only reasonable legal alternative of Premium Lite (which I think never existed in North America).
A big difference is that Twitch livestreams are creating content as reality happens. You can’t skip ahead, you can’t pre-load into a buffer. YouTube would need to take those features away to allow for similarly effective ad enforcement, which would eliminate a significant advantage of VODs.
I’ve never used twitch. You can’t preload? Like, you can’t just pause while someone does their paid spot and then skip past it?
That one can be realized client-side (just don’t actually pause the stream download, but rather write it into a buffer). No idea, if there actually is a client that implements this, but it is conceptually possible.
I rather meant that with a livestream, people don’t want to be several minutes behind. They want at most a few seconds delay, so they can collectively chat about the things happening in the stream and reasonably hold conversations with the streamer.
What you can do as well, is to just pause the stream when the ad starts and then reload when you imagine the ad might be over…
