You can solve any problem with a Molotov cocktail. Any time I had a problem and I threw a Molotov cocktail, boom, right away, I had a different problem!
Paid subscriptions per month, you watch the newest video for free. Have the youtuber host the server themselves for their own videos and federate that access.
It’s illegal to not identify an ad as an ad (unless you’re a movie maker, but that’s a different topic). All ad blockers need to do is read that indicator. That might not be super simple, but I have faith in the abilities of the brilliant people behind many ad-blocking technologies.
bjoern_tantau@swg-empire.de
on 13 Jun 09:45
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That’s actually hurt by this because it uses timestamps supplied by users to work. But now they are off because the ads are of variable length. We can just hope that YouTube keeps the ability to link to a specific timestamp because then it has to calculate the difference and that can be used by Sponsorblock and adblockers alike.
The problem is those blocking extensions are based on timestamps. Those timestamps are added by the users, it’s a crowdsourced thing. But the ads a single user will see differ from what another user will see. It’s likely the length of the ads is different, which makes the whole timestamp thing a no go.
Along with the timestamp, there needs to be a way to detect where the actual video begins. That way at least an offset can be applied and timestamps maintained, but it would introduce a certain level of error.
The next issue would be to then advance the video to the place where the actual video begins. This can be very hard, as it would need to include some way of recognizing the right frame in the buffer. One requirement is that the starting frame is actually in the buffer (with ads more than a few seconds, this isn’t guaranteed). The add-on has access to this buffer (depending on the platform, this isn’t guaranteed). And there’s a reliable way to recognize the right frame, given the different encoding en quality setups.
And this needs to be done cheap, so with as little as infrastructure as possible. A database of timestamps is very small and crowdsourcing those timestamps is relatively easy. But recognizing frames requires more data to be stored and crowdsourcing the right frame is a lot harder than a timestamp. If the infrastructure ends up being complex and big, someone needs to pay for that. I don’t know if donations alone would cut it. So you would need to play ads, which is exactly what you intend on not doing.
I’m sure the very smart and creative people working on these things will find a way. But it won’t be easy, so I don’t expect a solution very soon.
You need more data to recognize frames, but not a lot more data. A hash for each quality setting would be sufficient as long as they don’t start fuzzing the videos, which would be very expensive on their part.
Not really. They can precompute those and inject it in an MP4 file so long as the settings match and it’s inserted right before an i-frame so that it doesn’t corrupt b-frames. They already reencode everything with their preferred settings, so they only need to encode the ads for those same settings they already do. Just needs to be spliced seamlessly.
But YouTube uses DASH anyway, it’s like HLS, the stream is served in individual small chunks so it’s even easier because they just need to add chunks of ads where they can add mismatched video formats, for the same reason it’s able to seamlessly adjust the quality without any audio glitches.
Re-encoding is one thing, but ads are more or less supposed to be dynamic based on user location and likely some other data to target them.
Offloading that to the client made a lot of sense but now they have to do this server-side, they have very smart people working on making this as efficient as possible using tricks you’ve mentioned and more but it is still more effort than before. All for something that will likely be circumvented eventually.
All of that targeting data lives on Google’s servers already. Your computer isn’t trying to figure out who you are and what you like each ad play, Google already knows who you are when your browser makes a request for a video. Everything you are talking about is already server-side.
Every bit of effort and resourcing they spend on this returns revenue directly. Which is more than they can probably say for a lot of things they do. And they’re smart enough to know that they can’t eliminate blocking, just make it harder and harder so that fewer and fewer people do it.
parpol@programming.dev
on 13 Jun 08:17
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Sample the color of a specified pixel (or something recognizable in the streaming format) every 30 frames from the original video.
Store collection of pixels in a database and share in a peer to peer network or stored on invidious instances. Because the sample size is small, and the database can be split up by youtube channel, the overall size and traffic should remain low.
When streaming a youtube video, if the plugin detects that the pixel in the video doesn’t match the one in the database, automatically skip until where the pixel matches the data in the database.
programmer_belch@lemmy.dbzer0.com
on 13 Jun 09:25
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That is prone to error, just a pixel can be too small of a sample. I would prefer something with hashes, just a sha1sum every 5 seconds of the current frame. It can be computed while buffering videos and wait until the ad is over to splice the correct region
might_steal_your_cat@lemm.ee
on 13 Jun 09:52
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The problem with (good) hashes is that when you change the input even slightly (maybe a different compression algorithm is used), the hash changes drastically
programmer_belch@lemmy.dbzer0.com
on 13 Jun 09:58
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Yes, that’s why I’m proposing it as opposed to just one pixel to differentiate between ad and video. Youtube videos are already separated in sections, just add some metadata with a hash to every one.
might_steal_your_cat@lemm.ee
on 13 Jun 10:07
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I think that downsizing the scene to like 8x8 pixels (so basically taking the average color of multiple sections of the scene) would mostly work. In order to be undetected, the ad would have to match (at least be close to) the average color of each section, which would be difficult in my opinion: you would need to alter each ad for each video timestamp individually.
programmer_belch@lemmy.dbzer0.com
on 13 Jun 10:21
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Yes, that could be an alternative to computing hashes, I don’t know what option would be less resource intensive
Oh well. Youtube is useful as a podcast/streamer host now; no ads with sponsor block/ublock. Once that isn’t the case they (Google) will get network blocked.
No real loss to me. I tend to prefer local download/host for convenience. Most channels are chaff anyway.
some people still recommend using a VPN and IP address from a country where YouTube ads are prohibited, such as Myanmar, Albania, or Uzbekistan.
Wait, you can just prohibit YouTube ads at a national level? That’s somehow awesome and terrifying at the same time.
NeoNachtwaechter@lemmy.world
on 13 Jun 09:37
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That’s somehow awesome and terrifying at the same time.
The people of this country would find it just the normal thing.
TrickDacy@lemmy.world
on 13 Jun 11:50
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What would be terrifying about it?
deranger@sh.itjust.works
on 13 Jun 11:59
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Yeah, I don’t see what’s terrifying. Countries can make laws, if YouTube wants to operate in that market it has to follow the laws there.
Dark_Arc@social.packetloss.gg
on 13 Jun 16:29
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There seems to be an abundance of the false notion that large corporations are somehow above governments on Lemmy … and that’s simply not true, at least for corporations that want have legitimate business within the country.
EDIT: So as to say … perhaps the commenter (at least in the moment) was a bit awestruck seeing laws apply to tech (which often seems to feel as though it’s above the law in some way).
It kinda depends where. GDPR in the EU is certainly an example of governments imposing their will on corporations. In the US, not so much, as corporations dump tons of money on lobbying that allow to them influence how they are regulated.
Myanmar, as a country, has a GDP of 62.26 billion usd.
Google has a market cap of 2.17 Trillion usd and made a profit of $305 billion usd last year.
Google makes more money in profit than moves through Myanmar in a year by nearly 5 times.
If Google chooses not to operate in their country because of some law they don’t like, what’s to stop them?
Google definitely has national government level influence, especially considering the pervasiveness of their product suite. Implying that they’re above the law might be too far, but they for sure influence it.
If the most extreme happens and Google decided that some EU law was too much to deal with compared to the gains, a lot of Europeans could find themselves in a position where Google doesn’t operate in their country. Imagine every Android device becoming unable to use the majority of the service they operate on, or the most common browser, search engine, email service, and video streaming services simultaneously being disabled. I can’t imagine the people will be very happy about that.
nondescripthandle@lemmy.dbzer0.com
on 13 Jun 14:59
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‘oh no youtube cant make advertisers money while putting kids in a far right conspiracy rabbit hole how scary’
Myanmar’s average internet speed looks to be around 10-20mbps, so they probably stream with lower quality. Their GDP per capita is ~$1,150, so ads being shown to people in Myanmar wouldn’t be worth much anyway.
my_hat_stinks@programming.dev
on 13 Jun 08:53
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My gut reaction is that this won’t work long-term. Users on youtube often point to specific timestamps in a video in comments or link to specific timestamps when sharing videos, meaning there needs to be some way to identify the timestamp excluding ads. And if there’s a way to do that there’s a way to detect ads.
Of course, there’s always the chance they just scrap these features despite how useful they are and how commonly they’re used; they’ve done similar before.
YT already scrapped (or broke) setting the start/end timestamps for embedded videos. That hasn’t worked for at least the last few weeks. Embed videos now always start at 0
I have YT embed support in Tesseract, and videos with timestamps broke a few weeks ago (they all start at 0 now). I’ve tried both t= and start= formats: neither worked.
You can still link to the YT video directly with those, though, but I’ve been unable to get embeds to honor them.
Ya on second thought, I don’t think I’m using embedding in the best way and what I’m saying isn’t really related to that. I’m not actually embedding anything.
Lemminary@lemmy.world
on 13 Jun 10:46
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Feedback across the Firefox and YouTube subreddits highlighted that it could break timestamped video links and chapter markers. However, YouTube knows the length of the ads it would inject, and can offset subsequent timestamps suitably.
The move also adds a layer of unnecessary complexity in saving Premium viewers from these ads. If they are added server-side, the YouTube client would have to auto-skip them for Premium members, but that also means ad segment info will be relayed to the client, opening up a window of opportunity for ad blockers to use the same information meant for Premium subscribers and skip injected ads automatically.
The ads won’t be baked in beforehand, they’ll be injected into the stream in real time. Videos are broken into chunks and sent over HTTP, they’ll just put ad chunks in during playback. There is no need to re-encode anything. If you deep link to a timestamp, the video just starts from that timestamp as normal. If you are a Premium user, the server just never injects the ads.
But you are correct that the client needs to be aware that ads are happening, so they can be indicated on screen, and so click-throughs are activated.
This is why Chrome went to Manifest v3 - so you can’t have any code looking for ad signals running on the page to try to counter it.
Surely at the server side it knows the premium status of the user it is supplying the video to, so just wouldn’t insert the ads? I don’t see why that would need to be client side.
steersman2484@sh.itjust.works
on 13 Jun 10:41
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I’m prette sure they have to send the metadata to the client where an ad starts and ends. Just to make the ad clickable.
Timestamps can be calculated on the server, but maybe there will be an api endpoint that can be abused to search for the ads.
Very little most likely. I was reading some of what the sponsorblock dev had to say about this and the tone seemed to be “meh, there will be a way around this”.
therealjcdenton@lemmy.zip
on 13 Jun 09:26
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I saw someone say Twitch does this, but there are many Twitch ad blockers that work
ModernRisk@lemmy.dbzer0.com
on 13 Jun 10:37
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May I ask which ones? I have ‘‘TTV LOL PRO’’ but it does not always block the ads. It’s 50/50.
therealjcdenton@lemmy.zip
on 13 Jun 18:31
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I'll be curious to see where this ends up going, as I doubt the community will take this lying down.
The few times I've had to go without an Ad blocker, I've seen just how bad the Ads have gotten - they're almost the same as regular TV Ad breaks now!
... And then YouTube Premium is just not a good deal in my eyes, £12.99 a month is an awful lot to pay just to not see Ads.
The majority of of people using it will most definitely take it lying down as they’re most likely not tech savvy enough to install a browser extension on a laptop if the only thing on the page was a large red install button.
That's why I specified the community, as in the more tech savy folks that would care about this, because I know that the wider public is surprisingly tech illiterate
And then YouTube Premium is just not a good deal in my eyes, £12.99 a month is an awful lot to pay just to not see Ads.
I think this includes YouTube music (at least in my market it does) which makes it fairly good value for money if you already subscribe to a music streaming app.
EngineerGaming@feddit.nl
on 13 Jun 11:46
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But you can listen to YouTube music for free too, no?
I use ublock on my phone as well. I set it up to play through FF and never access the YouTube app. Did it for my gf when she complained of ads, and then did it for my self it was so easy.
I don’t remember the last time I saw an ad between us.
I don’t watch YT from phone much, but I find Newpipe for videos to be a better experience than browser (it is also much lighter). And similarly Innertune for music.
Because Netflix didn’t dismantle the capitalism machine.
Capitalism can never fully disrupt itself. It’s always cyclical. If bundling eventually made it more money, then it will eventually return. If the response to that is to innovate something that gets around that form of bundling, then that “disrupts” the market, in the short term, only for the market to settle back to bundles.
Because as long as the idea makes more money in a capitalistic society, it will never die.
They get the most money by just donating trivial amounts to their Patreon. That should be the standard. I assure you $5 one time to a creator is more than they’d ever make off you with Ad revenue.
Thorny_Insight@lemm.ee
on 13 Jun 11:19
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Content creators get nothing from a subscription To YouTube premium.
This is not true. If you’re a free user they’re getting a share of the ad-revenue. If you’re a premium user they’re getting share of the membership fee. The more videos you watch from a creator the more they earn.
Also. Do you have any idea how expensive it is to run a video hosting platform? Especially at the scale of YouTube. There’s a good reason Lemmy doesn’t have videos.
EleventhHour@lemmy.world
on 13 Jun 11:43
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I don’t care. I don’t wanna watch ads, ever. The point is, YouTube will never be able to stop ad blockers. They can try, and the only ones who get hurt on the content creators.
Edit: and whining, “boo-hoo for the trillion dollar megacorp!” Isn’t going to elicit any sympathies
roguetrick@lemmy.world
on 13 Jun 11:46
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It is expensive, but it’s hard to quantify that expense for a cloud provider like Google. They’re liable to use their market prices for cloud services to justify the “cost” when they want to make it look more expensive than it is. They’re already building a cdn for all their other services as well, so YouTube’s cost is baked into that.
Reddit, by comparison actually pays for cloud hosting for all it’s video services and so pays out the ass.
PeggyLouBaldwin@lemmy.world
on 13 Jun 12:55
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There’s a good reason Lemmy doesn’t have videos.
peertube exists. it’s activitypub. lemmy is the reddit-like interface to activitypub. but the fediverse definitely has video. it even has live streaming through OwnCast (though i think peertube has livestreaming scheduled to be implemented as well)
I’m not informed enough to know how peertube works but running it is not free either. Nor is running a lemmy instance. Lemm.ee for example has a limit even on the size of images you can upload despite the fact that hosting images is orders of magnitude less bandwith and storage requiring than videos.
PeggyLouBaldwin@lemmy.world
on 13 Jun 13:38
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peertube uses webtorrents to share bandwidth among users: if you’re watching a video, you share the data to other users at the same time.
QuadratureSurfer@lemmy.world
on 13 Jun 14:44
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despite the fact that hosting images is orders of magnitude less bandwith and storage requiring than videos.
In general, yes, when comparing images/video of the same resolution. But if I compare an 8k image to a low quality video with low FPS, I can easily get a few minutes worth of video compared to that one picture.
As you said, it definitely costs money to keep these services running. What’s also important is how well they are able to compress the video/images into a smaller size without losing out on too much quality.
Additionally, with the way ML models have made their way into frame generation (such as DLSS) I wouldn’t be surprised if we start seeing a new compressed format that removes frames from a video (if they haven’t started doing it already).
We used to just get up and do the dishes while whatever injected nonsense interupted what we were watching on TV. And when it became too much we turned to DVDs or piracy. Then streaming was the “savior” until whoever funded it realized that more users do not equal more money. And now we are almost back to square one. This is just played out at this point. Google/Yt/TIktok etc are just betting on the addictive nature of instant gratification to survive.
At some point, I think, all the effords of adblocking (grayjay, newpipe, sponsorblock, ublock) will seem impractical when a download (and maybe now scan to cut out ads and sponsor segments) will achive the same. And then peer to peer is the most practical way to share that instead of redoing all the work. Until downloading is hindered too much and someone somewhere just has OBS with some adhoc script on top running 24/7 to capture youtube videos. The conversation of when is adblocking piracy etc seems to me to be coming to a natural end (at least as far as legalilties go).
One saving grace the internet has bestowed on media is that it is easier to follow creators and fund their work (if you can afford it).
The whole point of having ads be separate from the video is for youtube to easily distance itself from malicious ads. If an ad is malicious it can easily be reported and taken out of commission. But if ads are now part of the video, what stops an ad from being an ISIS beheading clip in the middle of a video made for children? If there is still a way to still report it, then there is a way to recognize the ad.
Also how will this interfere with creators? Editing a video and giving it a proper pace is already a huge challenge. But now ads can just be automaticaly cut into it without the creators control? That’s gonna fuck up so many quality channels. That’s already a big problem with the current system, bit at least you can skip or block them.
The ads are not part of the stored video file, they are sent in as chunks of the stream in place of the actual video. When the ad is done, the regular video starts playing again. They are not “editing in” anything to be permanently stored as part of an uploaded video.
But presumably with the new system, your computer will just receive a continuous bitstream with ads embedded in them. What was previously happening on your machine through HTML or JavaScript and was detectable by ad blockers, will now happen on YouTube servers beholind the scenes.
So, how will content creators be reimbursed for the long hours they put into creating YouTube videos? There are honest people out there who made content creation their job. I say that to express I’m not talking about content farms, clickbait creators or “Mr. Beast” types - those are all media companies, although they also have bills to pay.
I love this mentality. This idea that forcing someone who hates ads to watch a bunch of ads somehow magically makes more wealth happen. The whole thing is a bubble desperately trying not to burst by basically forcing more ads in more places where it actually makes very little difference.
I wonder if creators are actually going to get paid any better if YouTube forces more people to watch ads on their channels. My bet is not.
Thorny_Insight@lemm.ee
on 13 Jun 13:14
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Ad-revenue is literally how content creators get paid. If you’re using an adblocker (like me) then you’re freeriding. They’re not getting any money from us viewing their videos.
Nobody is forcing anyone to watch ads. That’s the alternative available to people who don’t want to pay. The other alternative is premium membership. Which ever you choose makes money for the creators. Blocking ads doesn’t.
I hate ads just as much as the next guy but this mentality of expecting to get content for free is ridiculous. That’s unbelieveably narrow sighted and self-centered thinking. If subscribtion based business model was the norm instead of ads-based then we’d have none of the issues that come with targeted advertising. On the other hand if one thinks google is evil company and don’t want to give them money then stop using their products. Damn hypocrites…
Ad-revenue is literally how content creators get paid
Great. If YouTube removes viewers’ abilities to block ads, resulting in more ads watched, will content creators get an increase in pay?
Again, I doubt it.
I hate ads just as much as the next guy but this mentality of expecting to get content for free is ridiculous. That's unbelieveably narrow sighted and self-centered thinking
You’ve missed the whole point. Ads exist to encourage people to spend money on products, therefore companies profit from paying for advertisements.
Where does the profit come from if someone who doesn’t deal with ads is forced to watch an ad? Do you think that person is just going to decide to spend money?
Secondly, if a creator adds a 1-2m sequence in their video to talk about a sponsor, no one is tracked, no one knows any better if uninterested viewers skip past it, and it’s usually very relevant to that creator’s target audience. I have zero qualms with such a system, and sometimes it’s actually really entertaining.
Morals or not, this is Google scraping at the bottom of the barrel to invent value where there is VERY little to be had. Data-invasive, targeted advertising is superfluous and needs to die.
Where does the profit come from if someone who doesn’t deal with ads is forced to watch an ad?
The creator gets paid for people watching the ads, not for buying the product. For the most part the point of ads is to increase brand recognition which in turn increases sales. Ads work wether you think they do or not. It’s among the most studied economic fields. There’s a good reason companies spend a ton of money on advertising. More people seeing ads = more sales. I too like to tell myself a story about how I’m immune to ads but I know I’m not.
Data-invasive, targeted advertising is superfluous and needs to die.
I agree. The alternative is paying for the service eg. subscribtion based business model.
Targeted or not - I’m not going to watch ads. If it’s a bad service like Instagram I’m just going to stop using it but in the case of YouTube if they manage to make adblocking sufficiently difficult and inconvenient then I’m going to buy premium. I can’t blame them for wanting to get rid of freeriders. If I was them I would probably want to too. Blocking ads is like piracy; I participate in it but it cannot be morally justified. I’m effectively stealing.
Creators do get paid a share of the ad impressions. Many also are completely open about it and post videos of how well their videos did and how much money they earned from monetized videos, i. e. videos with ads - this is also why you hear many avoiding e. g. swear words, since YT’s auto detection will then flag their video for de-monetization.
But funny enough, that’s not what I said at all. The cost of running YouTube and the cost of the creators must be paid (plus creating an incentive to produce high quality content in the first place). That can be achieved by ads or by offering a subscription.
My original question still stands: if you were to build a video streaming platform tomorrow, what would your model for financing operation and content creation be?
Do adblocked videos prevent creators from having another view registered for a monetized video?
I don’t know how to do a video platform. If I had the time and skill, I’d rather make a FOSS, federated platform for creators/studios to host and finance however they want. Odds are they would never be as egregious as YouTube is being, and I’d be less inclined to skip their ads.
Individually, no. But each view not generating ad revenue does still generate streaming costs. If no one would pay Google to host their ads on YT, I doubt they’d keep the platform online.
Now don’t get me wrong, the threshold at which Google decides that the ratio of adblocked to regular viewers is exceeding their business model is most likely based on corporate greed, and the recent crackdowns on ad blocking are due to the same reason. I think they’re doing fine and there is no need for the recent initiative - but it would be equally dishonest claiming running a platform the size and outreach of YouTube could be done without large investments, one way or the other.
Individually, no. But each view not generating ad revenue does still generate streaming costs. If no one would pay Google to host their ads on YT, I doubt they'd keep the platform online.
Well this kind of renders the whole “if you don’t watch the ads, content creators can’y get paid” morality approach meaningless, don’t you think?
Where is the money supposed to come from? Companies pay Google to put up ads expecting a return on the investment. If Google starts forcing people who inherently avoid advertisements to watch advertisements, what value is that actually supposed generate for either of Google’s customers? I’d just walk away from the screen like I do with regular television.
I don’t think that was ever a moral issue. We’re talking about large corporations in a capitalist setting, moral is not something to bring up in that discussion.
Also, no one said end users are morally obliged to watch ads. The gist is: some kind of revenue stream must exist so that the operator of the platform keeps it running and the creators are enabled to create content.
A paid subscription is a perfectly valid alternative, as are platforms like Nebula, which use that exact model of paid subscriptions. Patreon is a bit tricky since it only serves the content creator. Google famously shut down all kinds of projects without any consideration for their users, I have no doubt they’d pull the trigger on YouTube if it would serve them.
In a perfect world, ads should not exist at all. It took us decades to even regulate ads that are obviously harmful (alcohol, tobacco, gambling, ads propagating body issues via heavily manipulated images etc.), none of that should be forced down people’s throats.
Unfortunately, however, we don’t live in a utopia, but in a capitalist hellscape, so when I talk to people, I actually want to know their practical ideas of keeping the show running.
Currently, I couldn’t recommend anyone to not run an adblocker, the internet would become unusable due to how intrusive and downright dangerous ads have become, both in content for certain audiences, and as networks to deliver malware.
Simple answers just longing for the good old days of the small web are nothing more than nostalgia and willfully ignore how the internet and the society using it have changed. That’s not a practical or remotely useful answer.
We are watching the system change as we speak, and I came here to discuss alternatives. I did not ask a moral question, although I do absolutely believe that people creating high quality content should be paid for their time. I genuinely want to know what people’s ideas and beliefs are and how they think the system will continue to work.
It might have sounded like that at first, but I’m not actually shilling for a company trying to increase ad revenue, and I do hate what current ads have become.
Ads should not manipulate or downright endanger people, and there are also cases where we need to find a different mechanism to deliver ads to people entirely - if a podcast (for me, that means mostly audio dramas) advertises itself as immersive and is not on a platform where I can get an ad-free experience, I simply won’t be able to listen to it. Being immersed into a supernatural, cosmic horror doesn’t go well with hearing about how I should switch my business page to SquareSpace.
I was fine with the “watch these 3 relevant ads in sequence and we leave you alone for the rest of the movie” concept, for example. That to me looks like an indirect form of payment, it’s transparent (no obnoxious product placement) and I can enjoy the rest of whatever media I’m consuming in peace.
Content creators should move to a platform that isn’t pushing far-right radicalization to kids watching video game streamers if they’d like me to pay for a premium account.
Should you then in turn also not consume content on YouTube at all? If so, great, you’re basically not affected by this discussion at all.
As for the topic itself: YouTube definitely has its share of problems, e. g. ElsaGate, unskippable ads in front of emergency medical advice, automated copyright strikes that are incredibly easy to abuse etc., but all those things are completely off topic.
Why are the things people are paying YouTube for not on topic when discussing payments to YouTube?
computerscientistII@lemm.ee
on 13 Jun 12:04
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No. They make money if they find a sponsor. I also skip over those sponsors’ ads but the sponsors don’t know that or they accept a certain fraction of people not watching their ads. I just don’t watch ads. If, in the future, that means I cannot watch my favourite tubers’ content, well too bad, I’ll watch some ad-free netflix series or read a book or whatever. But one thing is certain: I’ll rather light my dick on fire than watching ads. I even joined a class action lawsuit against amazon because they want to make me watch ads without my consent.
But if you’re paying for Netflix, why wouldn’t you simply pay for a premium account that doesn’t show you the ads? Is the content from your favorite YouTubers really that bad in comparison? I’ll admit, for me, it’s absolutely the opposite.
computerscientistII@lemm.ee
on 14 Jun 07:17
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I am subscribed to amazon prime, mainly because of the benefits I have regarding shopping. I might cancel that subscription however. I am really annoyed right now because they changed their return policy and they try to force ads on me while at the same time reporting their modt profitable quarter.
To be honest, I don’t think I would mind ad supported YouTube. For me, it’s the obvious scam ads that Google makes it really hard and obtuse to report that made me block them indiscriminately.
If it was regulated like TV commercials are, I don’t think I would’ve minded too much. Twitch has basically no scam ads in my experience, I just get a lot of gaming-related advertising which makes sense for a gaming-centric streaming site. Quality over quantity (at least by advertising standards, lol.)
Of course, this is just YouTube and Twitch. The rest of the Internet is pretty fucking awful and they’ll need to clean up how advertising is handled before people even think about giving up their adblockers. Yeah, ads are annoying, but people gotta eat.
You are right of course, and I would like to make this point clearer for others in this thread: Nebula can only survive if people pay more than Nebula spends on getting them to subscribe in the first place (think ads etc.) , and if the annual streaming costs are covered (those were a little more than $250.000 / year last I checked).
The tool that works best for getting people to subscribe is direct advertisement by the creators (Click like and subscribe), so Nebula is heavily investing in creator sponsorships, around $5 million a year.
That is the platform supporting the creators via direct sponsorships.
Now that this is out of the way, I’m still not satisfied with the answer. First of all, I wanted to shed light on what, apart from decisions based on moral beliefs and political stance, would be different for you as an end user. Don’t get me wrong, those are perfectly valid reasons and in the end, I do believe every decision comes with a certain amount of politics attached to it, but I think those reasons won’t sway the masses.
Let me make it clear: overall, I like Nebula as a platform much better than Google as a company. I do not know enough about Nebula as a company to comment on how they will evolve over time. I’d personally love if all my favorite creators. would switch to a platform where I can support them in a more direct fashion by paying a parent entity vs. each creator individually, and where me and people I care about are never exposed to ads.
I really don’t care, most YouTubers I watch use Patreon and Twitch subscriptions for the bulk of their finances, think they buy candy with the pennies YouTube sends them.
I occasionally buy merch from them, that’s my support.
retrospectology@lemmy.world
on 13 Jun 12:16
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I think the unskippable and autoplaying ads are the point for me where I start actively finding ways to avoid ads. Anything that tries to force itself in front of my eyes or eclipses the actual content is kind of a no go.
It’s not that Youtube creators don’t deserve to be compensated (many if whom provide content to YT for free just to share, let’s remember) it’s that Google needs to find less obnoxious means of serving ads.
I’d be really curious to see the actual numbers of how much Google gets in revenue from YT and how much actually goes to paying creators. I’m betting the ratio is not as slim as they make it sound.
Most content creators don’t make money from ads. Google keeps on changing the rules to be able to monitize or keep monitizing their own videos. Google has put ads on videos when the creator did not reach the requirements to make money on ads.
This is why creators have sponsorahips, affliate links, their own merch, Patreon, or OnlyFans. They also use Youtube more as an ad platform for their other social media accounts like Instagram and Tiktok. Depending on the content some creators get paid more on Tiktok.
Yeah, if you listen to any content creator talk about sponsorship revenues it basically eclipses all other form of revenue for them.
I think it was Pokimane who got tired of people donating money and then being assholes if she wasn’t basically gushing over them for hours, so she just went “You know what, I don’t actually need your Twitch dontations.” and just turned them off.
Content creators make thousands of dollars per sponsorship deal minimum if they have a decent amount of viewers. Bigger creators like Ludwig get millions for some deals (Redbull gives him a crapload of money for product placement, for example).
The examples you cited are not individuals. Both Pokimane and Ludwig are basically media companies at this point in time.
And yes, the amount of money you get from YouTube is a lot less, although I’m being told major YouTubers have direct platform deals. But that’s not the issue:
In order to even get those lucrative sponsorships, you need the reach of a major platform in order to build an audience - that’s not happening without e. g. YouTube.
Yeah, but content creators haven’t deplatformed off YouTube. The closest might be streaming services like Nebula, but even those have subscriptions.
YouTube pays little to content creators for hosting the content, but they also pay for hosting the content. I can’t think of a case where content creators would pay to host their videos for others to watch for free without ads or a subscription.
What’s most valuable to Google is the user data. Google is still able to get a lot of user data even if blockers are on. Ads are really just a way to get even more data. If you click an ad 10 times and buy something just 1 time, that information is more valuable than the ability to put ads in front of you.
I said one was more valuable. That doesn’t mean they don’t go well together.
Anyway you can use data to nudge users. For example, Google can change search result orders. They can promote one company/research/ideology/party to the top and demote others.
Finding out where certain people are important for law enforcement or press.
Stores give out free wifi to track your MAC address and see where you go in stores. They sell this data, use it to track theives, or use it for better product placement.
Anyway you can use data to nudge users. For example, Google can change search result orders. They can promote one company/research/ideology/party to the top and demote others.
This is advertising.
Finding out where certain people are important for law enforcement or press.
This service isn’t that valuable, and extracting the value required is going to be a PR nightmare.
Stores give out free wifi to track your MAC address and see where you go in stores. They sell this data, use it to track theives, or use it for better product placement.
But it goes back to my earlier assertion that the value of user data is generally to help with advertising.
daniskarma@lemmy.dbzer0.com
on 13 Jun 12:58
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No everything has to be for profit in this life.
I’ve no contract with them, I’ve not made any purchases. They post something online for anyone to see.
They are completely free of locking their content behind a paywall, there are plenty of platforms for that.
But I want to make my first statement clear: no every single thing any human being does has to be done just for the sole purpose of getting an economical profit. That would be the death of humanity.
I still remember 90s internet when we had tons of websites with lots of content that was just there because the creators were fans of such content, no further intentions. Barely any ads or monetization whatsoever. The ‘shark’ mentality is killing internet.
Sure. But nobody had to invest multiple hours each day into maintaining their Geocities page - there are only so many animated GIFs you could load over a modem connection anyway. Also, are we really comparing the hosting expenses of fucking YouTube with static 90s fan pages?
People expect edited videos from content creators these days. Even someone filming a hobby in their home shop will get barked at for having bad audio quality, if, this week for once, they forgot to charge the batteries on their wireless Rode lavalier mic.
That’s why so many content creators do have e. g. Patreon. Many of them are providing peeks behind the scenes and create transparency to show how much effort a single video takes, and even individuals often hire someone to do the video edits for them.
If you’re fine watching unedited, 5-10 minute videos that can be churned out with next to no effort, all good. I’m really into 40-90 minute long videos and personally view YouTube as an alternative to obtain the content type I prefer, but I’d rather not sacrifice quality. I also prefer creators who provide a serialized format and upload a video every week - in that way, I guess I’m old fashioned.
This type of content is impossible to make without financial support, which I’ll gladly provide one way or the other. However, how much the average person can afford in terms of monthly subscription fees is certainly limited, so a company offering access to multiple creators for a flat subscription fee is absolutely reasonable.
far_university1990@feddit.de
on 13 Jun 14:33
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People expect edited videos from content creators these days.
They do not, look how popular meme compilation are.
Even someone filming a hobby in their home shop will get barked at for having bad audio quality, if, this week for once, they forgot to charge the batteries on their wireless Rode lavalier mic.
Hater will hate, welcome to the internet.
If you’re fine watching unedited, 5-10 minute videos that can be churned out with next to no effort, all good. I’m really into 40-90 minute long videos and personally view YouTube as an alternative to obtain the content type I prefer, but I’d rather not sacrifice quality.
This type of content is impossible to make without financial support,
Also, are we really comparing the hosting expenses of fucking YouTube with static 90s fan pages?
There were much edited 40-90 minute video before there were ad on youtube. There were high quality page long essay on internet before youtube exist. Do not need ad or revenue or money support to get your content.
In 90s people did thing because passion. Now because passion and money. Still can make thing only because passion, never got impossible.
I’ve seen people who make money from YouTube, and I’ve no interest in seeing them continue to get paid. If somebody actually makes something worth paying for, they can take their shit to Netflix or whoever. They aren’t going to pay some manchild to yell at videogames all day.
I have seen plenty of people who make excellent content and who I’d consider to be decent human beings. I also used to believe that YouTube was a cesspool hosting only crap, and I think it was via some new hobbies that I discovered the decent offerings.
That by the way is why I explicitly mentioned channels and personalities I’d like to exclude from my claim that creators that should receive financial support to be able to keep creating content.
SuperSpruce@lemmy.zip
on 13 Jun 21:33
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You realize you could watch every ad on every video a creator puts out for a year and generate them less than a coffee, yeah? If you care go give them 5 dollars.
Fuck, an integrated donation/payment thing on YouTube would go so much farther for Google’s profit than ads ever would as well!
You realize I mentioned in several other comments in this thread that I am pretty aware of the financial structures involved in content creation on various platforms? That’s also a fallacy, as thousands or millions are watching a given video and it’s not on me alone to generate the required financial support, so the value my ad impressions generate is proportional to that number.
You realize I mentioned why donations made by individuals, to individuals, are not ideal and not sustainable? How many creators can a single individual support? Let’s say I am interested in 70 creators, should my media consumption cost me $350 a month, or should the cost be divided by all their subscribers and ideally be fairly managed by a platform?
I do care, and I do support content creators with my money directly, thank you. I also happen to have paid subscriptions, although as my other comment mentions, out of necessity, not because I believe that to be an ideal situation (in the case of YouTube, specifically).
YouTube introducing a KoFi - like donation button with minimal UX threshold and minimal processing fees with the benefits going directly to the creator? I fully support that idea.
systemglitch@lemmy.world
on 13 Jun 12:56
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Bingo
TheChargedCreeper864@lemmy.ml
on 13 Jun 17:23
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It could’ve been. You and me probably would’ve blocked ads regardless of their content for various reasons, but I’d imagine that Google wouldn’t have reached this critical mass prompting this scheme if their ads were properly vetted.
The technologically literate capable of installing ad blockers are the minority, and those who’d do it out of principle are a smaller subset of those
Not scam ads, intrusive ads. A decade ago i read cracked and the only ads were non intrusive sidebar ads or a banner at the top. They didn’t play music, they didn’t interrupt what i was doing, they just existed. Google, being the near complete monopoly it is, could easily force the standard to return to that and many people would never even go looking for adblockers.
How it works is that once you start getting these Server Side Ads (SSA), Youtube will create a sort of queue of videos in place of your usual video, with the first few being ads that can’t be skipped and have a red bar (not yellow) and in the end you’ll get your video. They are not literally part of the original video stream, they are separate streams that get injected as if they were the original video. It’s called SSAP, and I’ve been experiencing it from the last weekend. In the meantime, they’ve pretty much broken their player to implement this.
Yeah, there’s ways around this. It’s just that most of the ublock origin blocking specific code, isn’t reusable here and the team will need to start over to deal with this new tactic/approach from Google.
The cure might eventually be worse than the disease though. If not now, or tomorrow, then the next day.
I’ll let the ublock team carve demonic sigils into me and sacrifice my grandma if that’s what it escalates to, I’d sooner lose YouTube entirely than sit through those ads
QuadratureSurfer@lemmy.world
on 13 Jun 14:52
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You could also use something like GrayJay, I’ve been using it for a while now and haven’t had any issues with it.
I am excited. This will break my YouTube addiction.
It’ll only affect me when I need to fix something I’m unfamiliar with, and it’llead creators to using other platforms for that kind of material, and lower the barrier to entry.
I don’t know why Google is shooting themselves in the foot like this. I mean, it’ll be profitable in the short run, yes, but this will almost certainly be devastating to their bottom line in the long run if it works as planned.
cyberic@discuss.tchncs.de
on 13 Jun 12:50
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Have you looked at the Unhooked extension. You can choose to hide recommended videos, which was a game changer for me.
devastating to their bottom line in the long run if it works as planned.
Google knows their service is addictive and is banking on people being willing to eat an unlimited amount of shit in order to watch a bald man from Vancouver spend 12 minutes talking about his Peloton ride that morning. Realistically, they are probably right. There is no competition to YouTube. Hasn’t been for years. And there probably never will be ever again. Capitalism trends towards natural monopolies as infrastructure and complexity of operations makes startup costs prohibitive.
rebelsimile@sh.itjust.works
on 13 Jun 10:01
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Oh man, I wonder why no one ever thought of randomly injecting ads into content before? What geniuses they must have working at YouTube. I can’t even comprehend the big-brainedness. I’m sure people will love it.
I don’t see any technical specification in the article, but if they inject the ad at the start of the video, making it part of the video itself, would make possible to just skip it using video controls. To avoid user skippin ad thru video controls there should be client-side script blocking it, so an ad-blocker can use this to tell apart an ad from the video itself.
Can anyone correct me on this?
Also, would this affect piped and invidious too?
explore_broaden@midwest.social
on 13 Jun 12:49
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That sounds correct for me. It is possible for them to switch to a system where everyone can manually skip past the ad in the video stream but adblockers are useless (by not sending and indication of the ad to the client), but I don’t see that happening since most people don’t use adblockers and letting all of them easily skip past every ad is probably bad for profits.
There’s already addons that can recognize in-video sponsored content and skip, if youtube splices in ads into the video stream these addons will still work (although depending on how strict server side logic is, they may have to pause when the buffer runs out until the time of the ad length has passed)
It doesn’t recognize the sponsor sections. The community does that. I don’t believe there is any tool right now that can automatically detect the sponsor sections.
kata1yst@sh.itjust.works
on 13 Jun 13:36
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Honestly it would be trivial for them to make the video controls server side too and simply not accept fast forward commands from the client during the ad.
We might be in a “Download and edit to watch ad-free” world with this change.
Seems too much, really. Even if they do such a terrible thing, would they not expose a “report ad” or “see the product” buttons? Video buffer is still locally downloaded.
It’s not literally part of the video, exactly because of what you describe. They are separate streams that get injected into the player before the normal video. You can’t skip them or interact with them in any way (pretty sure it also breaks any purchase links etc). Piped or Invidious don’t have them, ytdl also doesn’t download them.
As of now, afaik, you won’t see them if your account wasn’t selected for the experiment, if you are in incognito mode (with uBO on) or if you have uBlock Origin (and other adblockers) off (you’ll see the normal ads and then the video).
How does this actually works? Can you point me to technical documentation about this?
I’ve only found info about SSAI, not about SSAP. Is it the same?
just_another_person@lemmy.world
on 13 Jun 14:10
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I believe this describes them altering the ad host at load time for the page. DNS blocking of ad serving hosts only work if the hostname stays predictable, so just having dynamically named hosts that change in the loading of the page would make blocking more difficult.
Example: 1234.youtube-ads.com is blocked by AdBlockerX. 5678.youtube-ads-xyz.com is not on the blocklist, so is let through. All they have to do is cycle host or domain names to beat DNS blocking for the most part.
Previously, injecting hostnames live for EACH page load had two big issues:
DNS propagation is SLOW. Creating a new host or domain and having it live globally on multiple root servers can take hours, sometimes days.
Live form injection of something like this takes compute, and is normally set as part of a static template.
They’re just banking on making more money from increased ad revenue to offset the technical challenges of doing this, and offsetting the extra cost of compute. They’re also betting that the free adblocking tools will not spend the extra effort to constantly update and ship blocklist changes with updated hosts. I guarantee some simple logic will be able to beat this with client-side blocklist updating though (ie: tool to read the page code and block ad hosts). It’ll be tricky, probably have some false positives here and there, but effective.
As long as the naming pattern is distinct from important domains you can still block it based on pattern matching. They need to obfuscate ad domains and other hosting domains the same way.
Creating subdomains is quite fast because the request goes right through when it’s unknown to caches, it’s updates when you reuse existing ones that causes trouble with lag.
I’ve tested making new subdomains, it’s literally minutes in real life. Sure, in some pathological case it might be hours, but it’s not actually going to happen realistically.
PenisWenisGenius@lemmynsfw.com
on 13 Jun 16:23
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It’s probably going to be like twitch. I’m sure they’ll eventually succeed in making it so you can stream videos without watching ads but they’ll never be able to stop people from downloading the video and skipping the ad in vlc.
And once everybody is watching ads and nobody is skipping them, YouTube will start making the commercials shorter and less invasive, right Anakin?
UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world
on 13 Jun 15:12
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When I have to wade through sixteen different “Would you like to join YouTube Plus!?!?!?!” pop-ups every time I whisper the words “online video” in the direction of my phone, I’m rarely inclined to use YouTube to begin with. Its a bad fucking service.
My TV doesn’t pull this shit on me. I get Show -> Ads -> Show -> Ads in regularly spaced intervals, like I’m a civilized human being. I don’t get WOULD YOU LIKE TO GET SLIGHTLY FEWER ADS!!! GIVE ME $8$12$15 $20!!! every time the fucking thing turns on.
catch22@programming.dev
on 13 Jun 15:16
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People will find a way to get around it, I could see buffering a video for 5 mins or even downloading the entire video ala locally playing podcasts, then using AI or some type of frame analyzation technique t to skip ads. Or just skip them like good old fashion Tivo from your player.
Freetube has a sponsor skip feature, skips sponsored sections of videos automatically, so it looks like this has already been solved
KneeTitts@lemmy.world
on 13 Jun 18:03
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server side video ad injection means they could vary the placement of the ad, so things like sponsorblock which relies on the segment being in the exact same place all the time would not be very effective
They should but easy to say than done. In the end they will return back to it if no better or at least equal alternatives are out there to fill the vacuum.
sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works
on 13 Jun 18:04
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Yup, I’m investigating alternatives like Nebula and generally reducing my YouTube use, but that’s not going to work for a lot of people. The Grayjay app helps a lot.
This is such a weird take. There is 20 years of content on youtube and not just like, unboxing videos or AI generated kid stuff or whatever. Theres family recordings and DIY vids for literally everything, to college courses from like, Yale and Harvard, to vocational videos I use for my job. All of the videos that radicalized me into an Ancom on are youtube. Every song ever recorded, including rare songs like second hand accounts of slave field hymns. Old, obscure movies, especially where the copyright holder doesnt give a fuck, are available for free. Small indie projects, like small groups producing shorts, and small bands making their own music, are on youtube. And yes, millions of hours of people playing video games, or sports high lights, or wrestling high lights, or video essays or whatever, are all on youtube.
The world is the way it is. Do I wish the web was more diversified? I do. Do I wish Alphabet didnt have us over a barrel like this? Of course. But youtube is almost a utility at this point; its like saying dont use the roads bro, eventually they will listen to us and put in light rail tracks. I would love for that to happen but you gotta get to work in the mean time.
KneeTitts@lemmy.world
on 13 Jun 18:04
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Just stop using YT altogether
YT spent the last 15 years stomping out all competition, so now that they have accomplished that, they jack up the rates… (or in this case jack up the ads)
Youtube doesn’t pay attention to what ads get approved, or where they get served. Ive heard stories of people getting served two hours full amateur movies as ads, Ive heard of people getting soft core porn served as an ad, to actual scams and crypto pitches. It’s like Facebooks new AI enabled algorithm. There is actual danger, considering children and the elderly get sucked in to youtubes black hole?
I watched a couple videos on the Diddy case, and a couple days later my whole feed was filled with the worst conspiracy theories and Christian preachers.
I watch one Youtuber talking about pyramids, YouTube fills my whole suggestions with ancient alien conspiracies.
I watched one cover of a song, I get recommended the same song for weeks.
I watch one reaction video, the whole feed turns into reaction videos within minutes.
It’s a fight against the algorhytm and it isn’t fun. It’s incredible how dumb it is after all these years, and those algprhythms are partly to blame that everyone feels more miserable than they are.
sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works
on 13 Jun 23:41
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I just turn off recommendations (disable watch history) and use a third party app where I can disable recommendations (Grayjay and NewPipe). I just want my subscriptions and search, that’s all.
So, what’s the difference to Firefox with some add ons then?
That someone else gets my login data and view data to sell?
sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works
on 14 Jun 13:04
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I don’t login. Grayjay/NewPipe doesn’t send any data to its servers, so they’re not tracking viewed content. I also get subscriptions and playlists (again, w/o Youtube account) in addition to the features I mentioned. Afaik, you can’t get any of that with addons.
Make a fair payment model. No classic subscription. But pay per watched minute, and when you hit a certain amount of minutes, every additional minute is free.
Crashumbc@lemmy.world
on 13 Jun 18:08
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Google is operating at a 24% net profit margin. They don’t need to get their shareholders more money…
Do you actually understand how this works?
It’s a beautiful statement and oh so noble, but it just flies against how the world really works.
At some point, maybe not today, but at some point, you’re going to be saving up for your retirement. Your money will be invested; either passively or actively. If active, a fund manager (or maybe even yourself) will be spending time, every single day, wondering how to maximise the invested cash. If passive, you’re letting a WHOLE lot of fund managers make the decisions for you (wisdom of the crowd). Either way, Google better fucking perform or the investors will go elsewhere.
And you’ll be an investor too, asking for Google to do better than anyone else or you’ll take your savings elsewhere.
FiniteBanjo@lemmy.today
on 13 Jun 19:17
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If investors go elsewhere then they’re trading for a higher risk and return ratio than a massive company with rich history like Google. Plus, it frequently performs large buybacks and offers, and even offered a dividend recently. There is always going to be something attractive to investors, here.
Agreed there is a mix of things Google can do to remain attractive. But at the core, Google has to be a better investment than something else to remain invested into.
You can buy Microsoft or Apple, hardly the riskiest stocks
bravesirrbn@lemmy.world
on 13 Jun 20:33
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One thing I genuinely don’t get: why does a company making this much money need “investors”? (Other than participating in the make-rich-people-richer scheme)
You aren’t an investor if you are planning to resell. Day trading and real investment are totally at odds. It’s far better (for retirement) to invest in a stable company and get a set return over time for it. We also don’t even need to do that for retirement, the fact that we do is fucking insane.
You’re arguing against the world that is. I’m just trying to explain the behaviour, not necessarily condone it.
A pension fund manager may not move in and out of stocks on a daily basis, but at some point they’re going to take a look at how their portfolio is doing and react.
uriel238@lemmy.blahaj.zone
on 14 Jun 01:35
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Millennials and zoomers are not saving up for retirement, barely able to sustain themselves. They’re also expecting ecological collapse to cause global famine or their own nation to go full Reich, assuming they’re not killed by hurricanes, wildfire or war.
Agreed, many young people can’t save. That’s why I said “maybe not today, but at some point”. I’m not saying it’s easy for young people, I’m trying to explain why companies seek to increase profitability and that almost every investor is self-centred.
jjjalljs@ttrpg.network
on 13 Jun 18:14
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First, individually targeted advertisement should be illegal. Instead of trying to figure out who I am and serving me ads based on that, they should only be able to look at server side facts. What is the video? This is how television and radio ads have worked for ages. You have a video about SomePopBand, you advertise concert tickets. You have a video about bikes, you advertise bike stuff. You don’t know who I am. Suddenly, the motivation for most of the privacy invading, stalking, nonsense is gutted.
Some people would still block those static ads. If they showed some restraint, I think more people would accept them. But that’s a sad joke- no profit driven org is going to show restraint.
Secondly, if they can’t ethically run the business at a profit, the business probably doesn’t deserve to exist. That or it’s a loss leader to get people into the ecosystem.
You do know you can enter into your Google settings and disable all tracking and targeting, right? And you can ask them to delete all information they already hold on you.
Yes right. But what does the investor environment look like today? Profit, not users, is what everyone is counting. If Google says “we’re burning cash in all businesses but search, but hey we’re nice”, investors will take their investments to more profitable businesses.
They actually have a pretty huge net profit margin and what basically amounts to a monopoly on advertisement, so even if their ads reached less intended targets it wouldn’t hurt their bottom line much.
Didn’t you know? It’s doesn’t matter that they’re still making billions more than they ever made, numbers have to go higher.
PlutoniumAcid@lemmy.world
on 13 Jun 21:20
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This makes me puke.
sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works
on 13 Jun 23:38
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Let me buy an API token anonymously, similar to how Mullvad works. I’m happy to pay for what I watch, but I don’t want to be tracked at all, and I don’t trust their internal settings.
Until that’s a thing, I’ll watch without an account using an ad-blocker. Give me that experience with the apps I use (Grayjay and NewPipe), and I’ll pay.
They could use their monopolies to force advertisers to pay a fair amount for a decent ad instead of taking pennies to ruin the Internet. I never even considered using an ad blocker back when it was just banner ads. Or maybe they could stop being a full decade behind the times and add donations to YouTubers for a cut. If they add value to premium instead of trying to remove value from the base experience they could even triple dip on these ideas.
uriel238@lemmy.blahaj.zone
on 14 Jun 01:29
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Yes. Google bought YouTube. Alphabet is worth $2 trillion. The social control and data mining is value to Google enough.
interdimensionalmeme@lemmy.ml
on 14 Jun 03:42
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The internet was a mistake. We had a good run. Lot of fun was had, but it hasn’t made anyone’s life better. I say we roll things back to the ARPANET days. The internet should exclusively be used for disseminating post-graduate level academic research and DOD projects. Everyone else can read the newspaper on their train ride in their full 3 piece suits to their union job at the business factory.
interdimensionalmeme@lemmy.ml
on 14 Jun 06:33
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No, FAANG is killing the internet
We kill them, internet good again
Or else, I laser off the optics from soviet early launch satellites and … well. … you know
It’s too late now, but only if they didn’t put so many ads in the first place, less people would be blocking them. They could also make YouTube premium affordable by removing all the features except “no ads”.
Some time ago I would’ve bought YouTube premium, but it had so many features I didn’t want driving up the price that I just didn’t. I instead switched to Firefox and ads were gone again. Good job google, drove me off YouTube premium and Google chrome at the same time.
I sort of spent a decade uploading and streaming to it, started before it was even bought by Google, so I’ve really dug myself a pit at this point.
Gsus4@programming.dev
on 13 Jun 17:20
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Youtube is aware that serving ads to people who hate ads is going to reduce these brands’ value, right? I thought that was the reason they were ok with adblockers before…
Xtallll@lemmy.blahaj.zone
on 13 Jun 17:40
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They have decided that the damage is worth less than the cost of serving videos to users with add blocks. Only time will tell if they are right.
If the amount of people that just put up with ads currently instead of switching to Firefox is anything to go by, I think the number of people who truly care is less that you might think. Especially when YouTube is such a monopoly.
I accidentally watched YouTube the other night without adblock, OMFG what an experience.
If I can’t watch with adblock I’ll just stop using it, it’s only a rabit hole to waste time for me anyway.
pixeltree@lemmy.blahaj.zone
on 13 Jun 19:28
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Same, just like when reddit killed 3rd party apps
sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works
on 13 Jun 23:35
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Yup, and I’m not willing to pay for Youtube Premium because the app kinda sucks and I don’t like Google keeping track of what I watch. I’m willing to pay, but I’d really like to keep using the 3rd party apps I prefer (Grayjay and NewPipe).
So like Reddit, I’ll drop Youtube if my 3rd party apps stop working. That’s my line in the sand. If Youtube wants to get money from me, it needs to be through an API disassociated from my identity.
Andromxda@lemmy.dbzer0.com
on 13 Jun 19:40
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Finally a use case where AI/Machine learning would absolutely make sense. If we can have AI that can generate text or images, imitate people’s voices or write code, we can also have a lightweight model that can detect ads and skip them during playback. There’s a model trained on SponsorBlock data for detecting sponsored segments github.com/xenova/sponsorblock-ml
I’m sure that we can have something similar but for embedded ads.
Give it 5 more years in hardware performance improvements and software/model optimization and I don’t see a problem. The important part is that improvements are made public for everyone to use and improve upon instead of letting openai and microsoft take the whole cake
It’s called a classifier and it could easily detect an embedded ad. The issue is now everyone needs to run it on their hardware to detect and this will cost some electricity.
interdimensionalmeme@lemmy.ml
on 14 Jun 03:42
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Well I’m not happy about potentially adding new type of load on the electrical grids around the world.
interdimensionalmeme@lemmy.ml
on 14 Jun 12:46
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Do you understand what we’re still talking less energy than the monitor it displays on.
I would bet even untuned VGG16 could do that without even a fine tune. Advertising is starkly different to content and the output is a “ad=yes/no” signal. It’s a very small amount of data, probably less than the plain hardware video decoder.
It’s also not a new type of load, it runs off the same power supply as any computer, a slight capacitive load, it won’t even change the grid powerfactor.
Ads have definitely added more load on electrical grids in aggregate than locally hosted and lightweight models, especially given that ads are fucking everywhere all the time. Websites, apps, the servers, even 24/7 electric billboards. I’m not worried about a few nerds using slightly more electricity sometimes for their own benefit and joy (it’s still less power than gaming), as opposed to a corp that burns through power and breaks their climate pledges (Microsoft) for the benefit of their bottom line and nothing else. Corps don’t get to have a monopoly on AI that was built with our data, only to have it fed back to us to pull more data and siphon more money.
Used to put up with this back when Hulu was free. Adblockers weren’t as sophisticated then, so I had to watch 2 minutes of a black screen every commercial break. Still better than watching ads.
Good. This is how YouTube dies. This is how Google dies. This is how competitors/alternatives are born. Stop fighting to make Google services useable against every effort of theirs. Let them drive people away to make (or discover) alternatives.
PlutoniumAcid@lemmy.world
on 13 Jun 21:18
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It has been THE viteo platform for literally decades. There is so much content there; it would be a tremendous effort to direct that elsewhere.
And that other site would quickly succumb to storage and bandwidth costs. What options could exist?
Wishfull thinking. Sadly the truth.
It’s nearly impossible to have that high of a federation and preventing a centralization to not loose any videos (except if the creators chose so).
It’s owned and populated by history and science/engineering YouTubers, so if you’re not usually watching that side of YouTube, you might not find much on Nebula for you.
sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works
on 14 Jun 06:22
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On the flipside, that’s most of what I watch, so I hear about it all the time.
sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works
on 14 Jun 17:00
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Yup, but no Google tracking, but they seem to do other tracking.
A_Random_Idiot@lemmy.world
on 13 Jun 21:41
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Do you have any idea how many billions with a B it would take to even start a viable, proper competitor to youtube? and how quickly that capital B could end up becoming a Capital T?
I hate people who keep screaming about let youtube die and alternatives will be born.
Youtube has been shit for years. No ones made an alternative that is viable.
Any an all alternatives are subscription based services, and tiny. Like Floatplane, Utreon and whatever the gunfocused one is that I cant remember off the top of my head, if it even still exists.
Anyone that has that kinda money are probably already in bed with googles capitalistic hellscape ideals for hte internet and not interested in going against them.
Creating competitors for things like Reddit and Facebook are relatively easy. Creating a competitor for something that probably accumulates hundreds of terabytes, if not more, per hour? That takes insane amounts of storage, and bandwidth, and overhead, and everything else that costs more than any regular person could ever have a hope of even having a wet dream over.
Semi_Hemi_Demigod@lemmy.world
on 13 Jun 22:46
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If you tried to create a centralized one? Yeah, it would take a lot. Would a decentralized one be as expensive? I’m not sure.
I think the best goal would be to try to create a platform for creators that has a low barrier to entry - both in terms of cost and skill - that gives them the ability to easily and quickly set up a “channel” to “broadcast” from and earn some revenue somehow.
Why build one competitor to YouTube when we could build a billion of them?
A_Random_Idiot@lemmy.world
on 13 Jun 22:53
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Why build one competitor to YouTube when we could build a billion of them?
Because thats the very reason why people hate current streaming services, and you’re arguing to not only make it worse than that, but to make the end users eat the costs of storage and bandwidth.
Semi_Hemi_Demigod@lemmy.world
on 14 Jun 00:03
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If they shared the same protocol, or at least reasonably compatible versions of it, you could have one app that does all of them.
The protocol isn’t the hard part. It’s the monetizing that is. Creators aren’t looking to provide content for free, especially if they are also now paying for hosting costs.
Ad spots (like Google does) work well because they can inject an up to date ad into an old video. In something like the fedeverse today a creators only option would be ads baked into the video, but they would only get paid for that up front which isn’t ideal…
Sponsors pay more upfront. If creators are only using sponsors than their whole back catalogue is basically valueless. If it costs a creator 2-10 cents a month to host a video (based off S3 pricing), but they only made 1000$ on it upfront when the video was made, overtime the back catalogue becomes a pretty significant financial burden if it’s not being monetized
Also it’s worth keeping in mind that many people are also using tools to autoskip sponsor spots, and the only leverage creators have for being paid by sponsors are viewership numbers.
Patreon is irrelevant, that’s just like Nebula, floatplane etc, it’s essentially a subscription based alternative to YouTube.
Discoverability is pointless if the people discovering you aren’t going to financial contribute. It’s the age old “why don’t you work for me for free, the exposure I provide will make it worth your time”, that hasn’t been true before and likely isn’t here. Creators aren’t looking to work for free (at least not the ones creating the high quality content we’re used to today)
interdimensionalmeme@lemmy.ml
on 14 Jun 03:37
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You don’t understand why people hate streaming fragmentation.
You can have a billion decentralized openyoutube all on the same page, just look how lemmy already does it.
Podcast also did it with RSS. Agglomeration isn’t an issue on a decentralized open platform
interdimensionalmeme@lemmy.ml
on 14 Jun 03:35
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Yet bittorrent does youtube fives times over with central governance. You have drunk too much cloud coolaid. My laptop could host my youtube channel without issue and I would still have enough juice to play counter strike and download the latest marvel slop movie.
rwhitisissle@lemmy.world
on 14 Jun 06:16
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Boy howdy, users sure would love to pivot to a peer distributed content system that randomly downloads chunks of a video file as they become available with speeds of anywhere between 2 bytes and 2 megabytes a second (which one you’ll get depends on who you’re getting the chunks from) with literally no guarantee of being able to even complete said download because the people they’re downloading it from may not all have the entire file’s worth of combined data across their respective computers, and they have to download the entire video before watching it to determine whether or not they even want to watch it in the first place. Also, there’s no capacity for monetization without literally doing what Google is trying to do and injecting advertisements directly into the video, so there’s no incentive for any content producers to use this system to distribute said content, meaning it would be a ghost town of a service from the start.
Yep, that would be a great system. /s
interdimensionalmeme@lemmy.ml
on 14 Jun 06:38
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If the file is that poorly seeded, and therefore extremely sparsely watched, then the laptop with a broken screen in my closet can serve it to anyone who wants it.
The only reason we need a scalable system, is to handle high demand / broad appeal media and in that case, what you describe WON’T happen.
For low demand media, https off my mom’s coffemaker will do just fine.
That means anyone posting 100-200 video to youtube today, can easily handle all these situation with less expense than the price of whatever camera they filmed the content with to begin with.
Youtube only exists, because us, old internet fucks, got lazy and relied on google for mail and video.
A service people want to use is typically one with redundancy and high availability. Your laptop could overheat, have a drive failure, spontaneously lose its wifi connection, or a million other things. It’s fundamentally unreliable.
only reason we need a scalable system, is to handle high demand
Scalability isn’t just about distribution. It’s about reliability and convenience - two things your system as described lacks by design. A video file that no one but you has ever seen has the same exact degree of accessibility as one served to millions.
We could EASILY EASILY EASILY done it ourselves.
This is the copium talking. If it had been easy to do and monetizable, it would have already been done. That’s the other part of the problem here. There is no incentive for anyone to use this system to consume or distribute content other than to decouple from Google. Opposition to an existing service is not enough of a motivator for people to use a system. It has to provide some comparative benefit that outweighs the cost incurred by continuing to use the other service. The big thing that Youtube has is, obviously, content. Exabytes of it. Your new service would have…nothing. We have left the age of services starting up and gaining massive movements of people behind them. We are now in an age of the internet in which the inertia of existing services will carry them decades into the future. Youtube is now too big to fail, and too big to be replaced.
Blockbuster died because its business model was rendered obsolete by virtue of widespread adoption of the internet and the advent of streaming. And because it refused to shift its business model away from physical media distribution to digital. Let me know when they invent something that makes the internet obsolete, will you? Because that is what it will take to dethrone YouTube.
Because that is what it will take to dethrone YouTube.
I think YouTube will eventually end up destroying itself. It’s not a profitable business model to just run some ads. The amount of storage, bandwidth, and processing power a video host requires is massive.
interdimensionalmeme@lemmy.ml
on 14 Jun 12:42
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We are in the age of the toy internet, it is all about to crumple like a house of card bought on cheap credit and unviable business models.
Youtube is not long for this world and nobody will miss it.
The only question is how much of it Archive Team can save before if goes up in flames.
Well, the good parts of it, that’s easy but can we save the garbage too, I’m not sure.
Take any channel on youtube and its creator can easily serve it’s entire catalog out of a obsolete chromebox with two usb sticks on the side.
Even as small as a terabyte would still be mostly empty space.
Youtube was built defective by design using 1970s ideology, it is immensely wasteful.
I want to see how you can serve thousands or millions of people with a Chromebook in your closet. And if you say p2p, that doesn’t deal with spikes in demand and a lot of old content will just vanish even easier than on YouTube. Also it would rely on people being willing to seed.
interdimensionalmeme@lemmy.ml
on 16 Jun 20:06
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The main limitation is the 1 gigabit network. It can push out 260 3megabit streams or 50 15megabit streams at the most.
That’s already an enormous amount of concurrent viewers that covers 99% of content on youtube.
To achieve this, you can’t be wasting processing power anywhere, a straight copy to network from pre encoded files, no live transcoding.
No scripting, no encryption either. If you really need that, which you almost certainly don’t, then install a recerse proxy on your openwrt router.
Now, if you want to scale, which almost no video really needs, then you’ll send the client a script. The client is a source of inifinite scaling, compute and bandwidth.
Each client just needs to rebroadcast two streams of the file.
As excess clients connect, you tell them to get the stream from the stun/turn server. This punches through both sides of the nat. And puts two clients in communication. First client sends its copies of the received stream chunks, with preference from the beginning of the file. One client can get the stream from multiple other client and once it has a few stream chunks in the cache it can serve them to new clients.
It doesn’t take many doublings before you have more bandwidth than the whole internet. All the logic for organisation, hash checking, stream block ordering etc etc is a small text file from the server, signed by the server’s certificate. It runs entirely inside the client’s browser.
A_Random_Idiot@lemmy.world
on 14 Jun 11:15
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Exactly.
I’m feeling like this whole “distrubuted youtube!” argument is nothing but a variant of the blockchain fantasy. Seeing a lot of the same style of arguments and ignorance.
It’s a common trap for certain types of people to assume technology can fix problems that are inventive or socially driven.
A_Random_Idiot@lemmy.world
on 14 Jun 19:18
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Its also a common trap for idiots to grasp hold of a fraction of a fragment of an idea and think it gives them complete and total understanding, and then go around proselytizing their absolute incompetence as if its techno-gospel.
Which I think is why this distributed youtube bull follows the same general argument trend as the mythical and holy blockchain. That does nothing, but somehow can magically solve all problems.
interdimensionalmeme@lemmy.ml
on 16 Jun 21:59
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We solved this problem BEFORE youtube was even a thing.
Youtube only exists out of convenience for normies.
Youtube can die tomorrow, we will still have unlimited video.
In fact, think youtube slowed down innovation on this front.
Torrent trackers are unchanged in their form from 2003.
I wouldn’t mind federated content, browser integration of torrent systems and locally running content recommendation system as well as social crowdsourced review systems (aka the like button and comments)
To be fair, a LOT of people swear by Popcorn Time, which is exactly that. I was surprised it worked as well as it does, too.
A_Random_Idiot@lemmy.world
on 14 Jun 11:14
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Your laptop would become suicidal the second it had to start serving streaming, 4k video to dozens of people, much less hundreds or thousands.
interdimensionalmeme@lemmy.ml
on 14 Jun 12:36
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My laptop can copy files at 15 mbps, very very easily.
Hundreds ? Again piss easy, that’s what bittorrents are for, even easier when the swarms takes care of all the traffic.
The more people are 10 or so and the faster it will copy itself.
Do you cloud people still know how to copy files or was that arcane knowledge lost to the sands of 1995 ?
A_Random_Idiot@lemmy.world
on 14 Jun 19:16
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I hate the cloud you perfidious incompetent. The only thing more stupid than the “cloud” is your belief that you can serve hundreds, if not thousands, of simultaneous streams,possibly 1080, most likely 4k, from your 15mbps laptop.
interdimensionalmeme@lemmy.ml
on 17 Jun 00:15
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You are correct.
Nearly all youtube channels can be fully served off a single laptop. 260 concurrent streams at 1080p 3mbps is achievable over gigabit ethernet. Very few channels exceed this for any appreciable amount of time. And in those cases we can leverage a very small amount of the client’s ressources to further propagate the stream. This can be done with repurposed bittorrent dht.
Now all we need is federated RSS and a locally running content curation algorithm and a social review system (like buttons and reputation history)
I like this idea so much. Do the public libraries not have some kind of video service already? Seems like a network of library-powered PeerTube instances would serve that niche really well.
They’re testing to embed the ads in the stream and not the usual switch to a different video
It definitely affects third party client if now they get a file of a video that now has 30 seconds of ad content at the beginning
KillingTimeItself@lemmy.dbzer0.com
on 13 Jun 22:33
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it won’t though, because you can just remove that 30 seconds at the beginning, which is almost definitely going to be very different than the rest of the video in a number of ways. Notably, there are likely going to be UI differences during and after ads play, as well as video playback alterations. Ad’s aren’t going to be the same quality as video itself.
It’s possible that they’re transcoding them into the video itself, but doing that would be catastrophically bad and have such a massive cost that it simply would not be worthwhile.
MrWildBunnycat@lemmy.world
on 13 Jun 23:03
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They are transcoding them into the video. Sponsorblock had to make a quick change to discard submissions from users that have been identified to be on this trial system, because it affects the video length, and as such - makes it impossible to have consistent segments
KillingTimeItself@lemmy.dbzer0.com
on 14 Jun 01:03
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i highly doubt it. I would think they’re probably doing some UDP packet voodoo bullshit.
Though it likely appears as transcoded.
The sheer cost of them being transcoded into videos is immense, even if they’re live encoding every video.
What happens when you get an ad you need to takedown and remove? You’re on disk transcode is suddenly useless now, and you need to make a new one, easy enough, you can just do that in the background, but this also means your ads are baked into each video, which is less than ideal, unless you’re constantly updating them.
And if you’re doing live transcodes, that means that you have to do this for every view on every video, and i’m not sure that’s sustainable.
I suppose you could probably do a cached live transcode system to bring down the overhead, but i can’t imagine it’s easier than just pulling some voodoo networking bullshit to literally inject an advertisement.
tomalley8342@lemmy.world
on 14 Jun 03:36
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AFAIK there is no need to re-encode, since Youtube videos are stored and served in chunks anyways. The change is that they are now slipping in the ad chunks as if they were a part of the normal video chunk stream.
KillingTimeItself@lemmy.dbzer0.com
on 14 Jun 17:57
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yeah that’s what im saying. Re-encoding and transcoding is completely different, it’s more than likely a served change, rather than a stored change.
KillingTimeItself@lemmy.dbzer0.com
on 14 Jun 22:52
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shocker
interdimensionalmeme@lemmy.ml
on 14 Jun 03:41
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We can just train an AI to filter out the spam , just like we did with email.
werefreeatlast@lemmy.world
on 13 Jun 23:05
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We’ll just copy the video and recast without ads I guess? I do watch several videos many times over for diy, so it would be relatively painless to just download and modify.
randon31415@lemmy.world
on 14 Jun 00:13
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RememberTheApollo_@lemmy.world
on 14 Jun 01:53
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I already barely watch YouTube but for a couple people I subscribe to, and I already pay membership for their content so I get no ads. YouTube has already whittled me down to the minimum thanks to their overbearing ad content.
csm10495@sh.itjust.works
on 14 Jun 02:21
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I pay for premium… but also like my sponsorblock… and 3rd party clients. Let me have it all momma Google.
That’s me too. I was a family subscriber for years. Some of those years it was just myself on there too. But the price hikes and interface degrading was infuriating.
Microplasticbrain@lemm.ee
on 14 Jun 05:41
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Over the past years I’ve been reducing my youtube and twitch viewership anyways. Its literally the lowest form of entertainment and its not worth a single moment of ad watching. I’ll just do something else. Most youtube content sucks anyways. I don’t even remember most of the channels I used to watch.
They’re just going to increase their own server costs chasing some tiny fraction of viewers who will do anything to avoid ads. they should be grateful for the adviewers they have.
rwhitisissle@lemmy.world
on 14 Jun 06:05
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Man, you’re definitely spot on with this. For me, it’s a fast, easy source of superficial distraction that I can put on for background noise and don’t have to pay attention to. It’s ultimately what cable TV used to be for me. I’ll even leave on a streamer playing a game in the background on low volume if I’m going to sleep just for white noise. At this point, the behavior and desire for that kind of content is so ingrained in me that it’s sort of like an addiction. I wish there were alternatives to youtube, but that era of video content might just be straight up dying for some of us. I guess if anything I’ll start fleshing out my plex server with old t.v. shows and just put Gilligan’s Island or something on in the background.
Microplasticbrain@lemm.ee
on 14 Jun 08:23
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Yea, a plex server for idle viewing would be a way better alternative. Just make a custom nickelodeon, comedy central, etc and have it run random episodes of random shows.
I’ve actually always wanted to do this! Download a load of old school Nickelodeon stabs and episodes and find some software that can play them all together in random order haha… Any advice on how to go about setting this up?
rwhitisissle@lemmy.world
on 14 Jun 14:57
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It’s actually built into plex. If you have a library of t.v. shows you can just click the Shuffle button and it’ll play random episodes. Or you can make Categories of shows and shuffle those. If you’re asking how to get started with Plex and downloading content, well…I don’t want to get banned for piracy related reasons, so I’ll just say that, totally unrelated to this discussion, there’s a wealth of resources regarding how to get started with bittorrent and usenet. Which you can use for perfectly legal purposes, like downloading Liinux ISOs and open source textbooks.
I use Jellyfin because it’s pretty light weight and straight forward. Just add the shows you want to a playlist, or even just specific seasons, and shuffle play.
Perfect opportunity to reprogram your brain. Put on something healthy like waves on the shore, etc.
VinnyDaCat@lemmy.world
on 14 Jun 09:36
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Its literally the lowest form of entertainment and its not worth a single moment of ad watching.
I’m just curious, but what type of content would you be watching on YouTube?
I think the platform has come a long ways when it comes to content. Sure, if you’re just watching gaming content I’d say you’d be disappointed. It’s been like that for a decade now at least. There’s a lot of decent content on there though with a lot of it even being somewhat educational.
Microplasticbrain@lemm.ee
on 14 Jun 10:37
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My viewership has changed so much over the years. I used to watch stuff like diyperks, primitive technology, this guy kris harbour who built a house with natural materials. When I was coding lots of edu stuff.
Im sure there is a lot of good shit, but I just have less energy to wade through the crap. And the continued attacks on ad blockers makes me less willing to want to find channels and communities I would probably enjoy.
I actually can’t stand gaming content cause its just spoilers and gfuel marketing as far as im concerned
VinnyDaCat@lemmy.world
on 14 Jun 13:44
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I see. I simply ask because the platform has changed a lot if you used it a little over a decade ago and I know some people who never got over the transition.
Absolutely understandable that you don’t want to spend time looking for anything that might catch your interest though.
Yeah YouTube’s real problem is the recommendations are terrible. It tries to ram the most profitable, lowest common denominator swill down your throat until it gives up and just recommends stuff you’ve already watched.
I’m just curious, but what type of content would you be watching on YouTube?
I literally use it almost exclusively for how-to styles of videos. I had to replace the throttle cable on my riding lawnmower last year. I found an awesome step-by-step video. Stuff like that…
Yeah you’re right, YouTube just isn’t what it used to be. I miss when people made videos for free because they wanted to share something with the world. Now it’s a full time job
Worse case scenario, we gotta make an extension that detects the ad UI and blanks the screen and mutes the audio until its over
Simulation6@sopuli.xyz
on 14 Jun 09:52
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And fast forwards to the end of the ad, if possible
Vaeril@sh.itjust.works
on 14 Jun 19:19
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I just found a userscript that mutes, skips, and lets you black out the ads. Worked during my brief test of it. I’ll probably use this if adblock or other clients are bricked.
Not if it brings people to a user controlled FLOSS platform (Peertube for example ) and make them ditch Youtube. We need to move the viewers and content to FLOSS alternatives so anything that will bring new users is good. Youtube will be the biggest battle IMO. Plus it would be kind of fun to trash Youtube on their own platform. Let’s settle for an optional functionality.
Let me simplify this for you: If I’m getting an addon to stop seeing ads, I’m not going to choose an addon that replaces them with other ads. I will choose the addon that doesn’t give me ads.
The only people who would even consider such an addon are not the target audience for the ads because they already support it.
What if I offer you an add-on that would promote healthy life-habits instead of black screen? Would you be interested in that? For example, it’s important to squeeze the sponge after using it, this would be super useful to remind you about it!That’s just an example, there are dozens of small tips like that requires a daily reminder.
Ok hear me out: an add-on that promotes “Watching less youtube!!!”. Isn’t that genius? It could be 50/50. 15 seconds of blackscreen for people like you who enjoy starring at it, and 15 seconds of “less screen time” promotion. That way you are frequently reminded that you could do better things with your time. Example : “You have starred at a black screen for XX minutes today. Did you know that a basic ukulele cost around 30$ and you can learn playing by investing as low as 30 minutes per day?” On top of it, I will ad a functionality that let you customize the color of the blackscreen! What do you think, are we getting somewhere or what?
Ok hear me out: If I am downloading an add-on for the explicit purpose of watching youtube, then I am not interested in being told by the add-on not to use it. If I want to watch less youtube I will, and I know this sounds novel: I will watch less youtube.
If I want helpful life tips I will go look for helpful life tips on my own. If I want to be told youtube sucks then I already know youtube sucks. I don’t understand why the fuck, when the entire purpose of me installing an add-on is to block a site from showing me things I didn’t ask for, you keep trying to convince me to have the add-on show me things I did not ask for. The defeats the entire fucking purpose of me getting it in the first place.
I have stated this as clearly as I can multiple times. I am done trying to explain it any further.
Ok got you. So you’d rather stare at a black screen for 30 seconds every 5 minutes than switch to an alternative where you can have exactly the same service, but without advertising and where control is based on the user rather than a multi-billion dollar corporation. So you want youtube and nothing else, but you refuse to support youtube. Basically, we’re back at good old advertising, were people will pick up their phone during a break and wait for the program to resume. But you don’t see things you didn’t ask for! One last thing, did you know that “Vinegar is perhaps the best way to clean a toilet tank, as it’s naturally acidic. It removes lime and calcium deposits, and it’s a natural antibacterial. Pour two cups of vinegar into the tank, allow to sit for an hour, scrub, and flush to rinse.” You’re welcome!!
Doubt. Never underestimate the hate and motivation against ads.
recapitated@lemmy.world
on 14 Jun 12:13
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It’s what they always should have done anyway. I’m not so entitled that I think I should get content delivered absolutely free, but I am entitled enough to sandbox and restrict how many discrete domains my browser windows will talk to.
Exactly I don’t think we’re in disagreement. I’m not making a pro-youtube statement here. I just accept that it exists, as they need to accept that I have full control over my hardware. It’s up to them to make their business model work for them in that environment, not me.
andrewth09@lemmy.world
on 14 Jun 12:39
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If the YouTube interface restricts you skipping during certain parts of the video, an ad blocker can detect that and skip over it anyway. Otherwise, I myself will just skip over the ad.
I pay for YT Premium. It’s 100% worth it based on my very high usage of YT for entertainment and learning. Best streaming service bargain by far. Netflix’s pile of shitty self-made movies is a ripoff by comparison.
No need to get vulgar, there, chief. I’m just a satisfied customer who doesn’t understand why watching YT videos has to be such a deathmatch with their engineering team all the time. I’ll bet that the majority of people here get the value from YT that Premium charges for, and a sizable number of people here pay for some streaming service that they actually use less than YT. Yet because YT is a website with a free tier, the arms race of ad blocking / countermeasures is never ending. People wind up hating YT and talking about them like the third reich, when it’s really a service that all of us love and depend on. Shrug?
Youtube is a festering shithole. Overflowing with the absolute worst kind of clickbait and vacuous content. It brings together everything wrong with society under a single URL. For what little useful content there is youtube should be the one paying visitors to sift through the shit to get to it.
Your account is a festering shithole. My YT is full of woodworking and gardening tutorials, geopolitics and cosmology explainers, Tolkein lore and a few other fun things I enjoy. I’m sorry yours is not as fulfilling.
Lootboblin@lemmy.world
on 14 Jun 19:34
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fuck google.
themeatbridge@lemmy.world
on 15 Jun 01:26
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Right? I already don’t use youtube as much as possible. Piped helps, but if that stops working, I just won’t watch movies on youtube.
I understand why people are upset anytime a company fucks their customers for money, but the solution is always to walk away.
UltraGiGaGigantic@lemm.ee
on 14 Jun 20:10
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People are taking the piss out of you everyday. They butt into your life, take a cheap shot at you and then disappear. They leer at you from tall buildings and make you feel small. They make flippant comments from buses that imply you’re not sexy enough and that all the fun is happening somewhere else. They are on TV making your girlfriend feel inadequate. They have access to the most sophisticated technology the world has ever seen and they bully you with it. They are The Advertisers and they are laughing at you.
You, however, are forbidden to touch them. Trademarks, intellectual property rights and copyright law mean advertisers can say what they like wherever they like with total impunity.
Fuck that. Any advert in a public space that gives you no choice whether you see it or not is yours. It’s yours to take, re-arrange and re-use. You can do whatever you like with it. Asking for permission is like asking to keep a rock someone just threw at your head.
You owe the companies nothing. Less than nothing, you especially don’t owe them any courtesy. They owe you. They have re-arranged the world to put themselves in front of you. They never asked for your permission, don’t even start asking for theirs.
You’d become a homicidal maniac if youtube makes you pay to remove ads?
thermal_shock@lemmy.world
on 15 Jun 01:34
nextcollapse
there is a plugin I bought, it’s community driven where you can tag sections of the video as ad, sponsored, etc, and auto skip it. it’s really nice, was like $5. will post when I find the link, but even if ads are server side, this plugin will skip. someone has to bite the bullet though and tag time stamps unfortunately.
found it, called dearrow, also changed clikcbait thumbnails and titles are editable by community.
Pre roll and post roll ads would be pretty easy to detect since the length of the actual video is fixed. Mid roll ads though will need something more clever.
chemicalwonka@discuss.tchncs.de
on 15 Jun 05:54
collapse
I get it, no one likes ads on youtube. But, you realize that they have to pay the people that are producing content as well as pay for the storage space to gold all of this content. Why does everyone think that can just be free?
draughtcyclist@lemmy.world
on 15 Jun 03:10
nextcollapse
Nobody expects it to be free. But it used to operate with far less intrusive ads. Also, people didn’t use ad blockers until they got worse.
It does, two on the barrel and on on the top. for me currently it acts as a mouse in Gnome and in krita it acts like a stylus with pressure and everything. My model number is the Dell Active Pen PN579X. it can switch between wacom and Microsoft protocols so it will also work on my Surface.
threaded - newest
Humanity accepts your challenge! See y’all on the battlefield ;-)
lights molotov cocktail
…
“are we not going to do that, or…? asking for a friend, of course”
That comes later but I like the energy.
We can do it the old fashioned way
<img alt="" src="https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/pictrs/image/9e3c9e5f-8c47-49e3-a867-bc2bf869bfb0.webp">
Where is that image from?
A show called ‘The Good Place’. Good show imo.
Ah ok cool, thanks I watched I think the first season. Need to finish it.
You can solve any problem with a Molotov cocktail. Any time I had a problem and I threw a Molotov cocktail, boom, right away, I had a different problem!
But we fixed this already, it was called TiVo…
I mean, I’ll just continue to not use Youtube…
I will see you on peertube ;)
I really wish this would gain some traction. As it is, there is just not enough content there to compete with YouTube in any reasonable way.
Well the problem here is that youtubers need some type of monetization too for compensation. Idk Peertube can solve this without ads.
Paid subscriptions per month, you watch the newest video for free. Have the youtuber host the server themselves for their own videos and federate that access.
Would incentivize more evergreen content too.
This is new to me; are there any decent android apps for it?
They’re working on creating an official android app that’s all I know.
PeerTube has a variety of third-party applications for Android, desktop, and a few other platforms.
Begun the arms race have .
Just wait until someone trains an AI to recognize and skip ads.
That poor AI.
This particular arms race began a couple of decades ago at least…
This must cost YouTube a fortune doing additional processing and reduced flexibility. They are going to hurt themselves and blockers will find a way.
There’s already extensions that somehow skip sponsorship sections, so it won’t even take that long.
That’s “crowdsourced”, i.e. manually done by volunteers on per-video basis.
I see a good use case for AI, can also be crowd sourced.
It’s illegal to not identify an ad as an ad (unless you’re a movie maker, but that’s a different topic). All ad blockers need to do is read that indicator. That might not be super simple, but I have faith in the abilities of the brilliant people behind many ad-blocking technologies.
That’s actually hurt by this because it uses timestamps supplied by users to work. But now they are off because the ads are of variable length. We can just hope that YouTube keeps the ability to link to a specific timestamp because then it has to calculate the difference and that can be used by Sponsorblock and adblockers alike.
But then those ads either need to be skippable or not skippable with some kind of metadata which can be used against it by injected scripts.
The problem is those blocking extensions are based on timestamps. Those timestamps are added by the users, it’s a crowdsourced thing. But the ads a single user will see differ from what another user will see. It’s likely the length of the ads is different, which makes the whole timestamp thing a no go.
Along with the timestamp, there needs to be a way to detect where the actual video begins. That way at least an offset can be applied and timestamps maintained, but it would introduce a certain level of error.
The next issue would be to then advance the video to the place where the actual video begins. This can be very hard, as it would need to include some way of recognizing the right frame in the buffer. One requirement is that the starting frame is actually in the buffer (with ads more than a few seconds, this isn’t guaranteed). The add-on has access to this buffer (depending on the platform, this isn’t guaranteed). And there’s a reliable way to recognize the right frame, given the different encoding en quality setups.
And this needs to be done cheap, so with as little as infrastructure as possible. A database of timestamps is very small and crowdsourcing those timestamps is relatively easy. But recognizing frames requires more data to be stored and crowdsourcing the right frame is a lot harder than a timestamp. If the infrastructure ends up being complex and big, someone needs to pay for that. I don’t know if donations alone would cut it. So you would need to play ads, which is exactly what you intend on not doing.
I’m sure the very smart and creative people working on these things will find a way. But it won’t be easy, so I don’t expect a solution very soon.
You need more data to recognize frames, but not a lot more data. A hash for each quality setting would be sufficient as long as they don’t start fuzzing the videos, which would be very expensive on their part.
Not really. They can precompute those and inject it in an MP4 file so long as the settings match and it’s inserted right before an i-frame so that it doesn’t corrupt b-frames. They already reencode everything with their preferred settings, so they only need to encode the ads for those same settings they already do. Just needs to be spliced seamlessly.
But YouTube uses DASH anyway, it’s like HLS, the stream is served in individual small chunks so it’s even easier because they just need to add chunks of ads where they can add mismatched video formats, for the same reason it’s able to seamlessly adjust the quality without any audio glitches.
Ad blockers will find a way.
Re-encoding is one thing, but ads are more or less supposed to be dynamic based on user location and likely some other data to target them.
Offloading that to the client made a lot of sense but now they have to do this server-side, they have very smart people working on making this as efficient as possible using tricks you’ve mentioned and more but it is still more effort than before. All for something that will likely be circumvented eventually.
All of that targeting data lives on Google’s servers already. Your computer isn’t trying to figure out who you are and what you like each ad play, Google already knows who you are when your browser makes a request for a video. Everything you are talking about is already server-side.
The data is but the client gets the specific bits from a CDN. Now they need a server to stitch these server side and stream it to you.
You can check the SponsorBlock FAQ about this. They do not need to do additional reprocessing
Every bit of effort and resourcing they spend on this returns revenue directly. Which is more than they can probably say for a lot of things they do. And they’re smart enough to know that they can’t eliminate blocking, just make it harder and harder so that fewer and fewer people do it.
Sample the color of a specified pixel (or something recognizable in the streaming format) every 30 frames from the original video.
Store collection of pixels in a database and share in a peer to peer network or stored on invidious instances. Because the sample size is small, and the database can be split up by youtube channel, the overall size and traffic should remain low.
When streaming a youtube video, if the plugin detects that the pixel in the video doesn’t match the one in the database, automatically skip until where the pixel matches the data in the database.
That is prone to error, just a pixel can be too small of a sample. I would prefer something with hashes, just a sha1sum every 5 seconds of the current frame. It can be computed while buffering videos and wait until the ad is over to splice the correct region
The problem with (good) hashes is that when you change the input even slightly (maybe a different compression algorithm is used), the hash changes drastically
Yes, that’s why I’m proposing it as opposed to just one pixel to differentiate between ad and video. Youtube videos are already separated in sections, just add some metadata with a hash to every one.
I think that downsizing the scene to like 8x8 pixels (so basically taking the average color of multiple sections of the scene) would mostly work. In order to be undetected, the ad would have to match (at least be close to) the average color of each section, which would be difficult in my opinion: you would need to alter each ad for each video timestamp individually.
Yes, that could be an alternative to computing hashes, I don’t know what option would be less resource intensive
Imagine thinking they can’t detect when you try to skip forward during an ad.
They can’t. They have no clue where you are currently in the video, and even if they did run some client side script, you could easily spoof it.
Oh well. Youtube is useful as a podcast/streamer host now; no ads with sponsor block/ublock. Once that isn’t the case they (Google) will get network blocked.
No real loss to me. I tend to prefer local download/host for convenience. Most channels are chaff anyway.
100% The only reason I even allow google on the network is for YouTube.
Wait, you can just prohibit YouTube ads at a national level? That’s somehow awesome and terrifying at the same time.
The people of this country would find it just the normal thing.
What would be terrifying about it?
Yeah, I don’t see what’s terrifying. Countries can make laws, if YouTube wants to operate in that market it has to follow the laws there.
There seems to be an abundance of the false notion that large corporations are somehow above governments on Lemmy … and that’s simply not true, at least for corporations that want have legitimate business within the country.
EDIT: So as to say … perhaps the commenter (at least in the moment) was a bit awestruck seeing laws apply to tech (which often seems to feel as though it’s above the law in some way).
It kinda depends where. GDPR in the EU is certainly an example of governments imposing their will on corporations. In the US, not so much, as corporations dump tons of money on lobbying that allow to them influence how they are regulated.
Myanmar, as a country, has a GDP of 62.26 billion usd.
Google has a market cap of 2.17 Trillion usd and made a profit of $305 billion usd last year.
Google makes more money in profit than moves through Myanmar in a year by nearly 5 times. If Google chooses not to operate in their country because of some law they don’t like, what’s to stop them?
Google definitely has national government level influence, especially considering the pervasiveness of their product suite. Implying that they’re above the law might be too far, but they for sure influence it.
If the most extreme happens and Google decided that some EU law was too much to deal with compared to the gains, a lot of Europeans could find themselves in a position where Google doesn’t operate in their country. Imagine every Android device becoming unable to use the majority of the service they operate on, or the most common browser, search engine, email service, and video streaming services simultaneously being disabled. I can’t imagine the people will be very happy about that.
‘oh no youtube cant make advertisers money while putting kids in a far right conspiracy rabbit hole how scary’
On the surface it sounds like a gross overreach of government.
A government that hates ads as much as I do. Truly a nightmare scenario
Trust me, I hate them also. But they also fund a lot of great things. And there are ways to have ads that are not invasive or omnipresent.
Are these countries even safe to host a VPN server in?
Edit: Just checked my VPN (Proton) and it has options to connect to Myanmar and Albania. Nifty.
Good to know. I’d rather pay for a vpn than YouTube premium.
I’m wondering how the hell YouTube even makes money in those regions then. They must operate there at a massive loss.
Myanmar’s average internet speed looks to be around 10-20mbps, so they probably stream with lower quality. Their GDP per capita is ~$1,150, so ads being shown to people in Myanmar wouldn’t be worth much anyway.
My gut reaction is that this won’t work long-term. Users on youtube often point to specific timestamps in a video in comments or link to specific timestamps when sharing videos, meaning there needs to be some way to identify the timestamp excluding ads. And if there’s a way to do that there’s a way to detect ads.
Of course, there’s always the chance they just scrap these features despite how useful they are and how commonly they’re used; they’ve done similar before.
YT already scrapped (or broke) setting the start/end timestamps for embedded videos. That hasn’t worked for at least the last few weeks. Embed videos now always start at 0
I embedded a video yesterday with a start timestamp and it worked
Did they change the params or something?
I have YT embed support in Tesseract, and videos with timestamps broke a few weeks ago (they all start at 0 now). I’ve tried both
t=andstart=formats: neither worked.You can still link to the YT video directly with those, though, but I’ve been unable to get embeds to honor them.
‘t=’ works for me, but I’m just right clicking and getting it manually to put in docs.
Hmm. Like a Word doc? Maybe it’s just embeds (with timestamps) on other websites that are broken?
I tried using the embed URLs directly in a browser tab, and those refuse to play at all (they still work embedded, though).
Definitely something that changed in the last few weeks. The test posts I had are from months ago and worked then.
Ya on second thought, I don’t think I’m using embedding in the best way and what I’m saying isn’t really related to that. I’m not actually embedding anything.
It sounds like there’s a silver lining after all.
The ads won’t be baked in beforehand, they’ll be injected into the stream in real time. Videos are broken into chunks and sent over HTTP, they’ll just put ad chunks in during playback. There is no need to re-encode anything. If you deep link to a timestamp, the video just starts from that timestamp as normal. If you are a Premium user, the server just never injects the ads.
But you are correct that the client needs to be aware that ads are happening, so they can be indicated on screen, and so click-throughs are activated.
This is why Chrome went to Manifest v3 - so you can’t have any code looking for ad signals running on the page to try to counter it.
That’s what the article says, not me! lol
Surely at the server side it knows the premium status of the user it is supplying the video to, so just wouldn’t insert the ads? I don’t see why that would need to be client side.
I’m prette sure they have to send the metadata to the client where an ad starts and ends. Just to make the ad clickable.
Timestamps can be calculated on the server, but maybe there will be an api endpoint that can be abused to search for the ads.
So… whats stopping something like sponsorblock from nixing this potentially bankrupting choice?
Time.
Very little most likely. I was reading some of what the sponsorblock dev had to say about this and the tone seemed to be “meh, there will be a way around this”.
I saw someone say Twitch does this, but there are many Twitch ad blockers that work
May I ask which ones? I have ‘‘TTV LOL PRO’’ but it does not always block the ads. It’s 50/50.
github.com/pixeltris/TwitchAdSolutions
I'll be curious to see where this ends up going, as I doubt the community will take this lying down.
The few times I've had to go without an Ad blocker, I've seen just how bad the Ads have gotten - they're almost the same as regular TV Ad breaks now!
... And then YouTube Premium is just not a good deal in my eyes, £12.99 a month is an awful lot to pay just to not see Ads.
The majority of of people using it will most definitely take it lying down as they’re most likely not tech savvy enough to install a browser extension on a laptop if the only thing on the page was a large red install button.
That's why I specified the community, as in the more tech savy folks that would care about this, because I know that the wider public is surprisingly tech illiterate
Ads will probably stop me from watching YouTube completely. The huge surge of ads at some point was what stopped me from using Instagram.
Unstoppable ads are what stopped m from using twitch.
The occasional times I need to use Twitch I either VPN to Romania or use S0undTV.
I think this includes YouTube music (at least in my market it does) which makes it fairly good value for money if you already subscribe to a music streaming app.
But you can listen to YouTube music for free too, no?
I think so, but with ads just like the free tier of Spotify.
Does Ublock Origin not work for it anymore? And for phones, there are alternative apps - I use InnerTune.
I use ublock on my phone as well. I set it up to play through FF and never access the YouTube app. Did it for my gf when she complained of ads, and then did it for my self it was so easy.
I don’t remember the last time I saw an ad between us.
I don’t watch YT from phone much, but I find Newpipe for videos to be a better experience than browser (it is also much lighter). And similarly Innertune for music.
Lol right!
Oh, bundling. I thought societies were pleased to get rid of cable bundling, why is it coming back?
Because Netflix didn’t dismantle the capitalism machine.
Capitalism can never fully disrupt itself. It’s always cyclical. If bundling eventually made it more money, then it will eventually return. If the response to that is to innovate something that gets around that form of bundling, then that “disrupts” the market, in the short term, only for the market to settle back to bundles.
Because as long as the idea makes more money in a capitalistic society, it will never die.
You’re not paying to not see ads. You’re paying for the content on the platform. You can pay either by watching ads or by paying for premium.
Content creators get nothing from a subscription To YouTube premium.
You’re not paying for the content, you’re paying for and-free access to the content.
They get money from premium views. I believe they get significantly more per premium views than an add view.
This is true, no matter what ElevethHour and their downvote brigade want you to believe.
They get the most money by just donating trivial amounts to their Patreon. That should be the standard. I assure you $5 one time to a creator is more than they’d ever make off you with Ad revenue.
This is not true. If you’re a free user they’re getting a share of the ad-revenue. If you’re a premium user they’re getting share of the membership fee. The more videos you watch from a creator the more they earn.
Source
Also. Do you have any idea how expensive it is to run a video hosting platform? Especially at the scale of YouTube. There’s a good reason Lemmy doesn’t have videos.
I don’t care. I don’t wanna watch ads, ever. The point is, YouTube will never be able to stop ad blockers. They can try, and the only ones who get hurt on the content creators.
Edit: and whining, “boo-hoo for the trillion dollar megacorp!” Isn’t going to elicit any sympathies
It is expensive, but it’s hard to quantify that expense for a cloud provider like Google. They’re liable to use their market prices for cloud services to justify the “cost” when they want to make it look more expensive than it is. They’re already building a cdn for all their other services as well, so YouTube’s cost is baked into that.
Reddit, by comparison actually pays for cloud hosting for all it’s video services and so pays out the ass.
TIL I should be posting hundreds of AI-generated long form video essays to reddit.
Serving the videos is where they really get hit, not necessarily storing them.
Well, damn, there goes that idea.
peertube exists. it’s activitypub. lemmy is the reddit-like interface to activitypub. but the fediverse definitely has video. it even has live streaming through OwnCast (though i think peertube has livestreaming scheduled to be implemented as well)
edit: hey i just found a movie station!
movies.ctbperth.net.au
I’m not informed enough to know how peertube works but running it is not free either. Nor is running a lemmy instance. Lemm.ee for example has a limit even on the size of images you can upload despite the fact that hosting images is orders of magnitude less bandwith and storage requiring than videos.
peertube uses webtorrents to share bandwidth among users: if you’re watching a video, you share the data to other users at the same time.
In general, yes, when comparing images/video of the same resolution. But if I compare an 8k image to a low quality video with low FPS, I can easily get a few minutes worth of video compared to that one picture.
As you said, it definitely costs money to keep these services running. What’s also important is how well they are able to compress the video/images into a smaller size without losing out on too much quality.
Additionally, with the way ML models have made their way into frame generation (such as DLSS) I wouldn’t be surprised if we start seeing a new compressed format that removes frames from a video (if they haven’t started doing it already).
This is not true, creators get paid for Premium user views.
We used to just get up and do the dishes while whatever injected nonsense interupted what we were watching on TV. And when it became too much we turned to DVDs or piracy. Then streaming was the “savior” until whoever funded it realized that more users do not equal more money. And now we are almost back to square one. This is just played out at this point. Google/Yt/TIktok etc are just betting on the addictive nature of instant gratification to survive. At some point, I think, all the effords of adblocking (grayjay, newpipe, sponsorblock, ublock) will seem impractical when a download (and maybe now scan to cut out ads and sponsor segments) will achive the same. And then peer to peer is the most practical way to share that instead of redoing all the work. Until downloading is hindered too much and someone somewhere just has OBS with some adhoc script on top running 24/7 to capture youtube videos. The conversation of when is adblocking piracy etc seems to me to be coming to a natural end (at least as far as legalilties go).
One saving grace the internet has bestowed on media is that it is easier to follow creators and fund their work (if you can afford it).
The whole point of having ads be separate from the video is for youtube to easily distance itself from malicious ads. If an ad is malicious it can easily be reported and taken out of commission. But if ads are now part of the video, what stops an ad from being an ISIS beheading clip in the middle of a video made for children? If there is still a way to still report it, then there is a way to recognize the ad.
Also how will this interfere with creators? Editing a video and giving it a proper pace is already a huge challenge. But now ads can just be automaticaly cut into it without the creators control? That’s gonna fuck up so many quality channels. That’s already a big problem with the current system, bit at least you can skip or block them.
The ads are not part of the stored video file, they are sent in as chunks of the stream in place of the actual video. When the ad is done, the regular video starts playing again. They are not “editing in” anything to be permanently stored as part of an uploaded video.
Yes. The way it works now is:
But presumably with the new system, your computer will just receive a continuous bitstream with ads embedded in them. What was previously happening on your machine through HTML or JavaScript and was detectable by ad blockers, will now happen on YouTube servers beholind the scenes.
They just escalated the arms race between ad and ad blocker. All this could have been avoided if they actually did something about the scam ads.
No, it could not have been avoided. I don’t watch ads. Ads don’t need to be “scam ads” for me to not watch them. I just don’t. Full stop.
So, how will content creators be reimbursed for the long hours they put into creating YouTube videos? There are honest people out there who made content creation their job. I say that to express I’m not talking about content farms, clickbait creators or “Mr. Beast” types - those are all media companies, although they also have bills to pay.
Did you get a premium account?
I love this mentality. This idea that forcing someone who hates ads to watch a bunch of ads somehow magically makes more wealth happen. The whole thing is a bubble desperately trying not to burst by basically forcing more ads in more places where it actually makes very little difference.
I wonder if creators are actually going to get paid any better if YouTube forces more people to watch ads on their channels. My bet is not.
Ad-revenue is literally how content creators get paid. If you’re using an adblocker (like me) then you’re freeriding. They’re not getting any money from us viewing their videos.
Nobody is forcing anyone to watch ads. That’s the alternative available to people who don’t want to pay. The other alternative is premium membership. Which ever you choose makes money for the creators. Blocking ads doesn’t.
I hate ads just as much as the next guy but this mentality of expecting to get content for free is ridiculous. That’s unbelieveably narrow sighted and self-centered thinking. If subscribtion based business model was the norm instead of ads-based then we’d have none of the issues that come with targeted advertising. On the other hand if one thinks google is evil company and don’t want to give them money then stop using their products. Damn hypocrites…
Great. If YouTube removes viewers’ abilities to block ads, resulting in more ads watched, will content creators get an increase in pay?
Again, I doubt it.
You’ve missed the whole point. Ads exist to encourage people to spend money on products, therefore companies profit from paying for advertisements.
Where does the profit come from if someone who doesn’t deal with ads is forced to watch an ad? Do you think that person is just going to decide to spend money?
Secondly, if a creator adds a 1-2m sequence in their video to talk about a sponsor, no one is tracked, no one knows any better if uninterested viewers skip past it, and it’s usually very relevant to that creator’s target audience. I have zero qualms with such a system, and sometimes it’s actually really entertaining.
Morals or not, this is Google scraping at the bottom of the barrel to invent value where there is VERY little to be had. Data-invasive, targeted advertising is superfluous and needs to die.
The creator gets paid for people watching the ads, not for buying the product. For the most part the point of ads is to increase brand recognition which in turn increases sales. Ads work wether you think they do or not. It’s among the most studied economic fields. There’s a good reason companies spend a ton of money on advertising. More people seeing ads = more sales. I too like to tell myself a story about how I’m immune to ads but I know I’m not.
I agree. The alternative is paying for the service eg. subscribtion based business model.
Targeted or not - I’m not going to watch ads. If it’s a bad service like Instagram I’m just going to stop using it but in the case of YouTube if they manage to make adblocking sufficiently difficult and inconvenient then I’m going to buy premium. I can’t blame them for wanting to get rid of freeriders. If I was them I would probably want to too. Blocking ads is like piracy; I participate in it but it cannot be morally justified. I’m effectively stealing.
Creators do get paid a share of the ad impressions. Many also are completely open about it and post videos of how well their videos did and how much money they earned from monetized videos, i. e. videos with ads - this is also why you hear many avoiding e. g. swear words, since YT’s auto detection will then flag their video for de-monetization.
But funny enough, that’s not what I said at all. The cost of running YouTube and the cost of the creators must be paid (plus creating an incentive to produce high quality content in the first place). That can be achieved by ads or by offering a subscription.
My original question still stands: if you were to build a video streaming platform tomorrow, what would your model for financing operation and content creation be?
Do adblocked videos prevent creators from having another view registered for a monetized video?
I don’t know how to do a video platform. If I had the time and skill, I’d rather make a FOSS, federated platform for creators/studios to host and finance however they want. Odds are they would never be as egregious as YouTube is being, and I’d be less inclined to skip their ads.
Individually, no. But each view not generating ad revenue does still generate streaming costs. If no one would pay Google to host their ads on YT, I doubt they’d keep the platform online.
Now don’t get me wrong, the threshold at which Google decides that the ratio of adblocked to regular viewers is exceeding their business model is most likely based on corporate greed, and the recent crackdowns on ad blocking are due to the same reason. I think they’re doing fine and there is no need for the recent initiative - but it would be equally dishonest claiming running a platform the size and outreach of YouTube could be done without large investments, one way or the other.
Well this kind of renders the whole “if you don’t watch the ads, content creators can’y get paid” morality approach meaningless, don’t you think?
Where is the money supposed to come from? Companies pay Google to put up ads expecting a return on the investment. If Google starts forcing people who inherently avoid advertisements to watch advertisements, what value is that actually supposed generate for either of Google’s customers? I’d just walk away from the screen like I do with regular television.
I don’t think that was ever a moral issue. We’re talking about large corporations in a capitalist setting, moral is not something to bring up in that discussion.
Also, no one said end users are morally obliged to watch ads. The gist is: some kind of revenue stream must exist so that the operator of the platform keeps it running and the creators are enabled to create content.
A paid subscription is a perfectly valid alternative, as are platforms like Nebula, which use that exact model of paid subscriptions. Patreon is a bit tricky since it only serves the content creator. Google famously shut down all kinds of projects without any consideration for their users, I have no doubt they’d pull the trigger on YouTube if it would serve them.
In a perfect world, ads should not exist at all. It took us decades to even regulate ads that are obviously harmful (alcohol, tobacco, gambling, ads propagating body issues via heavily manipulated images etc.), none of that should be forced down people’s throats. Unfortunately, however, we don’t live in a utopia, but in a capitalist hellscape, so when I talk to people, I actually want to know their practical ideas of keeping the show running.
Currently, I couldn’t recommend anyone to not run an adblocker, the internet would become unusable due to how intrusive and downright dangerous ads have become, both in content for certain audiences, and as networks to deliver malware.
Simple answers just longing for the good old days of the small web are nothing more than nostalgia and willfully ignore how the internet and the society using it have changed. That’s not a practical or remotely useful answer.
We are watching the system change as we speak, and I came here to discuss alternatives. I did not ask a moral question, although I do absolutely believe that people creating high quality content should be paid for their time. I genuinely want to know what people’s ideas and beliefs are and how they think the system will continue to work.
I’m sorry, I didn’t meant to imply you were making the morality argument, it’s just one I hear frequently. I meant to bring it up as an example.
I honestly don’t mind ads as a business model. I just wish they were non-invasive and relevant to the content.
Thanks, I do actually appreciate that comment.
It might have sounded like that at first, but I’m not actually shilling for a company trying to increase ad revenue, and I do hate what current ads have become.
Ads should not manipulate or downright endanger people, and there are also cases where we need to find a different mechanism to deliver ads to people entirely - if a podcast (for me, that means mostly audio dramas) advertises itself as immersive and is not on a platform where I can get an ad-free experience, I simply won’t be able to listen to it. Being immersed into a supernatural, cosmic horror doesn’t go well with hearing about how I should switch my business page to SquareSpace.
I was fine with the “watch these 3 relevant ads in sequence and we leave you alone for the rest of the movie” concept, for example. That to me looks like an indirect form of payment, it’s transparent (no obnoxious product placement) and I can enjoy the rest of whatever media I’m consuming in peace.
Content creators should move to a platform that isn’t pushing far-right radicalization to kids watching video game streamers if they’d like me to pay for a premium account.
Should you then in turn also not consume content on YouTube at all? If so, great, you’re basically not affected by this discussion at all.
As for the topic itself: YouTube definitely has its share of problems, e. g. ElsaGate, unskippable ads in front of emergency medical advice, automated copyright strikes that are incredibly easy to abuse etc., but all those things are completely off topic.
Why are the things people are paying YouTube for not on topic when discussing payments to YouTube?
No. They make money if they find a sponsor. I also skip over those sponsors’ ads but the sponsors don’t know that or they accept a certain fraction of people not watching their ads. I just don’t watch ads. If, in the future, that means I cannot watch my favourite tubers’ content, well too bad, I’ll watch some ad-free netflix series or read a book or whatever. But one thing is certain: I’ll rather light my dick on fire than watching ads. I even joined a class action lawsuit against amazon because they want to make me watch ads without my consent.
But if you’re paying for Netflix, why wouldn’t you simply pay for a premium account that doesn’t show you the ads? Is the content from your favorite YouTubers really that bad in comparison? I’ll admit, for me, it’s absolutely the opposite.
I am subscribed to amazon prime, mainly because of the benefits I have regarding shopping. I might cancel that subscription however. I am really annoyed right now because they changed their return policy and they try to force ads on me while at the same time reporting their modt profitable quarter.
To be honest, I don’t think I would mind ad supported YouTube. For me, it’s the obvious scam ads that Google makes it really hard and obtuse to report that made me block them indiscriminately.
If it was regulated like TV commercials are, I don’t think I would’ve minded too much. Twitch has basically no scam ads in my experience, I just get a lot of gaming-related advertising which makes sense for a gaming-centric streaming site. Quality over quantity (at least by advertising standards, lol.)
Of course, this is just YouTube and Twitch. The rest of the Internet is pretty fucking awful and they’ll need to clean up how advertising is handled before people even think about giving up their adblockers. Yeah, ads are annoying, but people gotta eat.
I could agree with you if there weren’t SO. DAMN. MANY. youtube ads.
When I find myself in a rare circumstance where ads on youtube are not blocked for me, I literally cannot believe how bad it is.
Patreon, Nebula, ko-fi, etc.
How does the hosting provider for the actual content benefit from the Patreon accounts of the creators?
Hence, Nebula.
That is - political topics aside - the same as getting a YouTube subscription.
I’d still prefer a platform run by content creators, naturally, so I fully support Nebula.
In one case I would be paying the platform in order to support the creator. In the other case, I am paying the creator to support the platform
You are right of course, and I would like to make this point clearer for others in this thread: Nebula can only survive if people pay more than Nebula spends on getting them to subscribe in the first place (think ads etc.) , and if the annual streaming costs are covered (those were a little more than $250.000 / year last I checked).
The tool that works best for getting people to subscribe is direct advertisement by the creators (Click like and subscribe), so Nebula is heavily investing in creator sponsorships, around $5 million a year.
That is the platform supporting the creators via direct sponsorships.
Now that this is out of the way, I’m still not satisfied with the answer. First of all, I wanted to shed light on what, apart from decisions based on moral beliefs and political stance, would be different for you as an end user. Don’t get me wrong, those are perfectly valid reasons and in the end, I do believe every decision comes with a certain amount of politics attached to it, but I think those reasons won’t sway the masses.
Furthermore, YouTube has been doing the same thing for a couple of years now
Let me make it clear: overall, I like Nebula as a platform much better than Google as a company. I do not know enough about Nebula as a company to comment on how they will evolve over time. I’d personally love if all my favorite creators. would switch to a platform where I can support them in a more direct fashion by paying a parent entity vs. each creator individually, and where me and people I care about are never exposed to ads.
I really don’t care, most YouTubers I watch use Patreon and Twitch subscriptions for the bulk of their finances, think they buy candy with the pennies YouTube sends them.
I occasionally buy merch from them, that’s my support.
I think the unskippable and autoplaying ads are the point for me where I start actively finding ways to avoid ads. Anything that tries to force itself in front of my eyes or eclipses the actual content is kind of a no go.
It’s not that Youtube creators don’t deserve to be compensated (many if whom provide content to YT for free just to share, let’s remember) it’s that Google needs to find less obnoxious means of serving ads.
I’d be really curious to see the actual numbers of how much Google gets in revenue from YT and how much actually goes to paying creators. I’m betting the ratio is not as slim as they make it sound.
Most content creators don’t make money from ads. Google keeps on changing the rules to be able to monitize or keep monitizing their own videos. Google has put ads on videos when the creator did not reach the requirements to make money on ads.
This is why creators have sponsorahips, affliate links, their own merch, Patreon, or OnlyFans. They also use Youtube more as an ad platform for their other social media accounts like Instagram and Tiktok. Depending on the content some creators get paid more on Tiktok.
Yeah, if you listen to any content creator talk about sponsorship revenues it basically eclipses all other form of revenue for them.
I think it was Pokimane who got tired of people donating money and then being assholes if she wasn’t basically gushing over them for hours, so she just went “You know what, I don’t actually need your Twitch dontations.” and just turned them off.
Content creators make thousands of dollars per sponsorship deal minimum if they have a decent amount of viewers. Bigger creators like Ludwig get millions for some deals (Redbull gives him a crapload of money for product placement, for example).
The examples you cited are not individuals. Both Pokimane and Ludwig are basically media companies at this point in time.
And yes, the amount of money you get from YouTube is a lot less, although I’m being told major YouTubers have direct platform deals. But that’s not the issue:
In order to even get those lucrative sponsorships, you need the reach of a major platform in order to build an audience - that’s not happening without e. g. YouTube.
Yeah, but content creators haven’t deplatformed off YouTube. The closest might be streaming services like Nebula, but even those have subscriptions.
YouTube pays little to content creators for hosting the content, but they also pay for hosting the content. I can’t think of a case where content creators would pay to host their videos for others to watch for free without ads or a subscription.
What’s most valuable to Google is the user data. Google is still able to get a lot of user data even if blockers are on. Ads are really just a way to get even more data. If you click an ad 10 times and buy something just 1 time, that information is more valuable than the ability to put ads in front of you.
What good is user data if you don’t use it for advertising?
I said one was more valuable. That doesn’t mean they don’t go well together.
Anyway you can use data to nudge users. For example, Google can change search result orders. They can promote one company/research/ideology/party to the top and demote others.
Finding out where certain people are important for law enforcement or press.
Stores give out free wifi to track your MAC address and see where you go in stores. They sell this data, use it to track theives, or use it for better product placement.
This is advertising.
This service isn’t that valuable, and extracting the value required is going to be a PR nightmare.
So A-B testing for their advertising?
But it goes back to my earlier assertion that the value of user data is generally to help with advertising.
No everything has to be for profit in this life.
I’ve no contract with them, I’ve not made any purchases. They post something online for anyone to see.
They are completely free of locking their content behind a paywall, there are plenty of platforms for that.
But I want to make my first statement clear: no every single thing any human being does has to be done just for the sole purpose of getting an economical profit. That would be the death of humanity.
I still remember 90s internet when we had tons of websites with lots of content that was just there because the creators were fans of such content, no further intentions. Barely any ads or monetization whatsoever. The ‘shark’ mentality is killing internet.
Sure. But nobody had to invest multiple hours each day into maintaining their Geocities page - there are only so many animated GIFs you could load over a modem connection anyway. Also, are we really comparing the hosting expenses of fucking YouTube with static 90s fan pages?
People expect edited videos from content creators these days. Even someone filming a hobby in their home shop will get barked at for having bad audio quality, if, this week for once, they forgot to charge the batteries on their wireless Rode lavalier mic.
That’s why so many content creators do have e. g. Patreon. Many of them are providing peeks behind the scenes and create transparency to show how much effort a single video takes, and even individuals often hire someone to do the video edits for them.
If you’re fine watching unedited, 5-10 minute videos that can be churned out with next to no effort, all good. I’m really into 40-90 minute long videos and personally view YouTube as an alternative to obtain the content type I prefer, but I’d rather not sacrifice quality. I also prefer creators who provide a serialized format and upload a video every week - in that way, I guess I’m old fashioned.
This type of content is impossible to make without financial support, which I’ll gladly provide one way or the other. However, how much the average person can afford in terms of monthly subscription fees is certainly limited, so a company offering access to multiple creators for a flat subscription fee is absolutely reasonable.
They do not, look how popular meme compilation are.
Hater will hate, welcome to the internet.
There were much edited 40-90 minute video before there were ad on youtube. There were high quality page long essay on internet before youtube exist. Do not need ad or revenue or money support to get your content.
In 90s people did thing because passion. Now because passion and money. Still can make thing only because passion, never got impossible.
I use an adblocker, but I watch sponsored segments from the creator, we know they earn money from those and they are often relevant to the channel
I’ve seen people who make money from YouTube, and I’ve no interest in seeing them continue to get paid. If somebody actually makes something worth paying for, they can take their shit to Netflix or whoever. They aren’t going to pay some manchild to yell at videogames all day.
I have seen plenty of people who make excellent content and who I’d consider to be decent human beings. I also used to believe that YouTube was a cesspool hosting only crap, and I think it was via some new hobbies that I discovered the decent offerings.
That by the way is why I explicitly mentioned channels and personalities I’d like to exclude from my claim that creators that should receive financial support to be able to keep creating content.
Patreon, sponsorships, and Nebula
You realize you could watch every ad on every video a creator puts out for a year and generate them less than a coffee, yeah? If you care go give them 5 dollars.
Fuck, an integrated donation/payment thing on YouTube would go so much farther for Google’s profit than ads ever would as well!
You realize I mentioned in several other comments in this thread that I am pretty aware of the financial structures involved in content creation on various platforms? That’s also a fallacy, as thousands or millions are watching a given video and it’s not on me alone to generate the required financial support, so the value my ad impressions generate is proportional to that number.
You realize I mentioned why donations made by individuals, to individuals, are not ideal and not sustainable? How many creators can a single individual support? Let’s say I am interested in 70 creators, should my media consumption cost me $350 a month, or should the cost be divided by all their subscribers and ideally be fairly managed by a platform?
I do care, and I do support content creators with my money directly, thank you. I also happen to have paid subscriptions, although as my other comment mentions, out of necessity, not because I believe that to be an ideal situation (in the case of YouTube, specifically).
YouTube introducing a KoFi - like donation button with minimal UX threshold and minimal processing fees with the benefits going directly to the creator? I fully support that idea.
Bingo
It could’ve been. You and me probably would’ve blocked ads regardless of their content for various reasons, but I’d imagine that Google wouldn’t have reached this critical mass prompting this scheme if their ads were properly vetted.
The technologically literate capable of installing ad blockers are the minority, and those who’d do it out of principle are a smaller subset of those
Not scam ads, intrusive ads. A decade ago i read cracked and the only ads were non intrusive sidebar ads or a banner at the top. They didn’t play music, they didn’t interrupt what i was doing, they just existed. Google, being the near complete monopoly it is, could easily force the standard to return to that and many people would never even go looking for adblockers.
I was using that as an umbrella term though I should have specified both scam ads and intrusive ads that are a vector for malware.
.
Meaning they can bury that toxic ad placement bidding now?
No need to answer, i know they wont.
How it works is that once you start getting these Server Side Ads (SSA), Youtube will create a sort of queue of videos in place of your usual video, with the first few being ads that can’t be skipped and have a red bar (not yellow) and in the end you’ll get your video. They are not literally part of the original video stream, they are separate streams that get injected as if they were the original video. It’s called SSAP, and I’ve been experiencing it from the last weekend. In the meantime, they’ve pretty much broken their player to implement this.
Ublock Origin has released a temporary fix yesterday here
Alternatively, you can use this extension to redirect from YouTube videos to piped.video I used it, it works very well, can’t guarantee for much more.
edit: fixed wording
Anything that makes it distinct gives a blocking opportunity, I assume?
<img alt="" src="https://thedisinsider.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/so-youre-telling-me-theres-a-chance-1600x900-1.webp">
Yeah, there’s ways around this. It’s just that most of the ublock origin blocking specific code, isn’t reusable here and the team will need to start over to deal with this new tactic/approach from Google.
The cure might eventually be worse than the disease though. If not now, or tomorrow, then the next day.
I’ll let the ublock team carve demonic sigils into me and sacrifice my grandma if that’s what it escalates to, I’d sooner lose YouTube entirely than sit through those ads
You could also use something like GrayJay, I’ve been using it for a while now and haven’t had any issues with it.
I am excited. This will break my YouTube addiction.
It’ll only affect me when I need to fix something I’m unfamiliar with, and it’llead creators to using other platforms for that kind of material, and lower the barrier to entry.
I don’t know why Google is shooting themselves in the foot like this. I mean, it’ll be profitable in the short run, yes, but this will almost certainly be devastating to their bottom line in the long run if it works as planned.
Have you looked at the Unhooked extension. You can choose to hide recommended videos, which was a game changer for me.
Disabling my watch history did the trick lol
YouTube’s recommendations are such absolute trash if you turn that off (I’m assuming intentionally, to get you to enable it).
Yeah, I love that feature! Disabling watch history makes using Youtube so much more pleasant imo:
So thanks Google for letting me opt out of your BS.
The day I’m forced to watch YouTube ads is the day I’ll stop using it.
Google knows their service is addictive and is banking on people being willing to eat an unlimited amount of shit in order to watch a bald man from Vancouver spend 12 minutes talking about his Peloton ride that morning. Realistically, they are probably right. There is no competition to YouTube. Hasn’t been for years. And there probably never will be ever again. Capitalism trends towards natural monopolies as infrastructure and complexity of operations makes startup costs prohibitive.
Oh man, I wonder why no one ever thought of randomly injecting ads into content before? What geniuses they must have working at YouTube. I can’t even comprehend the big-brainedness. I’m sure people will love it.
I don’t see any technical specification in the article, but if they inject the ad at the start of the video, making it part of the video itself, would make possible to just skip it using video controls. To avoid user skippin ad thru video controls there should be client-side script blocking it, so an ad-blocker can use this to tell apart an ad from the video itself.
Can anyone correct me on this?
Also, would this affect piped and invidious too?
That sounds correct for me. It is possible for them to switch to a system where everyone can manually skip past the ad in the video stream but adblockers are useless (by not sending and indication of the ad to the client), but I don’t see that happening since most people don’t use adblockers and letting all of them easily skip past every ad is probably bad for profits.
There’s already addons that can recognize in-video sponsored content and skip, if youtube splices in ads into the video stream these addons will still work (although depending on how strict server side logic is, they may have to pause when the buffer runs out until the time of the ad length has passed)
It doesn’t recognize the sponsor sections. The community does that. I don’t believe there is any tool right now that can automatically detect the sponsor sections.
Honestly it would be trivial for them to make the video controls server side too and simply not accept fast forward commands from the client during the ad.
We might be in a “Download and edit to watch ad-free” world with this change.
Seems too much, really. Even if they do such a terrible thing, would they not expose a “report ad” or “see the product” buttons? Video buffer is still locally downloaded.
I accept having to wait until the video downloads past the ad. Certainly not going to watch the ad.
It’s not literally part of the video, exactly because of what you describe. They are separate streams that get injected into the player before the normal video. You can’t skip them or interact with them in any way (pretty sure it also breaks any purchase links etc). Piped or Invidious don’t have them, ytdl also doesn’t download them.
As of now, afaik, you won’t see them if your account wasn’t selected for the experiment, if you are in incognito mode (with uBO on) or if you have uBlock Origin (and other adblockers) off (you’ll see the normal ads and then the video).
Otherwise, apply uBO new script if you get them
How does this actually works? Can you point me to technical documentation about this?
I’ve only found info about SSAI, not about SSAP. Is it the same?
I believe this describes them altering the ad host at load time for the page. DNS blocking of ad serving hosts only work if the hostname stays predictable, so just having dynamically named hosts that change in the loading of the page would make blocking more difficult.
Example: 1234.youtube-ads.com is blocked by AdBlockerX. 5678.youtube-ads-xyz.com is not on the blocklist, so is let through. All they have to do is cycle host or domain names to beat DNS blocking for the most part.
Previously, injecting hostnames live for EACH page load had two big issues:
DNS propagation is SLOW. Creating a new host or domain and having it live globally on multiple root servers can take hours, sometimes days.
Live form injection of something like this takes compute, and is normally set as part of a static template.
They’re just banking on making more money from increased ad revenue to offset the technical challenges of doing this, and offsetting the extra cost of compute. They’re also betting that the free adblocking tools will not spend the extra effort to constantly update and ship blocklist changes with updated hosts. I guarantee some simple logic will be able to beat this with client-side blocklist updating though (ie: tool to read the page code and block ad hosts). It’ll be tricky, probably have some false positives here and there, but effective.
As long as the naming pattern is distinct from important domains you can still block it based on pattern matching. They need to obfuscate ad domains and other hosting domains the same way.
Creating subdomains is quite fast because the request goes right through when it’s unknown to caches, it’s updates when you reuse existing ones that causes trouble with lag.
I’ve tested making new subdomains, it’s literally minutes in real life. Sure, in some pathological case it might be hours, but it’s not actually going to happen realistically.
It’s probably going to be like twitch. I’m sure they’ll eventually succeed in making it so you can stream videos without watching ads but they’ll never be able to stop people from downloading the video and skipping the ad in vlc.
Can’t you block ads on twitch?
In live videos they replace what you’re watching
Google uses tax avoidance schemes and I use ad avoidance schemes.
you’re actually helping by lowering the amount of revenue they have to shuffle offshore and hide from the feds.
YouTube’s next move might make it virtually impossible to watch YouTube
YouTubes past moves have been to make it impossible to block adds. What else is new in the world?
Is water still wet?
And once everybody is watching ads and nobody is skipping them, YouTube will start making the commercials shorter and less invasive, right Anakin?
When I have to wade through sixteen different “Would you like to join YouTube Plus!?!?!?!” pop-ups every time I whisper the words “online video” in the direction of my phone, I’m rarely inclined to use YouTube to begin with. Its a bad fucking service.
My TV doesn’t pull this shit on me. I get Show -> Ads -> Show -> Ads in regularly spaced intervals, like I’m a civilized human being. I don’t get WOULD YOU LIKE TO GET SLIGHTLY FEWER ADS!!! GIVE ME
$8$12$15$20!!! every time the fucking thing turns on.People will find a way to get around it, I could see buffering a video for 5 mins or even downloading the entire video ala locally playing podcasts, then using AI or some type of frame analyzation technique t to skip ads. Or just skip them like good old fashion Tivo from your player.
Freetube has a sponsor skip feature, skips sponsored sections of videos automatically, so it looks like this has already been solved
server side video ad injection means they could vary the placement of the ad, so things like sponsorblock which relies on the segment being in the exact same place all the time would not be very effective
Read the article
TBH I don’t expect AI to be able to solve this.
Sponsorblock does this through crowdsourcing
The more that use it the better it works!
I’m surprised at this point that people are still trying to circumvent Terrible. Just stop using YT altogether.
They should but easy to say than done. In the end they will return back to it if no better or at least equal alternatives are out there to fill the vacuum.
Yup, I’m investigating alternatives like Nebula and generally reducing my YouTube use, but that’s not going to work for a lot of people. The Grayjay app helps a lot.
This is such a weird take. There is 20 years of content on youtube and not just like, unboxing videos or AI generated kid stuff or whatever. Theres family recordings and DIY vids for literally everything, to college courses from like, Yale and Harvard, to vocational videos I use for my job. All of the videos that radicalized me into an Ancom on are youtube. Every song ever recorded, including rare songs like second hand accounts of slave field hymns. Old, obscure movies, especially where the copyright holder doesnt give a fuck, are available for free. Small indie projects, like small groups producing shorts, and small bands making their own music, are on youtube. And yes, millions of hours of people playing video games, or sports high lights, or wrestling high lights, or video essays or whatever, are all on youtube.
The world is the way it is. Do I wish the web was more diversified? I do. Do I wish Alphabet didnt have us over a barrel like this? Of course. But youtube is almost a utility at this point; its like saying dont use the roads bro, eventually they will listen to us and put in light rail tracks. I would love for that to happen but you gotta get to work in the mean time.
YT spent the last 15 years stomping out all competition, so now that they have accomplished that, they jack up the rates… (or in this case jack up the ads)
classic capitaism
And use what? I’m not on YouTube for YouTube. I’m on YouTube for the content that is often unavailable elsewhere.
I already barely watch YouTube. It’s mostly for music videos. Google can fuck itself to death.
What do you propose Google do instead? Run YouTube at a loss?
Youtube doesn’t pay attention to what ads get approved, or where they get served. Ive heard stories of people getting served two hours full amateur movies as ads, Ive heard of people getting soft core porn served as an ad, to actual scams and crypto pitches. It’s like Facebooks new AI enabled algorithm. There is actual danger, considering children and the elderly get sucked in to youtubes black hole?
I watched a couple videos on the Diddy case, and a couple days later my whole feed was filled with the worst conspiracy theories and Christian preachers.
I watch one Youtuber talking about pyramids, YouTube fills my whole suggestions with ancient alien conspiracies.
I watched one cover of a song, I get recommended the same song for weeks.
I watch one reaction video, the whole feed turns into reaction videos within minutes.
It’s a fight against the algorhytm and it isn’t fun. It’s incredible how dumb it is after all these years, and those algprhythms are partly to blame that everyone feels more miserable than they are.
I just turn off recommendations (disable watch history) and use a third party app where I can disable recommendations (Grayjay and NewPipe). I just want my subscriptions and search, that’s all.
Why Download a 3rd party app if the mobile browser works the same?
But it doesn’t… Here are some features I like about Grayjay/NewPipe:
So, what’s the difference to Firefox with some add ons then?
That someone else gets my login data and view data to sell?
I don’t login. Grayjay/NewPipe doesn’t send any data to its servers, so they’re not tracking viewed content. I also get subscriptions and playlists (again, w/o Youtube account) in addition to the features I mentioned. Afaik, you can’t get any of that with addons.
How do they make money then? Nothing is free, and usually when it sounds too good, it is.
Grayjay sells licenses for the app ($10), which doesn’t provide any benefits other than helping support the project.
unhook.app
Also let’s you block certain elements
Make a fair payment model. No classic subscription. But pay per watched minute, and when you hit a certain amount of minutes, every additional minute is free.
Google is operating at a 24% net profit margin. They don’t need to get their shareholders more money…
Do you actually understand how this works? It’s a beautiful statement and oh so noble, but it just flies against how the world really works.
At some point, maybe not today, but at some point, you’re going to be saving up for your retirement. Your money will be invested; either passively or actively. If active, a fund manager (or maybe even yourself) will be spending time, every single day, wondering how to maximise the invested cash. If passive, you’re letting a WHOLE lot of fund managers make the decisions for you (wisdom of the crowd). Either way, Google better fucking perform or the investors will go elsewhere.
And you’ll be an investor too, asking for Google to do better than anyone else or you’ll take your savings elsewhere.
If investors go elsewhere then they’re trading for a higher risk and return ratio than a massive company with rich history like Google. Plus, it frequently performs large buybacks and offers, and even offered a dividend recently. There is always going to be something attractive to investors, here.
Agreed there is a mix of things Google can do to remain attractive. But at the core, Google has to be a better investment than something else to remain invested into.
You can buy Microsoft or Apple, hardly the riskiest stocks
One thing I genuinely don’t get: why does a company making this much money need “investors”? (Other than participating in the make-rich-people-richer scheme)
Once you’ve gone public, unless some entity could do an offer to take you private, you have investors (aka owners).
To take Google private would be in the region of 2.5 trillion dollars. Even the Norwegian oil fund would struggle to do that.
Because they own the company
You aren’t an investor if you are planning to resell. Day trading and real investment are totally at odds. It’s far better (for retirement) to invest in a stable company and get a set return over time for it. We also don’t even need to do that for retirement, the fact that we do is fucking insane.
You’re arguing against the world that is. I’m just trying to explain the behaviour, not necessarily condone it.
A pension fund manager may not move in and out of stocks on a daily basis, but at some point they’re going to take a look at how their portfolio is doing and react.
Millennials and zoomers are not saving up for retirement, barely able to sustain themselves. They’re also expecting ecological collapse to cause global famine or their own nation to go full Reich, assuming they’re not killed by hurricanes, wildfire or war.
Agreed, many young people can’t save. That’s why I said “maybe not today, but at some point”. I’m not saying it’s easy for young people, I’m trying to explain why companies seek to increase profitability and that almost every investor is self-centred.
First, individually targeted advertisement should be illegal. Instead of trying to figure out who I am and serving me ads based on that, they should only be able to look at server side facts. What is the video? This is how television and radio ads have worked for ages. You have a video about SomePopBand, you advertise concert tickets. You have a video about bikes, you advertise bike stuff. You don’t know who I am. Suddenly, the motivation for most of the privacy invading, stalking, nonsense is gutted.
Some people would still block those static ads. If they showed some restraint, I think more people would accept them. But that’s a sad joke- no profit driven org is going to show restraint.
Secondly, if they can’t ethically run the business at a profit, the business probably doesn’t deserve to exist. That or it’s a loss leader to get people into the ecosystem.
You do know you can enter into your Google settings and disable all tracking and targeting, right? And you can ask them to delete all information they already hold on you.
Yes. However, it’s an assumption they honor those requests and don’t try to track you anyway.
Plus Google isn’t the only company trying to do individualized targeted advertising.
Agreed you have to trust them. However, I suspect GDPR punishments keep them to their word.
I mean, yeah. It did so for years.
Yes right. But what does the investor environment look like today? Profit, not users, is what everyone is counting. If Google says “we’re burning cash in all businesses but search, but hey we’re nice”, investors will take their investments to more profitable businesses.
They actually have a pretty huge net profit margin and what basically amounts to a monopoly on advertisement, so even if their ads reached less intended targets it wouldn’t hurt their bottom line much.
Didn’t you know? It’s doesn’t matter that they’re still making billions more than they ever made, numbers have to go higher.
This makes me puke.
Let me buy an API token anonymously, similar to how Mullvad works. I’m happy to pay for what I watch, but I don’t want to be tracked at all, and I don’t trust their internal settings.
Until that’s a thing, I’ll watch without an account using an ad-blocker. Give me that experience with the apps I use (Grayjay and NewPipe), and I’ll pay.
They could use their monopolies to force advertisers to pay a fair amount for a decent ad instead of taking pennies to ruin the Internet. I never even considered using an ad blocker back when it was just banner ads. Or maybe they could stop being a full decade behind the times and add donations to YouTubers for a cut. If they add value to premium instead of trying to remove value from the base experience they could even triple dip on these ideas.
Yes. Google bought YouTube. Alphabet is worth $2 trillion. The social control and data mining is value to Google enough.
Shut down operations immediately
The internet was a mistake. We had a good run. Lot of fun was had, but it hasn’t made anyone’s life better. I say we roll things back to the ARPANET days. The internet should exclusively be used for disseminating post-graduate level academic research and DOD projects. Everyone else can read the newspaper on their train ride in their full 3 piece suits to their union job at the business factory.
No, FAANG is killing the internet
We kill them, internet good again
Or else, I laser off the optics from soviet early launch satellites and … well. … you know
Yes, because Twitter is SO much better than Facebook. /s
It’s too late now, but only if they didn’t put so many ads in the first place, less people would be blocking them. They could also make YouTube premium affordable by removing all the features except “no ads”.
Some time ago I would’ve bought YouTube premium, but it had so many features I didn’t want driving up the price that I just didn’t. I instead switched to Firefox and ads were gone again. Good job google, drove me off YouTube premium and Google chrome at the same time.
I sort of spent a decade uploading and streaming to it, started before it was even bought by Google, so I’ve really dug myself a pit at this point.
Youtube is aware that serving ads to people who hate ads is going to reduce these brands’ value, right? I thought that was the reason they were ok with adblockers before…
They have decided that the damage is worth less than the cost of serving videos to users with add blocks. Only time will tell if they are right.
If the amount of people that just put up with ads currently instead of switching to Firefox is anything to go by, I think the number of people who truly care is less that you might think. Especially when YouTube is such a monopoly.
The people that hate YT ads hate Google already anyways.
Fuckin bring it, we’ll adapt
I accidentally watched YouTube the other night without adblock, OMFG what an experience.
If I can’t watch with adblock I’ll just stop using it, it’s only a rabit hole to waste time for me anyway.
Same, just like when reddit killed 3rd party apps
Yup, and I’m not willing to pay for Youtube Premium because the app kinda sucks and I don’t like Google keeping track of what I watch. I’m willing to pay, but I’d really like to keep using the 3rd party apps I prefer (Grayjay and NewPipe).
So like Reddit, I’ll drop Youtube if my 3rd party apps stop working. That’s my line in the sand. If Youtube wants to get money from me, it needs to be through an API disassociated from my identity.
Finally a use case where AI/Machine learning would absolutely make sense. If we can have AI that can generate text or images, imitate people’s voices or write code, we can also have a lightweight model that can detect ads and skip them during playback. There’s a model trained on SponsorBlock data for detecting sponsored segments github.com/xenova/sponsorblock-ml
I’m sure that we can have something similar but for embedded ads.
It already exists. Although it's not AI, and mostly works best when using channel logos to work out the ad breaks.
It’s hard to run AI on phones and low-end hardware though. It’s not that easy.
Give it 5 more years in hardware performance improvements and software/model optimization and I don’t see a problem. The important part is that improvements are made public for everyone to use and improve upon instead of letting openai and microsoft take the whole cake
It’s called a classifier and it could easily detect an embedded ad. The issue is now everyone needs to run it on their hardware to detect and this will cost some electricity.
Fine with me
Well I’m not happy about potentially adding new type of load on the electrical grids around the world.
Do you understand what we’re still talking less energy than the monitor it displays on. I would bet even untuned VGG16 could do that without even a fine tune. Advertising is starkly different to content and the output is a “ad=yes/no” signal. It’s a very small amount of data, probably less than the plain hardware video decoder. It’s also not a new type of load, it runs off the same power supply as any computer, a slight capacitive load, it won’t even change the grid powerfactor.
Ads have definitely added more load on electrical grids in aggregate than locally hosted and lightweight models, especially given that ads are fucking everywhere all the time. Websites, apps, the servers, even 24/7 electric billboards. I’m not worried about a few nerds using slightly more electricity sometimes for their own benefit and joy (it’s still less power than gaming), as opposed to a corp that burns through power and breaks their climate pledges (Microsoft) for the benefit of their bottom line and nothing else. Corps don’t get to have a monopoly on AI that was built with our data, only to have it fed back to us to pull more data and siphon more money.
So basically fuck Google and fuck ads.
i would rather have video go black for the duration of ad than watch that filth
Used to put up with this back when Hulu was free. Adblockers weren’t as sophisticated then, so I had to watch 2 minutes of a black screen every commercial break. Still better than watching ads.
Good. This is how YouTube dies. This is how Google dies. This is how competitors/alternatives are born. Stop fighting to make Google services useable against every effort of theirs. Let them drive people away to make (or discover) alternatives.
It has been THE viteo platform for literally decades. There is so much content there; it would be a tremendous effort to direct that elsewhere.
And that other site would quickly succumb to storage and bandwidth costs. What options could exist?
The only option left would be PeerTube if it federated with every other PeerTube instance by default, like Lemmy
Wishfull thinking. Sadly the truth.
It’s nearly impossible to have that high of a federation and preventing a centralization to not loose any videos (except if the creators chose so).
damn
Nebula is interesting. You pay for a subscription, which funds creators and platform costs.
Sounds like a survivable approach. Except: has anyone heard of it? I hadn’t.
It’s owned and populated by history and science/engineering YouTubers, so if you’re not usually watching that side of YouTube, you might not find much on Nebula for you.
On the flipside, that’s most of what I watch, so I hear about it all the time.
The youtubers that are on nebula place ads of it on almost every one of their videos.
If you haven’t heard about nebula it’s because:
Same for Floatplane
Sure, use anything that’s not Youtube.
So… YouTube Premium.
Yup, but no Google tracking, but they seem to do other tracking.
Do you have any idea how many billions with a B it would take to even start a viable, proper competitor to youtube? and how quickly that capital B could end up becoming a Capital T?
I hate people who keep screaming about let youtube die and alternatives will be born.
Youtube has been shit for years. No ones made an alternative that is viable.
Any an all alternatives are subscription based services, and tiny. Like Floatplane, Utreon and whatever the gunfocused one is that I cant remember off the top of my head, if it even still exists.
Anyone that has that kinda money are probably already in bed with googles capitalistic hellscape ideals for hte internet and not interested in going against them.
Creating competitors for things like Reddit and Facebook are relatively easy. Creating a competitor for something that probably accumulates hundreds of terabytes, if not more, per hour? That takes insane amounts of storage, and bandwidth, and overhead, and everything else that costs more than any regular person could ever have a hope of even having a wet dream over.
If you tried to create a centralized one? Yeah, it would take a lot. Would a decentralized one be as expensive? I’m not sure.
I think the best goal would be to try to create a platform for creators that has a low barrier to entry - both in terms of cost and skill - that gives them the ability to easily and quickly set up a “channel” to “broadcast” from and earn some revenue somehow.
Why build one competitor to YouTube when we could build a billion of them?
Because thats the very reason why people hate current streaming services, and you’re arguing to not only make it worse than that, but to make the end users eat the costs of storage and bandwidth.
If they shared the same protocol, or at least reasonably compatible versions of it, you could have one app that does all of them.
The protocol isn’t the hard part. It’s the monetizing that is. Creators aren’t looking to provide content for free, especially if they are also now paying for hosting costs.
Ad spots (like Google does) work well because they can inject an up to date ad into an old video. In something like the fedeverse today a creators only option would be ads baked into the video, but they would only get paid for that up front which isn’t ideal…
Sponsors pay much more than views. So does patrons.
The true issue is discoverability in my opinion.
Sponsors pay more upfront. If creators are only using sponsors than their whole back catalogue is basically valueless. If it costs a creator 2-10 cents a month to host a video (based off S3 pricing), but they only made 1000$ on it upfront when the video was made, overtime the back catalogue becomes a pretty significant financial burden if it’s not being monetized
Also it’s worth keeping in mind that many people are also using tools to autoskip sponsor spots, and the only leverage creators have for being paid by sponsors are viewership numbers.
Patreon is irrelevant, that’s just like Nebula, floatplane etc, it’s essentially a subscription based alternative to YouTube.
Discoverability is pointless if the people discovering you aren’t going to financial contribute. It’s the age old “why don’t you work for me for free, the exposure I provide will make it worth your time”, that hasn’t been true before and likely isn’t here. Creators aren’t looking to work for free (at least not the ones creating the high quality content we’re used to today)
You don’t understand why people hate streaming fragmentation.
You can have a billion decentralized openyoutube all on the same page, just look how lemmy already does it.
Podcast also did it with RSS. Agglomeration isn’t an issue on a decentralized open platform
…i think pornhub’s leaving money on the table not starting a SFW video platform…
Normhub, the hub for normal videos.
Notpornhub
considering pornhubs history of legal troubles, I doubt they are much inclined.
Users spend hours on YT, and 30 secs on PH. They’d have to scale their infrastructure up massively.
Look at this guy and his whole 30s
Yet bittorrent does youtube fives times over with central governance. You have drunk too much cloud coolaid. My laptop could host my youtube channel without issue and I would still have enough juice to play counter strike and download the latest marvel slop movie.
Boy howdy, users sure would love to pivot to a peer distributed content system that randomly downloads chunks of a video file as they become available with speeds of anywhere between 2 bytes and 2 megabytes a second (which one you’ll get depends on who you’re getting the chunks from) with literally no guarantee of being able to even complete said download because the people they’re downloading it from may not all have the entire file’s worth of combined data across their respective computers, and they have to download the entire video before watching it to determine whether or not they even want to watch it in the first place. Also, there’s no capacity for monetization without literally doing what Google is trying to do and injecting advertisements directly into the video, so there’s no incentive for any content producers to use this system to distribute said content, meaning it would be a ghost town of a service from the start.
Yep, that would be a great system. /s
If the file is that poorly seeded, and therefore extremely sparsely watched, then the laptop with a broken screen in my closet can serve it to anyone who wants it.
The only reason we need a scalable system, is to handle high demand / broad appeal media and in that case, what you describe WON’T happen.
For low demand media, https off my mom’s coffemaker will do just fine.
That means anyone posting 100-200 video to youtube today, can easily handle all these situation with less expense than the price of whatever camera they filmed the content with to begin with.
Youtube only exists, because us, old internet fucks, got lazy and relied on google for mail and video.
We could EASILY EASILY EASILY done it ourselves.
A service people want to use is typically one with redundancy and high availability. Your laptop could overheat, have a drive failure, spontaneously lose its wifi connection, or a million other things. It’s fundamentally unreliable.
Scalability isn’t just about distribution. It’s about reliability and convenience - two things your system as described lacks by design. A video file that no one but you has ever seen has the same exact degree of accessibility as one served to millions.
This is the copium talking. If it had been easy to do and monetizable, it would have already been done. That’s the other part of the problem here. There is no incentive for anyone to use this system to consume or distribute content other than to decouple from Google. Opposition to an existing service is not enough of a motivator for people to use a system. It has to provide some comparative benefit that outweighs the cost incurred by continuing to use the other service. The big thing that Youtube has is, obviously, content. Exabytes of it. Your new service would have…nothing. We have left the age of services starting up and gaining massive movements of people behind them. We are now in an age of the internet in which the inertia of existing services will carry them decades into the future. Youtube is now too big to fail, and too big to be replaced.
Blockbuster died because its business model was rendered obsolete by virtue of widespread adoption of the internet and the advent of streaming. And because it refused to shift its business model away from physical media distribution to digital. Let me know when they invent something that makes the internet obsolete, will you? Because that is what it will take to dethrone YouTube.
I think YouTube will eventually end up destroying itself. It’s not a profitable business model to just run some ads. The amount of storage, bandwidth, and processing power a video host requires is massive.
We are in the age of the toy internet, it is all about to crumple like a house of card bought on cheap credit and unviable business models. Youtube is not long for this world and nobody will miss it. The only question is how much of it Archive Team can save before if goes up in flames. Well, the good parts of it, that’s easy but can we save the garbage too, I’m not sure. Take any channel on youtube and its creator can easily serve it’s entire catalog out of a obsolete chromebox with two usb sticks on the side. Even as small as a terabyte would still be mostly empty space. Youtube was built defective by design using 1970s ideology, it is immensely wasteful.
I want to see how you can serve thousands or millions of people with a Chromebook in your closet. And if you say p2p, that doesn’t deal with spikes in demand and a lot of old content will just vanish even easier than on YouTube. Also it would rely on people being willing to seed.
The main limitation is the 1 gigabit network. It can push out 260 3megabit streams or 50 15megabit streams at the most.
That’s already an enormous amount of concurrent viewers that covers 99% of content on youtube.
To achieve this, you can’t be wasting processing power anywhere, a straight copy to network from pre encoded files, no live transcoding.
No scripting, no encryption either. If you really need that, which you almost certainly don’t, then install a recerse proxy on your openwrt router.
Now, if you want to scale, which almost no video really needs, then you’ll send the client a script. The client is a source of inifinite scaling, compute and bandwidth.
Each client just needs to rebroadcast two streams of the file.
As excess clients connect, you tell them to get the stream from the stun/turn server. This punches through both sides of the nat. And puts two clients in communication. First client sends its copies of the received stream chunks, with preference from the beginning of the file. One client can get the stream from multiple other client and once it has a few stream chunks in the cache it can serve them to new clients.
It doesn’t take many doublings before you have more bandwidth than the whole internet. All the logic for organisation, hash checking, stream block ordering etc etc is a small text file from the server, signed by the server’s certificate. It runs entirely inside the client’s browser.
Exactly.
I’m feeling like this whole “distrubuted youtube!” argument is nothing but a variant of the blockchain fantasy. Seeing a lot of the same style of arguments and ignorance.
It’s a common trap for certain types of people to assume technology can fix problems that are inventive or socially driven.
Its also a common trap for idiots to grasp hold of a fraction of a fragment of an idea and think it gives them complete and total understanding, and then go around proselytizing their absolute incompetence as if its techno-gospel.
Which I think is why this distributed youtube bull follows the same general argument trend as the mythical and holy blockchain. That does nothing, but somehow can magically solve all problems.
We solved this problem BEFORE youtube was even a thing. Youtube only exists out of convenience for normies. Youtube can die tomorrow, we will still have unlimited video. In fact, think youtube slowed down innovation on this front. Torrent trackers are unchanged in their form from 2003. I wouldn’t mind federated content, browser integration of torrent systems and locally running content recommendation system as well as social crowdsourced review systems (aka the like button and comments)
To be fair, a LOT of people swear by Popcorn Time, which is exactly that. I was surprised it worked as well as it does, too.
Your laptop would become suicidal the second it had to start serving streaming, 4k video to dozens of people, much less hundreds or thousands.
My laptop can copy files at 15 mbps, very very easily. Hundreds ? Again piss easy, that’s what bittorrents are for, even easier when the swarms takes care of all the traffic. The more people are 10 or so and the faster it will copy itself. Do you cloud people still know how to copy files or was that arcane knowledge lost to the sands of 1995 ?
I hate the cloud you perfidious incompetent. The only thing more stupid than the “cloud” is your belief that you can serve hundreds, if not thousands, of simultaneous streams,possibly 1080, most likely 4k, from your 15mbps laptop.
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You must not want a youtube competitor then, if your goal is to just okay-ly stream to just a couple dozen or so people.
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You are correct. Nearly all youtube channels can be fully served off a single laptop. 260 concurrent streams at 1080p 3mbps is achievable over gigabit ethernet. Very few channels exceed this for any appreciable amount of time. And in those cases we can leverage a very small amount of the client’s ressources to further propagate the stream. This can be done with repurposed bittorrent dht. Now all we need is federated RSS and a locally running content curation algorithm and a social review system (like buttons and reputation history)
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How can a competitor that is courting people that aren’t revenue sources compete
I fail to follow how a competitor can pop up if the main users it’s attracting are ones that don’t want to view ads or pay for subscriptions.
The alternative should be libraries hosting the peoples internet.
You may balk at the idea, much like you would have at the idea of free public libraries when originally conceived.
I like this idea so much. Do the public libraries not have some kind of video service already? Seems like a network of library-powered PeerTube instances would serve that niche really well.
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I like youtube, i use it quite a lot. I wouldn’t use it at all without ad and sponsor block. I don’t know how so many people do it, it’s crazy to me.
Finding and innovating new ways to fuck people with ads.
this is all bullshit btw, it won’t do anything for thirdparty clients and yt-dlp for example.
This is because blocking is entirely client side now, with no way of youtube determining whether or not its happened at all.
They’re testing to embed the ads in the stream and not the usual switch to a different video
It definitely affects third party client if now they get a file of a video that now has 30 seconds of ad content at the beginning
it won’t though, because you can just remove that 30 seconds at the beginning, which is almost definitely going to be very different than the rest of the video in a number of ways. Notably, there are likely going to be UI differences during and after ads play, as well as video playback alterations. Ad’s aren’t going to be the same quality as video itself.
It’s possible that they’re transcoding them into the video itself, but doing that would be catastrophically bad and have such a massive cost that it simply would not be worthwhile.
They are transcoding them into the video. Sponsorblock had to make a quick change to discard submissions from users that have been identified to be on this trial system, because it affects the video length, and as such - makes it impossible to have consistent segments
i highly doubt it. I would think they’re probably doing some UDP packet voodoo bullshit.
Though it likely appears as transcoded.
The sheer cost of them being transcoded into videos is immense, even if they’re live encoding every video.
What happens when you get an ad you need to takedown and remove? You’re on disk transcode is suddenly useless now, and you need to make a new one, easy enough, you can just do that in the background, but this also means your ads are baked into each video, which is less than ideal, unless you’re constantly updating them.
And if you’re doing live transcodes, that means that you have to do this for every view on every video, and i’m not sure that’s sustainable.
I suppose you could probably do a cached live transcode system to bring down the overhead, but i can’t imagine it’s easier than just pulling some voodoo networking bullshit to literally inject an advertisement.
AFAIK there is no need to re-encode, since Youtube videos are stored and served in chunks anyways. The change is that they are now slipping in the ad chunks as if they were a part of the normal video chunk stream.
yeah that’s what im saying. Re-encoding and transcoding is completely different, it’s more than likely a served change, rather than a stored change.
Nothing to do with UDP
shocker
We can just train an AI to filter out the spam , just like we did with email.
We’ll just copy the video and recast without ads I guess? I do watch several videos many times over for diy, so it would be relatively painless to just download and modify.
I think it is time to bring back The Wadsworth Constant!
I already barely watch YouTube but for a couple people I subscribe to, and I already pay membership for their content so I get no ads. YouTube has already whittled me down to the minimum thanks to their overbearing ad content.
I pay for premium… but also like my sponsorblock… and 3rd party clients. Let me have it all momma Google.
I can’t justify premium. For the same price I can buy for my family:
AppleTV+, Amazon Prime Video and Disney+
Or:
YouTube but without ads
Get a VPN and make a quick trip to Turkey or Ukraine where you can get it for about 2€/month
Once you sign up and pay in Türkiye does it just keep working back in your home country?
Yes, it’s been working for a year now. I set my location back to Germany right after subscribing to premium
How do you pay it though? With a US credit card?
NZD.
AppleTV+ ($14.99, Amazon Prime Video ($10.99) and Disney+ ($14.99) = $40.97 per month
YouTube Premium = $39.99 per month
Sponsorblock is awesome!
Which 3rd party clients are you using?
SmartTube on TV, Revanced on my phone, and the first party website on my computer.
What do those do for you if you already pay for premium?
Sponsorblock, return YouTube dislikes and more customization.
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That’s me too. I was a family subscriber for years. Some of those years it was just myself on there too. But the price hikes and interface degrading was infuriating.
Over the past years I’ve been reducing my youtube and twitch viewership anyways. Its literally the lowest form of entertainment and its not worth a single moment of ad watching. I’ll just do something else. Most youtube content sucks anyways. I don’t even remember most of the channels I used to watch.
They’re just going to increase their own server costs chasing some tiny fraction of viewers who will do anything to avoid ads. they should be grateful for the adviewers they have.
Man, you’re definitely spot on with this. For me, it’s a fast, easy source of superficial distraction that I can put on for background noise and don’t have to pay attention to. It’s ultimately what cable TV used to be for me. I’ll even leave on a streamer playing a game in the background on low volume if I’m going to sleep just for white noise. At this point, the behavior and desire for that kind of content is so ingrained in me that it’s sort of like an addiction. I wish there were alternatives to youtube, but that era of video content might just be straight up dying for some of us. I guess if anything I’ll start fleshing out my plex server with old t.v. shows and just put Gilligan’s Island or something on in the background.
Yea, a plex server for idle viewing would be a way better alternative. Just make a custom nickelodeon, comedy central, etc and have it run random episodes of random shows.
I’ve actually always wanted to do this! Download a load of old school Nickelodeon stabs and episodes and find some software that can play them all together in random order haha… Any advice on how to go about setting this up?
It’s actually built into plex. If you have a library of t.v. shows you can just click the Shuffle button and it’ll play random episodes. Or you can make Categories of shows and shuffle those. If you’re asking how to get started with Plex and downloading content, well…I don’t want to get banned for piracy related reasons, so I’ll just say that, totally unrelated to this discussion, there’s a wealth of resources regarding how to get started with bittorrent and usenet. Which you can use for perfectly legal purposes, like downloading Liinux ISOs and open source textbooks.
Nah I’m good for Linux ISOs and open source textbooks, just wasn’t aware that some of these media players had a shuffle button 😝 thanks folks!
Im glad the ther guy responded, because I have no idea, I haven’t started plex stuff yet
I use Jellyfin because it’s pretty light weight and straight forward. Just add the shows you want to a playlist, or even just specific seasons, and shuffle play.
Perfect opportunity to reprogram your brain. Put on something healthy like waves on the shore, etc.
I’m just curious, but what type of content would you be watching on YouTube?
I think the platform has come a long ways when it comes to content. Sure, if you’re just watching gaming content I’d say you’d be disappointed. It’s been like that for a decade now at least. There’s a lot of decent content on there though with a lot of it even being somewhat educational.
My viewership has changed so much over the years. I used to watch stuff like diyperks, primitive technology, this guy kris harbour who built a house with natural materials. When I was coding lots of edu stuff.
Im sure there is a lot of good shit, but I just have less energy to wade through the crap. And the continued attacks on ad blockers makes me less willing to want to find channels and communities I would probably enjoy.
I actually can’t stand gaming content cause its just spoilers and gfuel marketing as far as im concerned
I see. I simply ask because the platform has changed a lot if you used it a little over a decade ago and I know some people who never got over the transition.
Absolutely understandable that you don’t want to spend time looking for anything that might catch your interest though.
Yeah YouTube’s real problem is the recommendations are terrible. It tries to ram the most profitable, lowest common denominator swill down your throat until it gives up and just recommends stuff you’ve already watched.
I literally use it almost exclusively for how-to styles of videos. I had to replace the throttle cable on my riding lawnmower last year. I found an awesome step-by-step video. Stuff like that…
Yeah you’re right, YouTube just isn’t what it used to be. I miss when people made videos for free because they wanted to share something with the world. Now it’s a full time job
I guess there is a lot of crap on the platform.
But I follow many really really good content creators that put out very high quality content week after week.
I still want to watch their content and I can’t subscribe to all of them.
Nebula
Worse case scenario, we gotta make an extension that detects the ad UI and blanks the screen and mutes the audio until its over
And fast forwards to the end of the ad, if possible
I just found a userscript that mutes, skips, and lets you black out the ads. Worked during my brief test of it. I’ll probably use this if adblock or other clients are bricked.
greasyfork.org/en/…/9165-auto-close-youtube-ads
Why not use that screen time to promote alternative to YouTube?. Or even a simple Fuck google screen : " insert why google sucks here".
Because that would just be another ad lol
What if we replaced their ads with our ads? What do you mean that defeats the purpose?
Not if it brings people to a user controlled FLOSS platform (Peertube for example ) and make them ditch Youtube. We need to move the viewers and content to FLOSS alternatives so anything that will bring new users is good. Youtube will be the biggest battle IMO. Plus it would be kind of fun to trash Youtube on their own platform. Let’s settle for an optional functionality.
Let me simplify this for you: If I’m getting an addon to stop seeing ads, I’m not going to choose an addon that replaces them with other ads. I will choose the addon that doesn’t give me ads.
The only people who would even consider such an addon are not the target audience for the ads because they already support it.
What if I offer you an add-on that would promote healthy life-habits instead of black screen? Would you be interested in that? For example, it’s important to squeeze the sponge after using it, this would be super useful to remind you about it!That’s just an example, there are dozens of small tips like that requires a daily reminder.
No. I want to watch the thing I specifically decided to watch, and not what someone else wants to advertise to me.
Ok hear me out: an add-on that promotes “Watching less youtube!!!”. Isn’t that genius? It could be 50/50. 15 seconds of blackscreen for people like you who enjoy starring at it, and 15 seconds of “less screen time” promotion. That way you are frequently reminded that you could do better things with your time. Example : “You have starred at a black screen for XX minutes today. Did you know that a basic ukulele cost around 30$ and you can learn playing by investing as low as 30 minutes per day?” On top of it, I will ad a functionality that let you customize the color of the blackscreen! What do you think, are we getting somewhere or what?
Ok hear me out: If I am downloading an add-on for the explicit purpose of watching youtube, then I am not interested in being told by the add-on not to use it. If I want to watch less youtube I will, and I know this sounds novel: I will watch less youtube.
If I want helpful life tips I will go look for helpful life tips on my own. If I want to be told youtube sucks then I already know youtube sucks. I don’t understand why the fuck, when the entire purpose of me installing an add-on is to block a site from showing me things I didn’t ask for, you keep trying to convince me to have the add-on show me things I did not ask for. The defeats the entire fucking purpose of me getting it in the first place.
I have stated this as clearly as I can multiple times. I am done trying to explain it any further.
Ok got you. So you’d rather stare at a black screen for 30 seconds every 5 minutes than switch to an alternative where you can have exactly the same service, but without advertising and where control is based on the user rather than a multi-billion dollar corporation. So you want youtube and nothing else, but you refuse to support youtube. Basically, we’re back at good old advertising, were people will pick up their phone during a break and wait for the program to resume. But you don’t see things you didn’t ask for! One last thing, did you know that “Vinegar is perhaps the best way to clean a toilet tank, as it’s naturally acidic. It removes lime and calcium deposits, and it’s a natural antibacterial. Pour two cups of vinegar into the tank, allow to sit for an hour, scrub, and flush to rinse.” You’re welcome!!
Doubt. Never underestimate the hate and motivation against ads.
It’s what they always should have done anyway. I’m not so entitled that I think I should get content delivered absolutely free, but I am entitled enough to sandbox and restrict how many discrete domains my browser windows will talk to.
Your data is much more valuable than the 13/currency per month. Which btw, if you pay, the do not stop collecting sharing and monetizing on your data.
Exactly I don’t think we’re in disagreement. I’m not making a pro-youtube statement here. I just accept that it exists, as they need to accept that I have full control over my hardware. It’s up to them to make their business model work for them in that environment, not me.
It’s conflict theory.
I see, thanks for explaining. :)
If the YouTube interface restricts you skipping during certain parts of the video, an ad blocker can detect that and skip over it anyway. Otherwise, I myself will just skip over the ad.
Or at the very least detect when you can’t skip and mute the tab and put a black box over top of the video.
Grayjay!! 🙌🏻
“Virtually impossible?” I haven’t had ads on YT in over 6 years, and I don’t even use a blocker or alt client.
So what’s your trick?
I pay for YT Premium. It’s 100% worth it based on my very high usage of YT for entertainment and learning. Best streaming service bargain by far. Netflix’s pile of shitty self-made movies is a ripoff by comparison.
Fuck off, shill
No need to get vulgar, there, chief. I’m just a satisfied customer who doesn’t understand why watching YT videos has to be such a deathmatch with their engineering team all the time. I’ll bet that the majority of people here get the value from YT that Premium charges for, and a sizable number of people here pay for some streaming service that they actually use less than YT. Yet because YT is a website with a free tier, the arms race of ad blocking / countermeasures is never ending. People wind up hating YT and talking about them like the third reich, when it’s really a service that all of us love and depend on. Shrug?
Youtube is a festering shithole. Overflowing with the absolute worst kind of clickbait and vacuous content. It brings together everything wrong with society under a single URL. For what little useful content there is youtube should be the one paying visitors to sift through the shit to get to it.
Your account is a festering shithole. My YT is full of woodworking and gardening tutorials, geopolitics and cosmology explainers, Tolkein lore and a few other fun things I enjoy. I’m sorry yours is not as fulfilling.
Don’t understand why you didn’t just mention that you pay for premium in this comment.
then i won’t be using it much, if at all.
fuck google.
Right? I already don’t use youtube as much as possible. Piped helps, but if that stops working, I just won’t watch movies on youtube.
I understand why people are upset anytime a company fucks their customers for money, but the solution is always to walk away.
People are taking the piss out of you everyday. They butt into your life, take a cheap shot at you and then disappear. They leer at you from tall buildings and make you feel small. They make flippant comments from buses that imply you’re not sexy enough and that all the fun is happening somewhere else. They are on TV making your girlfriend feel inadequate. They have access to the most sophisticated technology the world has ever seen and they bully you with it. They are The Advertisers and they are laughing at you.
You, however, are forbidden to touch them. Trademarks, intellectual property rights and copyright law mean advertisers can say what they like wherever they like with total impunity.
Fuck that. Any advert in a public space that gives you no choice whether you see it or not is yours. It’s yours to take, re-arrange and re-use. You can do whatever you like with it. Asking for permission is like asking to keep a rock someone just threw at your head.
You owe the companies nothing. Less than nothing, you especially don’t owe them any courtesy. They owe you. They have re-arranged the world to put themselves in front of you. They never asked for your permission, don’t even start asking for theirs.
– Banksy
Wow this was great… No idea Banksy had published any written work
“Art should disturb the comfortable and comfort the disturbed.”
What’s the street address of Google again? I’m already homicidally insane, I’ll start by burning them TO THE FUCKING GROUND.
1600 Amphitheatre Pkwy, Mountain View, CA 94043
Calm down Ms, Aghdam.
You’d become a homicidal maniac if youtube makes you pay to remove ads?
there is a plugin I bought, it’s community driven where you can tag sections of the video as ad, sponsored, etc, and auto skip it. it’s really nice, was like $5. will post when I find the link, but even if ads are server side, this plugin will skip. someone has to bite the bullet though and tag time stamps unfortunately.
found it, called dearrow, also changed clikcbait thumbnails and titles are editable by community.
dearrow.ajay.app
That assumes every ad is exactly the same (or at least the same length) and at the same spot for every user.
yeah, I realized it after posting. I don’t see ads, I use it to block sponsored stuff and forgot about injected ads. still a great plugin.
Pre roll and post roll ads would be pretty easy to detect since the length of the actual video is fixed. Mid roll ads though will need something more clever.
dearrow sponsorblock will not work anymore
<img alt="1000018051" src="https://discuss.tchncs.de/pictrs/image/64e6ea01-8507-4288-8d2f-f3eaa18f10f4.jpeg">
I know, I realized after I posted. but still a cool plugin.
The demise of Youtube begins
I get it, no one likes ads on youtube. But, you realize that they have to pay the people that are producing content as well as pay for the storage space to gold all of this content. Why does everyone think that can just be free?
Nobody expects it to be free. But it used to operate with far less intrusive ads. Also, people didn’t use ad blockers until they got worse.
Will someone think off the multi billion dollar company? Anyone? They need to make the bottom line.
It does, two on the barrel and on on the top. for me currently it acts as a mouse in Gnome and in krita it acts like a stylus with pressure and everything. My model number is the Dell Active Pen PN579X. it can switch between wacom and Microsoft protocols so it will also work on my Surface.