YouTube tests server-side ads to make your coveted blocker obsolete
(www.yahoo.com)
from downpunxx@fedia.io to technology@lemmy.world on 25 Jul 2024 17:34
https://fedia.io/m/technology@lemmy.world/t/1017130
from downpunxx@fedia.io to technology@lemmy.world on 25 Jul 2024 17:34
https://fedia.io/m/technology@lemmy.world/t/1017130
YouTube has been spotted testing server-side ads, which could pose a problem to ad blockers.
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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
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.
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
I mean, if you’re not paying for it, and they can’t advertise to you, what do they need you for?
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
YouTube: oh no, the freeloaders costing us money are going away, what will we ever do!?
FAFO
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 I can trim those away if needed.
At least if still downloads them you can edit them out if it’s something you want to save.
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.
That’s what I figured, but I’m not expert on how things work so wanted someone who knows more chime in. Sad times
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).
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.
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
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.
Thank you!
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.
I stll haven’t get any ads with just stock ubo but when it does I’ll try this filter, thanks
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
Fuck youtube
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.
gitlab.futo.org/videostreaming/grayjay
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?
Not a great alternative. The second it becomes actually successful it will collapse.
Shucks.
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.
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.
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.
The price is absolutely obscene. No fucking way i’m paying that
When it was 9 bucks, it was worth it. Certainly isn't now.
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
My local invidious instance is borked too. Not sure if its related and I don’t have time to investigate now.Guess I need something else for background noise.Edit: Took enough time to get a fresh image and its working again. Looks like I hadn’t updated since September.
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.
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.
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.
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.
.
Aha! So this is how one snuck into a video I downloaded last night. Fuckers. At least with a locally downloaded file I can quickly skip ahead.
Or even trim it.
Way back in the day when I used SageTV to record live TV there were programs that would automatically identify commercials and skip them for you. Computers are way more powerful now so I doubt it will be long before there’s and app that automatically downloads your favorite YouTube channels and prescans the videos to skip the ads.
Still using comskip.exe today although it seems to be having more trouble than it used to.
I usee to wait by the VHS player and manually press pause while recording tv shows. In ironic retrospect, I find old 80s-90s commercials to be more kino than the tv shows I recorded.
This is where AI would come in handy. Start scrubbing the buffer as it’s coming in to identify the difference and jump past it.
It becomes an AI war. They will use AI to make ads to get around the AI blocking. The ads will end up looking very similar to the content.
Ad: “Hey guys. It’s ya boy, NordVPN, here today to tell you about the dangers of using the internet without my VPN…”
Whatever happened to ad placement lol
Then you start using ai to put in anti ads that point out all the bad stuff about the usual ad subjects, I’d say get as code to libel/slander as possible without risking a lawsuit
I’d be watching a car accident compilation and a Buick starts trying to tell me to ask my doctor about Cymbalta. You know… I might actually watch that.
Aren’t they legally required to indicate that an ad is playing? Should be almost trivial to detect and I don’t know how they’d get around that.
I’m the US? I think only if the content is targeted at children.
And that’s when I moved to Invidious and haven’t looked back
What makes you think they won’t block them or force ads to them as well?
You do know that Invidious is still YouTube, right?
It’s an open source front end to youtube, yes. So no ads on the sidebar, no bullshit about logging in, no garbage algorithm to be harassed by.
And no commercials yet. If YT streams the ads and invidious doesn’t block them and adblocker doesn’t block them and PiHole doesn’t block them, I will not watch them.
Death to Advertisement.
I don’t think YouTube cares if you refuses to watch their videos on another platform or not.
They probably prefer if you didn’t. You only cost them money with no revenue whatsoever.
They are still a metric they can peddle to their advertisers to show “how many people see this ad in a month.”
You don’t think they know how many watch their videos with adblockers or third party clients?
I highly doubt they accept views from third party clients as valid ad views or probably views at all since that would likely make abuse easier.
It still goes to active user counts though. There will still be a footprint left by any view and that can be marketed as “we have X million users daily!”
I doubt the really big advertisers (the only ones that maybe can negotiate) think that’s enough statistics.
Again, the point is that those accounts are still users that can be pointed out as such for all to see. Remember: a youtube account is just a Google account.
One could argue that youtube is a highly effective loss leader - people get into the Google ecosystem because of making an account to subscribe to their favorite content creators. Now Google has data they can sell, and metrics for advertisers to go “I see 18-30 year old white guys who watch things about X are likely to respond positively to things about Y.” The algorithm, even without advertisements, is constantly building a profile of every user.
I don’t use third party clients but I thought that the entire point of them was that you don’t use an account.
There is still a footprint of “person is watching X, then they go to Y” with or without an account by my understanding.
Its less valuable data, sure, but it all feeds thr algorithm
Maybe, it would depend on how the front ends work with how they get content and so on.
Either way I doubt they care much about that data. I would bet they would bet they would rather get rid of those users.
The effort/cost expended to go after a tiny group of people vs the amount of money generated/saved from stopping them was (and probably still is) not worth it. There just aren’t that many people who use 3rd party services without accounts.
I’ll download it so I can skip the bullshit if it comes down to it.
Considering I can't get Invidious to serve me a video in a higher res than 480p, no thanks.
Those ads do look good in 1080p!
I find it fascinating how media companies evolved their usage of ads over time. Used to be that the purpose of showing someone an ad was to get them to buy your product. Now, though, the companies who make the ads are paying to have them put on media networks who use the ads to annoy you into paying for a premium membership so you don’t have to see them. It’s double dipping.
Not sure how I would feel if I made an ad, and YouTube was saying to their users: “Yeah, you like that fucking ad? Super annoying, isn’t it? If you don’t pay me more money, I’m going to cram that annoying bullshit down your throat every time you want to watch a video. I’m going to put ads at the beginning of videos. I’m going to sprinkle them throughout the middle. Hell, I’m even going to make you watch ads after the video ends! You like that, you little bitch??”
It’s the evolution of the premium cable model. HBO, Showtime, etc. The upgraded cable tier has ad-free content and exclusives.
Yup. I’m old enough to remember when the selling point of cable TV was that it was ad-free. Then, of course, they started adding ads. And then they sold us premium channels that didn’t have ads. Now those have ads, too. You just can’t get away from them.
<img alt="" src="https://slrpnk.net/pictrs/image/d9be440d-416e-4ff5-9ddb-4e23855d6d3f.gif">
Now i want Pirate Bay to play the theme of pirates of the Caribbean every time i load it up.
Gotta make that line go up somehow
It’s been seven years, and this sketch is just getting more and more fitting each day.
Maybe if they cleared out the scams and served more than 3 ads on repete, I wouldn’t feel the need to block them. Yes, no one likes ads, but I get its to pay for the content I’m watching for free.
I would rather pay an ad-block company a monthly subscription than give it to YouTube in blackmail. This will just be another salvo in a never ending war.
I used to pay for youtube premium. My logic being that I was using an adblocker anyway, and I wanted the content creators I watched to get some kind of revenue for my watchtime. Youtube stopped taking my money a while back, and I can’t be bothered to figure out why. These days, there’s so little content that I find interesting that I spend more time scrolling than I do actually watching videos. It’s only a matter of time until I just stop regularly going to youtube.
I paid for it until they basically doubled the price.
I paid for it before they removed Google Play Music. I was on one of the plans that was $8 for both Google Play Music and YouTube Red.
Too Much engagement slop being pumped into the feed and you can't block offenders on teevee app...
WTF I lay for this. If I don't want to see some clown, I should be able to block.
I report them for misconduct and it seems to reduce the spam but they come back in few weeks amyway...
Like no I don't want linus, I don't want brownlee apple whore... Just stop.
There are already sponsorship-skipping add-ons. YouTube lost before they began.
IIRC the developer of SponsorBlock was asked about this and seemed very unconcerned.
I’m not sure if a sponsorblock like solution will work. Sponsorblock is entirely reliant on timestamps provided by users.
A similar solution for YouTube’s ads will only work if the ads always happen at the same timestamps and have the same length. This is not necessarily the case, as ads can happen at any point.
Yeah they just need to range the ad from x->y time into video playback starts.
There will have to be designated points where midroll ads can happen, just like the current system has, so the ads aren’t inserted mid-sentence or destroy an important sequence in the video. Nobody would accept it otherwise.
It’s a matter of detecting those points, mapping them to specific frames in the video, then automatically detecting when an ad is inserted on that basis.
It’s slightly harder to do, but not impossible.
Unfortunately I think there’s been a good bit of evidence recently that people WILL accept it. As a prime example lemmy hasn’t exactly replaced reddit despite the relative uproar that the API changes caused. Netflix & co just keep hiking prices and people just keep buying it.
And then on the technical side, if the ads are coming from the server it’s possible youtube might just refuse to serve the rest of the video stream until all or most the ad’s runtime has passed. It depends on how serious they want to get about capturing the revenue lost to adblock users.
Sure, but then that’s an even worse enshittification if they do make it random.
The mandatory wait-time will stop people from seeking through videos organically. Yet another thing that makes it worse for everyone.
And even then, it should still be possible to detect which frames are part of the original video and which are not, either by detecting original video frames, or building a database of ads and detecting them within videos.
The fact that lots of people still use reddit is just due to inertia. Platforms don’t die immediately overnight. Digg still exists. It still calls itself “The homepage of the internet.” The process of transitioning to a federated internet is going to take many years.
Reddit is still dying however. There’s been a marked drop in the quality of posts over there, and they’re harder to access, now they’re doing an exclusivity thing with google which is also enshittifying massively. That is making it less and less appealling over time. It won’t last forever as a culturally relevant site.
if you’re downloading the video locally it would be incredibly trivial to remove the segment of the ad. There are various different mechanisms i can think of that would work.
obviously, beginning and end ads are super trivial.
Ideally, youtube won’t be natively encoding the ads into the videos, because that would be a nightmare, so presumably they’re doing injection instead, that would be pretty obvious from the get go.
If not, they have to have some kind of interface for the advertisement you could very easily use that to track the ad placement itself, though that might be problematic.
There are likely other clever things that can be done, we’ll have to see what happens.
I’m afraid this is what they’re going for.
if they did, the only way it would work is if they live encode every video on request, which as we know from twitch, is incredibly cost prohibitive. So i doubt it. This could mostly be assuaged through caching, but i’m not sure how long the economics hold up on that compared to just not doing any live encoding at all.
No, that’s not necessary. The only thing they need to do is to find an I-Frame (which there are plenty of), make a cut at that frame, show the ad instead, and then resume to the original video after the ad is done. No extra encoding is involved. It’s just like concatenating video files together.
I’ve done similar stuff like this. It’s not too difficult, at least not in H264. Not sure about YouTube’s own format, but I guess it’s quite similar.
that’s what im saying. Maybe not in this thread, idk, i’ve had a few of these now, but they’re almost certainly just injecting the AD somewhere through the middle of the video.
There’s already a filter for UBO that blocks it. That was much quicker than I expected. Works and is further down this thread.
It’s only a matter of time until YouTube stops that as well.
It’s an arms race. But there’s not a weapon that doesn’t have a counter, even if that counter is mutually assured destruction. YouTube’s efforts are inevitably a futile chase that does little more than keep their shareholders happy that they’re chasing the dragon.
Possibly, but as long as they are not completely server-side (which they can’t be, they want to target people) then they are fighting on hostile ground.
Of course there are attempts to lock down PCs so that ad companies can tell it what to do (probably with some DRM argument), but we’re not there yet.
Then on to the next one. Google won’t get a dime from me. They can’t stop it, even if I have to set up something for my computer to record my videos while I sleep so I can watch them on a video player the next day, I will not watch ads.
I remember using MythTV in the beforetimes, and you’d record the show off the cable tuner, then it would process the file and remove the commercials based on volume levels and light signatures. It was remarkably good at it and was how I watched all TV until streaming came around.
I would imagine someone could do the same even better today with an AI model that would recognize all the ads and deliver an edited stream. The problem is that the video would have to be downloaded beforehand and then the streams stored elsewhere and referenced by an addon that redirects you.
This still exists today, for example in Plex’s DVR. Practically everything that blocks commercials these days uses comskip or a fork of it.
Let’s go full guerilla: Plugin that lets you select the first and the last frame of an ad, thus allows to report the beginning and length to a synced database. When that frame is found in the buffer, skip X frames ahead.
For ergonomics, the plugin should be able to spot cuts in the video so you can easily select the correct frames.
For resilience, maybe settle for similar frames. Thinking about anti-abuse, maybe require a minimum number of reports relative to the views (and ofc allow to not skip stuff).
Oh. I like this. Sponsor block but network wide basically xD
This shouldn’t even be too hard, I doubt YouTube is completely rerendering every video with ads, they’d just insert the ad in before an I frame in the video. So each ad will start with an I frame, and the video will resume on an I frame, meaning just let the user select all the I frames, no fancy cut detection algorithm is needed.
I have no idea how to do this from JS though.
Also I mean video I frames, not HTML iframes.
Due to legal reasons, and to keep advertisers happy, YouTube is forced to display the “Advertisement” mark and a link to the advertisers website. With these, all the required information exists to allow an adblocker to skip any ads embedded in the video stream. No community flagging of ads is required.
They’re forced to identify that it’s an ad, but they don’t have to do it in a machine-readable way. There’s many different approaches to show an “Advertisement” or “Sponsored” label that appears to users but that blockers can’t easily find.
If they don’t link to the advertisers page, they’ll lose advertisers, which is the last thing YouTube would do. Legally, a video-embedded “Advertisement” indicator could work, but the link to the advertisers page remains.
This would fit in well with SponsorBlock, which already does the same thing for different parts of videos (eg sponsored segments, intro and outro animations, non music segments in music videos, etc).
I suspect YouTube will find ways around this, like running ads of differing lengths, add random amounts of padding at the start of the video or between ads, etc.
Let the games begin.
It actually already did break sponsorblock for a bit because user submissions would include the wrong timestamps, due to the ads changing the duration of the video.
This would be hard to implement, but I personally would be happy to donate more to fund the development costs for such features. Adblocking is the largest consumer boycott in history and I won’t let a corporation try to crush it again.
The challenge is that videos will have a varying amount or type of ads based on the client’s country/demographic and simply on the timing of ad campaigns.
Not baking-in ads was the advantage of Youtube and other streaming platforms over the likes of traditional TV. That’s why they were client-side in the first place. I wonder how much the extra effort, bandwidth, and processing will cost Youtube to achieve server-side ads. Would be funny if it simply ended up being too expensive for them.
They have a LOT of compute power… They could have several baked in ads per geographical area / demographic and only store them on servers in / close to the relevant country. There’s definitely associated costs but I wonder if it’d amortize well given their viewer count.
That sounds very much like the idea of SponsorBlock (but might need a bit of refinement to work for different ads of different length). You should definitely check out Piped for watching YouTube videos without any tracking/ads/dark patterns, I am very sure they will do something to remove server-side ads as well (hopefully).
And if it is just five seconds instead of 15, it would be way better!
I’m so fucking sick of their greedy bullshit
I’ll just download the video and skip the shit, idgaf, I’m not watching ads, google can suck it.
Try the app called Seal on FDroid
I would settle for something that simply turns the screen black and turns audio off whenever ads play. I don’t care if YouTube gets paid for it, I just want to decrease the value of ads and prevent myself from seeing them.
Legally, YouTube have to detect if ads were blocked and and mark the impression as non-billable. They can’t charge advertisers for blocked ads.
They can only tell that something is blocked because the ad wasn’t loaded from a server. If it’s not loaded, then they can’t count it as “viewed.”
If the ad is just blacked over, it is still loaded, and they wouldn’t know.
Well they also infest the client side since they likely developed the main part of your web browser, so they can still know there’s a black cover in the DOM.
If it became a common thing, they’d have to add detection for it. Not necessarily to stop people doing it, but to ensure advertisers aren’t charged for invalid impressions. Practically every major ad network has adblocking detection; they just don’t always make it obvious (e.g. they might silently log it).
If they were effectively able to detect it they would be able to block you watching the rest of the video.
I already put my phone down on my desk and turn the audio down whenever an ad pops up, they can’t tell it isn’t being viewed.
.
FUCK GOOGLE SO GODDAMN MUCH
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.
Commercial detection systems exist already although I couldn’t vouch for their efficacy. How they will integrate with streaming however is another question.
I for one am excited for this phase of the cat & mouse game, as solving this challenge means keeping the monkey off our backs for good while longer.
It might even be a bit simpler than that, as YouTube’s going to have to mark segments as adverts somehow so you can’t just skip past them.
Ah, the irony.
Oh no, Anyway - Invidious/Piped user Hmmm wait, those may not work with it… damn
They then won’t need to break those anymore, right? … Right?
Does the ad restrict play back controls (such as disabling fast forward)? Trivial for an add-on to detect and if nothing else black out the video and mute the audio until playback controls are restored.
If it doesn’t restrict fast forward then everyone can skip the ad without an ad-blocker.
Also, now that ads are server side YouTube is more responsible for the content of them as they are hosting them.
I have no problems with this.
There is no way for advertisers to know that their ads are actually shown. That is why an ad is a link to the advertiser’s website. If there is one thing I have learned from uploading to YT and watching, it’s that YT is terrible at transparency and this kind of logistics. I doubt this will work at all.
they cracked down on adblockers, adblockers got better.
They’re trying to get around adblockers again, adblockers will get better again
I will pay for an adblocker before I pay for an ad provider to stop harassing me
Chad uBlock Plus dev doesn’t even want our money.
Chad Raymond Hill who refuses to accept donatoins or sponsorships of any kind.
That being said the people that maintain the filter lists I believe, don’t quoute me on this, you can donate to a few of them. Really depends if they mention it on their githubs though and you pretty much have to go about finding them on your own as there’s no real centralized list of all the people that contribue to the filter lists.
That’s correct. uBlock Plus’ Github says he won’t accept donations but give instead to the unsung heroes maintaining the lists on which his software depends.
YouTube shell company running highly effective subscription based ad blocker! Hahaha I could see it.
If anything, adblock taught me about pi-hole, which brought me into the raspberry pi world.
And id rather spend money on that.
adguard for windows, which is also available on CrappleComputers and I think it’s also on linux
I’m not so sure. Once they are embedded in the video they become hard to block. Twitch is like this now.
I’m holding out some hope, since twitch is live but YouTube is pre-buffered, but they could still block loading past the ad on a timer or a key computed from hashing the decoded frames of the ad, idk
And yet there are userscripts you can use to block out twitch ads. I haven’t seen one for months now despite not being a subscriber.
Ad blockers are useful for more than just YouTube. So they are not going anywhere. However it will be a bummer if we can no longer block YouTube ads.
On android I have to endure the ads but on desktop I never see them.
Use newpipe on Android, no ads
Or even better Tubular or LibreTube
NewPipe, Libretube, Revanced are the way to go!
For some reason New Pipe just doesn’t work on my me device
Try pipepipe on f-droid
Thanks I’ll give it a shot
I love newpipe except for one very annoying quirk: if you pause a video for more than a few minutes it “breaks” and skips to the end of the video when you hit play again.
For long videos this is very annoying, but I’ll gladly pay that “price” if it means I don’t have to hear 25261516 insanely annoying advertisements a day.
This is a recent thing caused by the changes YT has been making, at the moment we’ve been given multiple quick fixes while the community continues to investigate AFAIK
By the language you used it sounds like you’re involved with the project, so thank you!
If it helps at all I’ve been experiencing this issue for probably 6 months or more. I’ve just gotten into the habit of adding videos to playlists and closing the video after i know it has been paused for a while. If I open it again from the playlist it picks back up where I was.
Also oddly enough if it skips to the end and I let it go to the next video (not in playlist, but whatever it would have played next) then I hit “back” it will (usually? I haven’t tried too many times) pick up where it should have been from when I paused it.
Edit: actually nevermind “we’ve been given fixes” would imply you’re one of us plebs! Thanks for the info anyway lol
I use revanced:
Revanced manager: https://revanced.app/download
MicroG: https://github.com/revanced/gmscore/releases/tag/v0.3.1.3.240913
You also get SponsorBlock and Return YouTube Dislike right in the app (+ many other ui and functionality modifications)
I have premium and still use it just for this.
On iOS I have to use some niche app that lets me circumvent YouTube asking me for my ID but if it doesn’t want ID vinegar extension and wipr works for ads. Vinegar replaces the whole player I wonder if it will work for server side ads
You can use the brave browser on android. As of now it blocks youtube ads.
Added bonus it saves on your data plan because wouldn’t ya know it, the copious amounts of ads they shove in our faces uses a lot of data… that we already pay for. I’m not paying my cell provider for data just so advertisers can use it to try to get me to pay for more shit I don’t need.
Firefox with ublock origin also works on mobile
Or another alternative is the app grayjay
Oh I didn’t know ublock was available on mobile with Firefox! Thanks for the heads up. I’ll have to switch since I use ublock with Firefox on my pc and I prefer that for privacy protection
I use Firefox and just use the web browser. You can even listen to YouTube with the screen off. Plus Firefox add ons/extensions
What’s hilarious about this article is that I’m actually getting YouTube premium for free as some kind of bonus to my phone service yet I’m still using ad blockers on it and everything else. I really don’t give a shit. If they want to get better at injecting ads I’m going to place my bets on ad blockers getting better at blocking them. Or just not using YouTube. Cause, quite frankly, most of my favorite creators are on Nebula anyway and I pay for that service.
Try LibreTube. Or Firefox Mobile with Ublock Origin. Or one of many other solutions. You don’t need to watch YouTube ads on Android.
If you’re on Android, use revanced
I’m getting them already, which is a bit annoying, but I still prefer the black screen with an adblocker to the wild mix of commercials that range from MLM schemes and “join my telegram group for totally not financial advice” to flat out hate speech that I’d get without an adblocker. So yeah suck it Google.
Please do this! YouTube will finally be unusable and Google can finally start to die completely :3
Most normies I know watch YouTube with ads already. I sadly don’t think this will put much of a dent in YouTube.
That’s the thing, right? They’re fighting a very small minority of users blocking ads/tracking this hard
Well the upside is that they’re not actually trying to get it to stop, they’re just making an effort to please their customers.
If corporations are not squeezing every little bit of profit. Then the corporation is losing st making money.
Perhaps it’s better anyway if our favourite adblock/tracker blocking services don’t become popular
Yea the moment my adblockers don’t work I stop using youtube
I suspect they’re fine with that.
MFW server-side ads: <img alt="" src="https://lemm.ee/pictrs/image/167a00e6-70c1-45da-bac9-8d237f202e69.webp">
Google is getting desprite
Wait until it gets depepsi.
I prefer decoke
Do the dedew!
I’m rooting for beer
Oh yes, I totally believe that people are opting to delete their ad blocker, that works on not just YouTube but the entire internet, simply because YouTube has become obstinate and difficult. Who the fuck wrote this article? And how much are they getting paid by Google? Do they really think we’re going to buy into this bullshit and follow suit?
it’s total bullshit. For example if you use ublock origin every now and again sure you might get ads that pop up, but AT MOST that lasts for a day, generally it’ll last a couple hours as the team at ublock update their lists to block ads again. There’s no need, literally zero need, to remove it from your extensions. and at worst, like I got yesterday, you’ll just see a black screen that buffers for a bit before the video plays. the ad is still blocked.
you can also circumvent most of this if you use freetube. OR if you just want music the youtube-dl script on linux. I also ditched spotify for youtube-dl as I can also download entire playlists with it.
if I understood it correctly UBlock original would be totally unable to block server side ads right now
Just FYI I have a user driven plugin that skips self promotion in videos, wirks like a charm most often. I bet someone will make one that detects and skips ads even if they’re added randomly.
Sponsorblock, i have it too. it might break if they add ads server side. though im sure sponsorblock and ublock would find workarounds. those workarounds dont exist yet tho afaik
It’s illegal not to disclose when something is paid promotion. Worst case scenario, the ad blocker blacks out your screen while it detects the ad notification and auto skips when it can. We’ll never actually be forced to watch the ads.
Server side ads sound more expensive for Google to me. I’ll just use some future plugin that blacks out the screen or whatever if it comes to that.
Sounds like a price increase is coming our way!
They are coming your way for sure. Cause I’m not paying a dime 😉
Wouldn’t sponsorblock be enough?
No, the ad timings will vary
In fact, it’s likely that it might fuck over SB in general, if they don’t compensate for it
God it sure would suck if there were trojan advertisements threatening to take down Youtube servers.
I’m sure I’ll be downvoted to hell, but I just pay for Premium because I use YouTube all the time, don’t want to see ads, and acknowledge that YouTube is an incredible service/product.
I also pay, and share to several family members to help justify the cost.
That just makes us shills though; consumerism is a zero sum game. /s
It just makes us normal customers of a product. You want something? You pay for it.
fuck that. you want to be a musician, you play venues and engage with your fans instead of just releasing a one hit wonder that took half a week in the studio to make and made you millions
It’s a decent price. I use both the original app and the music one. No regrets at all!
It’s not so decent if you only need YouTube though. The package is good, but not everyone needs the full package.
That’s… True. I suppose I didn’t really think about that.
I’m in the same boat. There are a lot of parts of the Internet that should be free, but YouTube is not one of them. Video hosting is one of the most resource intensive services around, and if we as consumers aren’t paying for it they’ll find a worse way to fund it.
That’s fair.
Same. My adblockers are still in place, but YouTube premium is by far the best bang for the buck I spend on entertainment. My family uses it every day on multiple devices, and then we get YT music too.
I don’t think that’s an unfair thing to say at all.
I want to pay for Premium, but a mixture of oppressive tactics, poor payouts for YouTubers, and constant price hikes has made me reconsider. I watch YouTube more than most streaming providers, and that list continues to shrink because the cost has outpaced the value. A few years ago I couldn’t imagine not watching Netflix, but now…eh, cancel it.
The fact that google also tracks and monetizes/exploits every single thing you do should be more than enough payment. Considering thats how they got to be where they are in the first place.
Besides. If google moderated its fucking ads to begin with, people wouldnt have overwhelmingly adopted adblocking, since google adsense is like the biggest adserver on the internet.
And people you’re watching are getting money if you’re a premium user.
Me too, I’ve had YouTube premium since it was called YouTube Red and I was still in middle school lol.
Ah yes, the good 'ol days of RedTube.
Hey very valid statement and salute to you.
Personally, I believe this ultimately hurts and affects customers like yourself. Because YT is spending all of this additional effort to effect and crowdout, if looked at a very tiny percentage. Instead of investing into platform improvements for visitors and creators.
YT should of focused on competition which is every other streaming service. If they provided shows still using network ads breaks, instead of these psycho every 4min you 2.5mins of ads unless you pay is just extortion. Plus they aren’t really sharing revenue with creators… sigh
Based on what I’ve heard from creators, they love us premium subscribers. If I get no ads and the people I like get more money, I call that a win. Having just been to the movies which have about an hour of unskippable ads at the beginning - including ads to show more ads - I’m willing to pay to not have that in my life.
If YouTube were an independent company, I would be much happier to pay like I do for Spotify and even (borderline) Paramount Plus. I have no problem paying artists for their time, and I have spent thousands and thousands on commissions and merchandise from independent people and art businesses. Google already has enough money. I would rather save my money for small(er) companies who actually need it.
If people stopped supporting these ultra-consolidated megacorporations, we might have a healthier economy and better worker’s rights overall. But what do I know lol
It’s just gonna make premium more expensive because they have to recoup their engineering costs somehow and I don’t think that the extra ad views from bypassing as blockers will cover it.
Next article…UBlock has designed AI to detect ads and blackout/mute video until it is done. Even better, it can buffer queued videos ahead of time and just remove ads.
what ai have they designed? I have not heard about this and am skeotical
It was a /s commentary on the neverending war of ads vs ad blocking. Soon we will have to buy advanced anti advertising AI servers for our houses so we don’t get them beamed to our walls from space lasers.
Watch how quickly I drop your fucking platform lmao. Please give me a reason
Or just one more thing to add to the open seas of piracy. Or start supporting nebula?
Although this would be the case for piracy, as a better means to support artist, because I pirate my music. I do attend more live music venues which gives more revenue directly to the artist
When the YT apps stopped working a few days ago, I just continued watching on Nebula until the apps were fixed. Only went back onto YT to read discussions in video comments
Yeah they risk making their platform obsolete to many users.
And where will users go? There are no alternatives. Other platforms don’t have as much content, require you to pay, or both.
I can’t vouch for others but I’d rather just stop using the service all together if I can’t do it ad free. I’m not inclined to pay for YouTube either, already pay for too many services. People existed just fine without Youtube. They can again.
Pornhub, or touching grass. Either order really.
I’d been paying for premium YouTube for a few years, the family plan had a massive spike in price and I’d had enough from there. Been using Grayjay for the past few months only watching a couple of channels, but if this goes live it will kill the platform for me.
The bundled YouTube music sub really doesn’t sell it for me either, sure it’s got some more niche music compared to other platforms but it’s not a drop-in replacement (especially for the better half).
All and all I’m probably one of the few that will tap out of the platform, will be interesting to see the fallout.
Have you considered paying for their ad free service?
YouTube: creates the problem
This guy: have you considered paying them for the solution?
Like many other business they offer an ad funded service and a paid service. I understand this is Lemmy, and people love getting things for free. But if you don’t like ads, have you thought about paying for the service?
Just because they offer a paid service doesn’t mean it’s reasonable for me to pay for it. For example: if the cost was $1000 a month it would not be reasonable to respond with “why don’t you pay for it?” Because that’s not a reasonable price.
If a person doesn’t find the price reasonable then it is reasonable for them not to pay.
Watching ads is also a cost. It costs time. Each person has a threshold of how many ads they are willing to watch before the cost is too high, at which point it is reasonable for them to no longer pay that cost.
YouTube is constantly increasing the ad time trying to find that point just before people get sick of it.
I remind you that the person you originally replied to said they were done watching YouTube. Not that they were insisting on getting it for free. They find the ad cost too high, and the paid service cost too high, so they will not use the service. That is a perfectly reasonable response and a response of “why don’t you pay for it” is not helpful, irrelevant, and shows you aren’t listening to what is being said.
For the record: If I believed there was even a chance that my watching YouTube with an ad blocker caused the tiniest noticeable amount of loss to YouTube’s finances, I would set up a tab streaming YouTube 24 hours a day on mute. So no, I also will not be paying them for premium either.
I agree with all your points, not using the service is absolutely an option. I suggested paying for premium because that was the option that made the most sense to me. I hate ads and love YouTube. For me, the value I get from a subscription is much higher than other services I pay for. I’m subscribed to probably 500 YouTube channels and probably watch between 50-100 hours of content per month.
What’s the Lemmy equivalent of /r/hailcorporate?
That’s funny, but I love content created by individuals and small teams, especially the maker/engineering channels. I’ll take that over corporate produced media any day, even if it means paying a corporation to serve that content to me.
They also have one of the best business models for creators, meaning people producing content can do it full time and make a good living off of it, instead of doing it as a charity and producing mediocre quality videos.
If that’s true I’d hate to see the worst models. It’s a great system until Youtube completely changes their recommendation/discovery algorithm and kills your channel, or demonetizes half of it because there’s a content rule change, or you get a couple content or copyright strikes filed by a troll and your whole channel and years of your life is suddenly shut down because you can’t get a human to verify anything without a lawyer. If you’re Mr. Beast or Pewdiepie, Youtube is good for you. If you’re a normal creator, it’s an absolute nightmare of constant fear about what dystopian changes will be forced on you overnight.
They had a service I paid for. I paid for youtube without ads. Just that. And then they changed prices and made me pay for something that I did not need, YouTube Music. So I canceled.
They had me as a subscriber, they just wanted more money and lost me.
And I block ads. Not specifically for youtube, but for all sites and apps that I can. I use Blockada and most days the number of blocked tracking cookies goes over 1000. Laat 24 hours it is 3426 trackers blocked. Is it really necessary that I am being tracked that much?
I don’t think so, and I am not even talking about malware, or crypto ming scripts that will be loaded as ads. Most ads are not checked properly so I have no idea what malicious bullshit I can get on my systems without even asking for it.
If I find something that I use a lot and adds value, I will donate some money. For example, I support some creators on Patreon.
And ads always do their best to be loud and intrusive. And if I have a guest at my house that is loud and intrusive, they don’t get invited back. The same with ads.
Remember when ads were just a small rectangle on youtube? You clicked it away and that is it? That was the way. Serve ads in a normal, non intrusive way and I can handle them just fine.
If you pay me MORE money, I won’t shit on your lawn
If you pay me more money I’ll shit on your lawn less often
Premium also has lots of ads in your feed (disguised as product videos) and videos include sponsorships ads.
Yes, and it took less than a minute of googling to find “I’m paying, why do I still see ads?”. There’s also someone in this thread complaining of the same.
The problem with that is they will eventually introduce ads to the paid service as well.
Rumble and PeerTube
EDIT: I’m already paying YouTube with personal data and privacy.
I mean I’ll settle for the ad being blacked out and muted while I wait for the content. Or have it play elevator music while I wait.
or do some back end trickery where they can buffer the video for longer than youtube allows, then selectively clip out the ad parts so you can continue to seemlessly watch.
I wonder if the server throttles that ads so you can’t 2x the playback speed. Sounds like a good way to detect when the ads are being served.
Ive had no issues with Brave Browser on my Desktop, but NewPipe on Mobile has been all over the place the past few weeks.
Pipepipe on f-droid is kept much more up to date in my experience. It’s a fork so basically the same
Every other post about Ad blocking has someone pitching Brave.
Brave is also, you know, run by probably one of the worlds most evil people.
Peter Thiel.
The guy who is part of a group of people (including JD Vance) who wants to hook you up (using bff elon’s neuralink) and use your body as a biofuel source instead of just killing you. As a “more humane alternative to genocide”
PS. This isn’t a joke.
newrepublic.com/…/jd-vance-weird-terrifying-techn…
NewPipe had to deal with some thing YouTube did to break things. And they fixed them super quick. Last time I had a video not work, I visited the GitHub site and saw there was a new release from 11 minutes ago. Installed it and the video worked perfectly.
Have a sneaking suspicion that google is doing the classic spend 100 dollars to save 1 cent type scenario, cause all the money they’ve dumped into this anti-adblock shit? theres no way its less than what they’ve not made from adblockers.
Especially when all this money could have been spent on improving their ad service so people don’t have to view 2 hour ads, or malware laden bullshit, or just blatant pornographic advertising.
but why spend money moderating their own service, when they can spend 10x the money trying to force their open septic tank of a service on everyone.
It’s what happens when you hire MBA grads and they’re trying to find relevance.
Maybe… but in the long term advertisers aren’t going to be willing to spend as much on a platform if they know that ads are easily blocked.
except ads are blocked everywhere when you have an adblocker.
and people have adblocking because ads are cancer
Because as are everywhere.
and they carry malware.
and they are obnoxious, if not straight pornographic.
Moderating the advertising would do far more for making adblock useless, than starting a petty dickslapping war they wont win.
I remember when I first downloaded an ad blocker. For quite a while I didn’t bother, ads didn’t bother me and websites need to pay for hosting somehow. Then I encountered an ad that SCREAMED “HELOOOOOO” any time you moused over it and I immediately downloaded an ad blocker and haven’t been without since.
Fuck advertising companies, they are the reason ad blockers are so prolific. If ads aren’t bothering you then you’re not noticing them, meaning they’re not doing their job so ad companies will develop new ways to bother you with them until you refuse to take it anymore.
I jumped on the adblocking train after the 3rd time my system got struck with nasty malware (back in the windows XP days) from infected ads.
I finally said fuck it, downloaded adblockers, and never looked back.
and every time i’ve been without adblockers since (new computer/new format, working on someone elses, etc) I’ve continually been reinforced about the necessity of adblockers.
Ad moderation won’t happen until there’s a unified group which can moderate ads and can’t gain from being more permissive. Basically, advertisers need to unionize against their own common interest to increase the quantity of ads.
This has kind of happened already in the form of sponsorships, where each ad is vetted and can be rejected on a case-by-case basis. Each presenter is acting alone in this case however, letting bad sponsors slip through. Bad sponsors are often slammed on in feedback though.
Perhapse if advertisers could remove their heads from their posteriors for a moment they might see that neutrally read ads with no music would drive far fewer people to block them, but this could only work if all ads on a platform were limited in this way, and such regulations could be reliable and specific enough to make blocking more hassle than it’s worth.
I’m having difficulty imagining a blocker driven agreement though, as any level of leeway for ads would all but require compensation, and that’s 99% of the way to corruption already.
However, this all could only work if for-profic companies could be convinced to not seek every possible profit at every point immediately, which is unlikely.
advertisers dont even have to do anything.
Google just has to grow a set of fucking balls and say “No, this ad is to loud/obstructive/annoying/disruptive/downloads malicious code, It will not be run on our service”
but Google’d rather take money from PragerU than moderate its ads to remove the need for adblocking
Google runs AdSense, they’re exactly one of the advertising companies I’m talking about. I agree that they’re in a great position to enforce regulations on ads and build trust, but why do that when you can just eliminate all the alternatives?
I have a personal rule that anything advertised on YouTube I will never buy.
all I ever see advertised on youtube, during the brief times I have no adblocker (mostly when I’m working on other peoples computers and making sure audio and stuff is working) are either 2 hour long fake documentaries/talk shows/etc pushing some bullshit product
or PragerU pushing racist bullshit.
In fact, the overwhelming majority of it is PragerU pushing racist bullshit.
If you remove all other reasons for adblocking, Not seeing PragerU bullshit and not letting google make money off PragerUs racist bullshit is still an incredibly valid reason for adblocking.
ftfy
But do you have a viable alternative in your back pocket?
I’m pretty happy with Nebula. I tried it back when it was still bundled with curiosity stream but now I just subscribe to nebula.
It obviously isn’t anywhere near a full YouTube replacement, but it’s pretty good.
Yeah, Nebula is quite good. Really like Curiosity Stream too… I subscribe to both.
But alas, most channels I follow are Youtube only and not likely to change :(
I have a pile of shows on my media tower to watch instead.
If only there were hundreds of other sites on the Internet that stream video. If porn sites can make it work, anyone can make it work.
I’ve been a premium user for a while now and the platform has never been shittier than now. I pay for premium but I see integrated ads in videos and nowadays YouTube sneakily includes actual product videos in your home feed as if that’s not an ad. Recommendations have sucked for so long that I don’t remember the last time I watched something good on it. Inclusion of yt music was the thing that kept me on the subscription but shit man
Same here. I was struggling to get the ad blockers to work consistently, so I said fuck it and canceled Spotify and subscribed to Youtube. FWIW YT music does a much better job of choosing random music that I like; Spotify just plays the same shit over and over again.
I feel like YT music plays the same things over and over again, so good to know that switching to Spotify won’t be any better.
I’ve tried every music streaming service out there with their premium subscriptions and they’re really not that different. After a month of usage they all loop the same songs over and over again. It seems YouTube also adopted this because it’s been recommending me the same things over and over and over.
Tidal has new music playlists straight from Tidal and they’re genre specific, which is quite different from Spotify. They’re in a set place within Tidal, so you don’t have to search for the new playlists either.
The sad thing is that it appears a lot of people only like listening to music that they already know. Out of the people I know, I’m the only one that hates listening to the same songs over and over again. I wonder if that’s why many people only seem to like music from their teenage/young adult days 🤔
I miss GPM. YouTube music is full of community-made playlist that are actually YouTube video playlists, so you’ll start one up and have all the music video intros, interrupts, and extra sound effects and shit that get thrown in.
I started a Disney playlist for my nephew in the car, and you could hear all the sound effects from the movie over the actual soundtrack.
I haven’t seen any of that. For me, Youtube music is almost exactly like Spotify experience-wise.
I think you can disable non-music videos from the settings, maybe you did that
How is this bundling even legal. YouTube ist pretty much a Monopoly and they are using this fact to push YouTube Music. If that’s Not anti competitive behaviour what ist?
It’s not being prosecuted, so its legal. Everyone’s been properly paid off. If push comes to shove, Clarence Thomas will get a new RV and any lawsuits will be dismissed, but for now only the EU seems interested in internet regulation.
“Its not an rv. Its a motor coach.” - Clarence Thomas
How most regulations work, actually. From food to consumer electronics. And yes, that includes your bad dragon.
I think the EU should step in and force Google not to bundle Music.
On mobile, which is where I primarily use YT, the official app with premium doesn’t even have sponsorblock or dearrow or blocking shorts. It’s genuinely a worse experience than revanced which is free.
If I was to pay for premium, I’d want the above features at the very least.
Do you use Android? Stop paying for premium, just install ReVanced and “fix” the official YouTube apk. It also works with YouTube Music.
No, unfortunately I switched to an iPhone to limit Google’s tracking endeavors. I love Android, but Google has ruined it with constant tracking in my eyes.
I agree with you, but if you still use Google services, including YouTube, you’ll still be tracked.
Monopoly.
I got the server-side ads a few weeks ago. Switched to another account and was ad-free again. I’d be happy to pay for Premium as it supports the creators I watch, but for ad-free alone it’s not worth the £13/mo. The other features jacking up the price aren’t much use to me.
Won’t this totally break deep linking to time codes?
They can surely work around that… But if the client somehow knows where the ads are, the adblocker can skip them anyways.
But maybe also deep linking is less important than ads to them.
While the overall video would be a different length, video players often don’t count the ads towards the media time. So the deep links should be okay
But isn’t that because the ads aren’t part of the video? If players can tell when it’s an advert, presumably ad blockers could too.
(Although presumably they have to tell the player to disable video scrubbing)
I’m not entirely sure how ad blockers work, but my understanding was they prevent things loading from certain URLs. If the ads are embedded into the video, then there’s no ad-specific URL to block
If they make it shitty enough I just wont use it.
That will only be an option if content creators don’t use it either. And they will look where their audience goes, which will mostly be nowhere.
I mean, there is always the option of putting down YouTube and going outside, or picking up a hobby or something.
Gross, I know, having to live in the stone ages, but there’s always another option.
In a really twisted way, Youtube is a fairly big reason why a good number of people go outside, take up hobbies, etc.
You’re talking as if watching content on YouTube wasn’t a hobby like going to the cinema or theater.
Rumble/Locals
I’ll go somewhere Nazism isn’t openly encouraged, thank you. YouTube is terrible but at least they pretend they think Nazism is bad.
Way ahead of you
Any good alternatives you can suggest? I fucking hate what alphabet has done to google and youtube.
yewtu.be
Sounds good. It’s a waste of time anyway. Maybe I’ll do something else like go outside or create something of my own.
Honestly the shitter they get the more content creators will publish elsewhere.
Honestly idk why more don’t post to peertube already. It costs nothing to cross post if you already have the content.
I give it 5 hours from mass release before ad blockers catch up.
A bit longer if they play their cards right. If we have to move to a detect, buffer and skip model, it’ll be quite a while.
There are already addons to skip in-stream adds for when people do those sponsor segments. It just crowd sources the most consistently skipped parts and does it automatically.
Timing and length of ads won’t be consistent between users so this approach doesn’t work.
Depends how wide the range of ads is, if its a set amount/month then you could use the same method to pretty quickly identify which segments of data are ads and automatically cut them out wherever they occur.
If you’re referring to sponsorblock: no, those timings are manually submitted, not automatically generated by Skip time
Sponsor block works so well because the content to skip is exactly in the same place for everyone’s video.
They don’t have that kind of limitation.
Sb also requires you to initiate a fast forward during a commercial. They could ignore that command while commercials are running.
At that point we need to store the buffer as it’s coming in. Detect the commercials based on sound or scene changes.
Since they do have a limited number of of commercials, if we did the crowd effort to identify and catalog /fingerprint commercials we may be able to do a more accurate method for detection and skip. At least until they are modifying the commercials with AI to avoid detection.
Imagine what YouTube could be if they spent all this cash on improving their service instead.
That is only possible without capitalism. Until then, we will not see a single popular good service.
Preaching to the choir, friend.
The moment they fix the search, fix their recommendations, stop wasting money on junk projects like games and allow me to completely disable Shorts, I will resubscribe to YT Premium.
Why do Shorts (and Reels, and Stories, and whatever other catchy names they give short form videos) even exist?
For the same reason Vines did.
I would argue it’s more about consumerism and fin tech business ideas now, tik Tok nowadays has a bunch of shops, it’s kind of the end stage of this sadly
It still blows my mind that Vine failed to monetize themselves properly. Like, how did they fuck that up.
Because shorter videos mean more ads, more sponsorized content and are much more addictive. I hate how almost every major social media platform are moving closer and closer to Tiktok, or just copying the other ones.
The number of ads per hour of video is higher. And people get addicted to the dopamine fix. Short videos generally will have to be incredibly stimulating to keep people watching.
Your dopamine goes through the rood for 15 seconds or 30 seconds, after that it drops down again and you need the next video to get it higher again and again. In between the videos you get ads, so in the end they lure you into watching a whole bunch of ads.
They optimize their algoritms so they know what keeps you watching. Could be cute puppies, could also be fake news about how everything is somebody elses fault, but they just want to keep you watching. They don’t care about the truth, they need your eyes on the ads.
And that is how generations will be ruined.
Honestly… How much has Google spent trying to counter people skipping ads?
Is it less than the amount of potential profit if everyone was forced to watch ads?
This seems like that situation recently where NYC paid a million dollars to enforce people to pay for train tickets, which was less than twenty thousand a year in lost revenue.
The amount of people who:
Are not statistically significant to YouTube’s viewership or income.
I figured that. If I was to guess, I would say ~90% use the native app on their phones or TV to watch YouTube.
In total, I have to assume ad blocking viewers make up a single percent or less.
I don’t see how this could make financial sense.
I think it’s mostly about saving face for advertisers. Which is funny because Google never does anything for saving face for their users as they shut down services that literally cost a rounding error for them to run.
I think it probably breaks even and fits with their strategy to abuse everyone until they pay for premium
use libretube or grayjay 👍
Using a different client won’t help if the ads are injected directly into the video stream.
ye but alt clients still better than youtube 👍
Arse has fallen out of their money printer so they’re getting desperate.
No, I would rather quit watching youtube rather than to watch Japanese style animation porn ads.
Things look much better if I’m on a US VPN. But I don’t want to get bothered by those porn ads if it suddenly stops (yeah, it sometimes crashes for some reason) or I forget to turn it on. And yeah, I still don’t like Grammarly ads although it’s much better than porns.
.
I’m currently in Korea, and those ads appear even without being logged in.
Just asking for a friend: from what country do you get these ads?
I’m currently in Korea, and those ads appear even without being logged in.
Nothing that can’t be blocked by sponsorblock.
And if that doesn’t work we’ll find something else. Even if we’d have to download the same video multiple times to compare and strip out the differences.
Google may have plenty of nerds, but the world will always have more.
The issue is that Sponsorblock uses timestamps of videos to skip segments. If the ads injected all have different durations, then SponsorBlock is now obsolete.
It’s not even that simple. If you skip ahead during an ad, the YT servers could just keep streaming you the ad content anyway. Their servers can ensure that the next 30s of packet data you receive is an ad no matter what, so the only way you can skip it is to wait it out and close your ears and eyes. Basically the same concept as ads on broadcast TV. Which means we’ll have to do a TiVo for YT… Gross.
Video streams don’t quite work like that.
Thats not how it works. If a server is streaming ads to you then it shouldnt be a problem detecting that and blocking out that server.
What Google is doing is baking in the ad into the video so that the video itself has the ad embedded into it. This way you cant block a certain server from serving ads. And if those ads baked in have different duration for each user, then SponsorBlock stop behaving properly as it uses timestamps to skip segments.
I had to drop sponsorblock as it was letting those ads in. Now just use unblock and I don’t get those ads anymore.
What if sponsor block started collecting the durations of videos (if they don’t already), then it could skip forward by the difference.
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
Sponsor block extension
A few more years till they measure engagement via your camera
An ad will pause if you look away 👀
If you look away, you will have to watch another one
But they do it stochastically, so you only have a suspicion watching gives you fewer ads, but aren’t 100% sure