YouTube looks to be testing server-side ad injection to counter ad blockers

It does matter because it inspires newer platforms that aren't as shitty like Lemmy, PixelFed, Mbin, and PeerTube.

People will accept anything to not be inconvenienced in a purely consumer society.

That doesn't matter to me. When a company does shit like this, I won't use it and will actively avoid it. People can do what they want and if they want to be abused constantly that's on them. I don't really care. I make my choice and I stick with it. Change will never happen with companies, they don't care unless they actually get charged more then the money they make from their abuse and we all know that will never happen .

Well I don't know about the Reddit stuff not mattering—I occasionally still check on it for a couple of niche communities and the Reddit I used to enjoy has basically died, it's like the place is filled with angry idiots now. Those people were always there before but usually buried under a load of downvotes where you could mostly ignore them; they now seem to be a majority of those left contributing over there.

They killed the golden goose in scaring off enough of the people contributing most interesting posts and comments (who were doing it entirely for free!) that the lunatics have taken over and shat on everything

Each of these exoduses moves the bar a little bit. We only lose if we give up. Eventually the bad decisions will catch up to them, as long as we keep pushing.

I don't know about you, but what I learned is we'll build our own Youtube with blackjack and hookers.

I wouldn't particularly like it, that's for sure. But I would ultimately just bite the bullet and do it. At some point, you're just pushed too far and it's just not worth dealing with.

I genuinely spend too much time on that site, but I haven’t seen an ad in years. If that changes, then I guess I’ll have to change, too.

I don't think it can be completely avoided, but it can definitely be trimmed down a hell of a lot. As an example, if you watch YouTube for an hour a day and they make a change like this and you start watching it for 10 minutes a week, that's a serious reduction.

Unfortunately it is such a repository of information that it's nearly unavoidable anymore. It's a reference tool. Need to fix your car? YouTube knows how. Need to write a piece of code with a tool you're unfamiliar with? A random Indian man has posted a YouTube video explaining how. Need to find a hidden item in a video game? YouTube. There are many and varied reasons I'd pull up a YouTube video outside of the intended purpose of "watching YouTube" for entertainment. Many of these things can, technically, be conveyed through different media but often poorly and with a much lower rate of understanding. The sheer volume of knowledge and culture lost if Google ever takes down YouTube's servers will be akin to the burning of the Library of Alexandria and that is not a joke. I don't want to "watch YouTube" anymore for the most part but it is inescapable to me for several purposes as a reference material.

what a time to be alive...

Ha, nope. But i see I’m not alone. There is hope dear people.

Sure, popover video of cute cats and turtles eating strawberries

At this point you can just replace the video with the same video using a timestamped link from just before the ad started. Under IPv4 they can't tell if it is the same person/device requesting the same video. So unless they put the ad at exactly the same timestamp (which they won't) you can just blank out the video when an ad starts and replace the stream with the same video using the timestamp to start the video where you left off.

The idea here is that ads will be unskippable, aka, you skip ahead 10-20 seconds but can’t. They’re will be controls that appear to catch this. If they incorporate ads and I can just fast forward, then who cares. This is google, they want to watch ads.

You sound like an ad. It triggered my uncanny valley response. Please never do that again.

I will never pay Google a dime. They make enough off of us. It's really easy to download the video you want to watch and watch it on a stand alone player with you guessed it, NO FUCKING ADS.

as an occasional creator of internet videos,I would much rather host my own videos, because bandwidth is actually very cheap. but YouTube has a complete monopoly on internet video, so I have to host my video on their website, subject to their weird and arbitrary conditions, their trigger happy copyright system, and their general terrible treatment of their creators. they pay an absolute pittance for impressions, which is why most professional YouTubers use other revenue streams

the company, Google, that you are paying, didn't make the videos, doesn't fairly compensate the people who did, and they are effectively holding them and the very concept of internet video hostage

people on Lemmy mostly support a free, non-corpo, decentralised internet instead of the parasites at Google because Lemmy is free and decentralised and non corporate

get real

I'm not paying just to get back what we used to have without ad blockers. They need to offer more than just no ads. Like exclusive content.

Also:

plus saved video progress so you can resume videos later

You say that as if it's a premium only feature. It's not.

Will that fix their horrible site and mobile app that constatntly breaks on me? I'm not going to pay a corporation that treats users and creators like shit and can't even make a good way to interact with the service with all that money. If they prpvided a fantastic service and were pro-consumer and pro-creator then I totally would. But they're the opposite of that.

I use premium and even I cringed at this. The first two thirds of this are written like an AI generated ad.

What you don't understand is that if YouTube manages to get enough people by the balls with their anti-adblocking efforts, the next step is to start jacking up the subscription price year after year to see how much people are willing to pay.

I signed up for a family plan a couple years ago and it's honestly one of the last subscriptions I would cancel. I can justify it by the literally hundreds of hours of watching ads me and my family would have been subjected to otherwise.

I prefer subscription models. That way I'm paying with my money and not my content. Of course with Google you're doing both.. but in principle I support it. I pay for a family plan and have some friends/ family on it.

It hate ads and to me it's easily worth the monthly fee. I looked up a YouTube video on a TV that wasn't signed in and there was like 60 seconds of ads! I've had YouTube premium / red for years I didn't realize it was getting so bad.

But yeah, I support subscription model. More sustainable and honest way for a website to make a profit. In a subscription you are the buyer and the website is the product. In a free model ad companies are the buyer and you are the product.

They have more incentive under the subscription model to create a better experience for the user. In a free they have incentive to squeeze user as much as possible. I think it's one of the main drivers of enshittification

I pay for YouTube. It is without a doubt the best subscription I pay for, that I get major use out of. I know people are hardcore anti-ad and Google is like Ad Satan, but if you can afford it, YouTube is unironically worth it.

The monthly payment for my family subscription is less than 2 tickets to the movies, not including gas, popcorn, kids, etc.

Easily the most bang for the buck entertainment we get, we watch hours of YouTube every day. News, tech reviews, travel, kids songs, tutorials...

I canceled Disney+ and Netflix, but YouTube premium is not going anywhere.

Shhh. It is a huge "fuck you" to google to not use their bandwidth or servers for free. Not the actual goal of this.

Yeeeah, but my issue with that is they generated the expectation that it'd be free by using their investment money to muscle out smaller competitors. There was a time where Youtube was the biggest of a set of UGC video sites and some of the others were competitive. Now it's the only real alternative.

So from that perspective they made their bed, now they sleep in it.

I don't give a shit if it's reasonable anymore.

Google has done enough terrible things over the years, ruined enough services, some of them paid services, continually harmed content creators with their trash algorithm, refused to defend them from bogus copyright strikes, refused to provide meaningful support to anybody but advertisers, all the while hosting hate on their platform, for profit. So I don't give a damn what's fair to them.

They won't get a penny from me ever again. I'll continue to find every way of accessing any content on that platform that I choose, without ads, and without paying them, and it has absolutely nothing to do with ethics or reason. It is entirely, 100%, because fuck Google.

Fuck their ad network, fuck manifest 3, fuck their "integrity" checking, fuck all of this. I'd rather see it all burn to the ground than help them turn the internet into cable tv.

Oh sure servers do cost money but Google wants to have their cake and eat it to with the creators that make people actually want to use the site despite all their bullshit. Changing standards of what is and isn't not acceptable coming from the top has made every creator dance and squirm to escape the very real eventuality of having weeks of work mean nothing. Google doesn't respect the people making the product they are selling so I refuse to respect the bill they try to send me

Early youtube with the drywall backgrounds in skits or just random bits of life were what made it fun. The fact that the majority of the content now means it is just another streaming service with an expected income for someone instead of being something they did in their spare time. The switch from amateur to professional content ruined youtube.

The problem is that user generated content still takes time. Which means money. Also, people don't want vlogs with a drywall background anymore and the number of creators who can get away with simple prop free skits are double digit, at best. So making the videos also cost money.

That's why I don't use Sponsorblock: it hurts the wrong people.

But I'll still block the ads because to hell with Google and their monopoly. I'm only interested in supporting the artists directly, Google can get fucked.

The problem is that the patreon model inherently only supports the big creators. Many of whom only BECAME big because they had alternative funding sources for so long.

For example: Giant Bomb more or less imploded a few years back. Nextlander (Alex, Brad, and Vinny), Remap (Formerly Waypoint but Patrick Klepek, Rob Zachny, Cado Contreras) , and Jeff Gerstmann (hmmm? I wonder who that could be) and even Giant Bomb (Fandom) are doing great. But people like Abby Russel or Renata Price very much immediately fell into that "Well, I like her but she is one person and I am already blowing 20 or 30 bucks a month on patreons..." hole.

And we see that on youtube/twitch. Creators will mostly not care and then suddenly do a year long subathon because they understand... they are in that threshold where they make just enough off of ad and sponsor revenue that they can just keep their resume updated but are fucked if Youtube/twitch change ANYTHING. They need to get to that threshold where people will subscribe to a patreon.

And the "Well, I will just subscribe to the creators I think are worth it" inherently fucks them over.

I'll add on that, for all his many flaws, Ludwig Ahlgren (?) has done a lot of good discussion on this topic. Because as twitch and youtube stop giving streamers giant signing bonuses, it gets harder and harder for the next crop of big streamers to come into existence. Because if there isn't money to get people out of that O(100) concurrents mid-tier... yeah.

That's a fair point, I do pay for subs in some smaller sites. A lot of the time I still watch the Youtube version because... well, that way the creators get paid twice and I'm probably already on YT, but still.

100% agree. I follow a few content creators who include a Cash App or Paypal information in the description box. They don't demand cash** because they do it for the love of what they do, and don't demand subscriptions or anything else. If I have an extra dollar, I send it. I'm guessing this either isn't their only revenue stream or do well enough that it is. If everyone who is appreciative would do a dollar or few donations, maybe it is a livble wage, with or without youtube's payment?

YouTube is a modern miracle of engineering -- no other platform on the planet hosts the scale of video it does, indefinitely, with instant access, for free

Because Google chokes the market. There could be plenty of other competitors if Google charged for it like other companies would. Google subsidized YouTube with the rest of their company's profits, not to provide us a free platform because they're so nice, but to prevent competition. As long as YouTube was free, no other companies would be able to keep up with the costs, therefore no one else would enter the market.

If this shit is so expensive, and they want money, they can gate the content like every other streaming service, and then deal with the competition that would swell up.

Even if it’s a good product, you shouldn’t support the monopolist.

Then clearly it's not a smart choice to make videos and have them uploaded to a scummy place like YouTube.

Their issues are not my problem. I have my own stresses at work, you don't see me bitching about it to strangers online.

Don't like your job or the terms your forced to adhere too, quit.

Is there a loophole where they could delay the ad marking like 5 seconds into a longer ad so you'd have to watch at least 5 seconds before an extension can detect it? Is the law specific about it having to be marked as an ad for the entire duration?

What law (and jurisdiction) are you thinking of?

My understanding is that this would be covered with a blanket note on the page if it detects you aren't running Premium.

Maybe not skip them, but instead play something else over top of them like another video you like, a music segment, or cat videos.

people can get the privacy benefits of going through those proxies.

Exactly. This is why it will still be a threat to data hungry Google.

Nah, computer vision for standalone image processing (I mean, not batch processing dozens to thousands of files at the same time) today is pretty lightweight and can be done easily on consumer laptops and smartphones. It is just a different technique and takes people with different skills to do it, but completely doable. Gor example, even face detection AI models can run on your laptop, if AI can learn to classify faces, objects and animals it can learn to classify ads.

They're trying. Give them some time. Users will lap it up like idiots instead of just saying no.

Google was working on a feature that would do just that, but I can't recall the name of it.

They backed down for now due to public outcry, but I expect they're just biding their time.

EA, Ubisoft, and Activision are all on my do not buy list. Their games aren't even worth pirating.

EA has been on the boycott list since mass effect 3

Can't inject shitty ads in my mountain of board games.

And yet Google is investing all this time and money into trying to block the blockers. It's really quite stupid.

But it's always been their server. It's not like Geico provided that video snippet

So much effort, dev time and resources just to fight users to make the experience worse and push them to alternatives to squeeze out the tiniest margin of extra ad money. Plus I'm sure this'll be countered almost immediately. I'd be shocked if ad blockers took more than a few days to find a way to detect and neuter these ads.

This is some accelerated enshittification.

Other ramifications aside, it wouldn’t be that costly to splice real time.

YouTube has standard profiles of video and audio quality levels. As long as the video stream is the same quality, the stream can basically be concatenated one after another without any meaningful over head. Try it: ffmpeg -f concat -i files.list -c copy output.mp4 for two files with same codec (audio and video) was processed at over 900x speed for me with just CPU.

So all YouTube would need to do is transcode the ads they’d intend to splice in into the standard formats they’d offer the stream at (which they’d already have the video transcoded into), and splice the ads they’d want to show in realtime at request time.

Forced quite breaks of nothing instead of adpocalyps Is such an unironic wholesome idea. Our brains really need that more.

Good idea. 1.2x speed is how I save time on videos I expect to be long

You could still go for a premium subscription, but I don't trust Google with my money either.

I hope this would make some quality content creators to move to another platform, but I don't really believe in this.

I'll probably get hammered for this, but then again, you'll have to pay for API access anyway. I've been testing out notegpt.io (not affiliated). Exactly because of my reasons listed, and because I often have to research or do trainings, I needed ways to save time and 'sift' through lots of information. I used to just play videos in say 1.5 speed, but even then it's sometimes hard to stay focused or you might miss something and have to stop and go back. Sometimes language is a barrier too. Not to mention the ads. So for my own sanity, I've been testing that out. It's been pretty damn good actually. I can get by on the lowest tier and you can try it free too. Again it's not for everyone, but I'd rather give them money than Google for their Anti-customer behavior.

My client pre-downloads videos, so I can fast forward and rewind at will.

That’s neat, it’d be identifiable in a fashion similar to missile logic. You know where ads are based on where they aren’t. Actually skipping it would be difficult but muting and doing something else for a predetermined period has been a workaround since radio.

Google’s own Shaka sdk (video playback with ads) gives ad markers in the initial video manifest so that they can be marked on the timeline, so hopefully it’ll be trivial. Usually (but not always) with SSAI, the ads are spliced into the stream just before being sent to the client. That way if a user has just recently watched an ad pod, the server can choose to ignore that marker for a better UX in hopes that they don’t bounce if ads are too frequent.

I doubt it.. They couldn’t even manage to block FFWD on their own website for the longest time. I switched to using alternative front ends long ago, but back when I just used YT directly from my phone’s browser, spam tapping +5s a few times would bypass the ad.

If skipping is blocked in the ad, the client must know it's playing an ad somehow?

A solution would be for an extension to download the entire video 2x and delete the difference. But if you want to watch on 4k you'd need a connection that is pretty fast (although still in the range of what many people already have). However if they find a way to throttle the max speed on the server side for each client based on the quality they are watching, that would kill this possibility. You could block their cookies and throttling by IP on IPv4 would not be a possibility for them, but when everyone is on IPv6 idk.

But also processing the video on the fly to delete the difference in real time would be heavy, though at least I think it is possible to access the GPU with browser extensions via webGL but I am not sure if for HD and 4k that would be realistic for most people.

Oh I just won't in the future. Like I already ripped discord out of my life alongside most social media. Meaning I'm capable of doing it with YouTube as well especially as I was terminally online on discord. Plus I have literally infinite media to consume anyway via piracy and games on steam to get to alongside the odd source port or two.

Someone will train an AI to do it.

I can imagine a plugin system that gets submissions of hashes of specific frames - or just entire frames - when users play them, then checks those frames to detect which parts of the video are unique vs common, then automatically requests new frames to narrow down the timestamps and carve out the additions.

Probably wouldn't take more than a handful of views across the entire network to get a pretty solid ad removal system. Even better it wouldn't even rely on user input, which itself is already pretty fast. I have never encountered even the newest video that wasn't already in the sponsorblock system.

Honestly this sounds like a fun project, I imagine it wouldn't take the heroes that develop things like sponsorblock very long to figure it out. Plus they have spite on their side.

Edit: actually, rather than rely on randomised frame checks to find the collisions, have the clients submit frames then send frames out and ask clients to see if those frames appear in their videos. Then you very quickly determine which frames are unique.

yeah, i realized it later. i don't see normal ads, forgot they're injected randomly. still a great plugin

Just catch everything in the background, play the full ad on mute, and when the ad segment is coming up in the stream you are actually watching, switch to the cached copy. Shouldn't be too hard to program.

I doubt if they will refuse to serve as the stream still need to buffer. That's the fundemental of streaming.

Or I missed something?

Good to know.

Out of curiosity, I looked up the numbers. This is correct, they make 9.2 billion per quarter from ads and 10.7 billion from subscriptions. I can't find expenses per-segment, but in 2023 their total "Cost of revenues" was 37 billion. I doubt everything other than youtube costs less than 17 billion, so they're definitely making a profit.

Source: https://abc.xyz/assets/95/eb/9cef90184e09bac553796896c633/2023q4-alphabet-earnings-release.pdf

Ok, but equally any competition would need to be profitable earlier, you can't complain you got a service operating at a loss which is now operating at a profit when that's exactly what any alternative you'd feasibly switch to would do

Use a timestamp link for now, if it gets a different time than requested, there's an ad.

I'm sure some algorithm could be written to beat it. Still crappy overall but figured they'd do this sooner or later.

Oh, absolutely! I would never pay for YT+ because its paying for me to still be G's product and I won't do it. Just saying that its interesting that what I've seen is tolerable (not that it isn't a thistle in the side) and they want to overengineer some grand final solution that will alienate a lot of people

The next decade or two are going to be interesting in that consumer habits by necessity and choice are shifting so radically that a lot of dumb legacy industries and models are gonna have serious existential difficulties and are dead corps walking.

I've heard that some versions of the Blockchain are not based on computing power and therefore are not nearly as awful re: emissions. But I don't really know much about it so I decided to look into Odysee.

Instead I found out all about how the company that created the protocol was blasted out of existence by the SEC for selling unregistered securities & the website is full of Nazis because they don't do anything about fucking Nazis.

Never did reach a conclusion about the blockchain thing. Kinda stopped caring. Sounds like a clusterfuck.

Fair enough. I completely forgot about peertube. Been using newpipe predominantly and odysee was the first alternative that came to mind.

Thanks for reminding me about peer tube. A client recommendation would be great. I've used p2play.

Edit: I actually looked into the whole odysee debacle and it's disgusting,so I will try to use peertube (newpipe also supports it,but,again,completely forgot about it).