So if YouTube is now serving up the ads directly to me, does that mean they're finally liable for the content of those ads? Can we have them investigated for all the malware, phishing, illegal hate speech, etc.?
No, because that would be communism, and that killed 100 million people. You also think genocide is bad, aren't you? And besides of that, if there were less regulations, you could make your own video platform to challenge Google's monopoly! /s
i think people may have missed that you're not serious
Reading comprehension is for people who paid attention in school. Nerds.
The problem with pretending to be a dumbass on the Internet, is it's almost impossible to outdo the professionals.
Poe's law
It’s not possible for everyone to just tell if it’s supposed to be sarcasm. ADHD makes it hard. A bad day makes it hard. A tiring day makes it hard.
The downside of the misunderstanding isn’t just downvotes. It’s possibly a proliferation of misinformation and an impression that there are people who DO think that way.
Being not serious while saying something grim is not a globally understood culture either. It’s more common and acceptable in the Western world as a joke.
So… call it accessibility, but it’s just more approachable for everyone to just put an “/s”.
Well... Communism is directly responsible for multiple famines that killed into the hundreds of millions. Then there are the inevitable purges that have taken millions of lives and hosts of terrors as well.
You're free to dispute history if you need to, and claim that theoretically communism is nice, but in practice, history tells us that living under communism reaaaalllyy sucks.
There are people here not from western europe or north america, we felt all of that and beyond with capitalism too. Do you think Asia and Africa, who received aid and support from the soviet union to free themselves from capitalist Europeans will fall for that ? Where did you arrive at ''multiple famines that killed into the hundreds of millions" ? Even the soviet famines of 1930s and chinese great famine 'only' killed at maximum intervals of estimation 9 and 50 millions each, and this article over-viewing all atrocities maxes at 150 million, with a low 10-20 million estimation, not hundreds of millions in famines alone.
Are you paraphrasing that 'Black Book of Communism' shtick ? It is a propaganda tool not valid in actual academic research, even by liberals that are not fraudsters, because the author twists every single communist countries-adjacent deaths as ''mass killing caused by communism'', including brilliant takes like total number of abortions (ex: France, that practices 250.000 abortions per year must be enraged with a capitalist regime that killed 5 million people only in the 21st century !) and all WW2 eastern front deaths (so both the nazi germans and allies that invaded USSR and USSR soldiers and civilians killed count as 'killed by communism').
Last but not least, the USSR had much higher GDP per capita and living standards than the average third world capitalist country (which is where the demographic majority of capitalist people live), so even if the USSR could not equate Switzerland, they achieved a good quality of life better than the world average.
Last but not least, the USSR had much higher GDP per capita and living standards than the average third world capitalist country (which is where the demographic majority of capitalist people live), so even if the USSR could not equate Switzerland, they achieved a good quality of life better than the world average.
why would this be relevant? The US had a higher per capita GDP than the USSR and it was capitalist, surely that means that capitalism would be better here?
that's like saying capitalism is directly responsible for school shootings because it happens all the time in the US. but no one's dumb enough to claim that because that's not how things work.
well, technically the USSR exported lots and lots of grain during the 30s famine. So.
It's still not perfect, but you could argue there was mismanagement there.
TBF, stalinism wasn't really communism, it was more authoritarianism than anything, but.
This kind of messages should have a "/s" attached. IMHO, that's just proper Netiquette.
I kind of inferred the /s by the end of the post, but respect that such inference isn't universal. Also there are many /s comments that I wouldn't infer if it wasn't explicit.
Netiquette
Now there's a term I've not seen in many years.
And dates both of us, I expect... 😄
This is a good question.
Great, now it's Russian roulette every time you hit that pause button. ¡BOOM ZERODAY MALWARE!
no because of sec 230 and publisher rights, they were still directly serving them before, the only difference now is that it's tied into the video stream directly, rather than broken out as a second one.
In the past they have always said that they aren't transmitting the content and so it's the responsibility of the transmitter of the data. Now the content at least appears to be coming from youtube not the advertisers. So I'm curious if that's enough to make it fall under section 230 which would require that they make a good faith effort to remove "objectionable" content.
legally that's the same as far as courts care.
The only thing that would change this is a ruling on advertiser responsibility. Or something tangentially related that would force them to properly regulate ads for example.
Ultimately i'm guessing unless youtube rolls their own in home ads, instead of allowing other advertising agencies to run their ads on youtube, it simply wouldn't apply here.
No, at least not in the USA. They're still protected under Section 230, which makes them immune from liability of third-party content on their platform.
now serving up the ads directly to me
What do you think they were doing before? 🤔
Does anybody know how this will affect the EU?
Ads will always be detectable because you cannot speed up or skip an ad like you can the rest of the video.
If they do make it so you can speed up or skip the ad sections of a video, mission accomplished.
If all else fails, I'd enjoy a plugin that just blanks the video and mutes the sound whenever an ad is playing. I'll enjoy the few seconds of quiet, and hopefully I can use that time to break out of the mentally unhealthy doom spiral that is the typical YouTube experience.
Yep. YouTube must include a manifest with each video to tell the player what time ranges are un-skippable. Baked in ads were doomed from the beginning 🤡
Are they? What if the server refuses to serve the video until the ad’s duration has passed? You’d have no better option than to hide it, which most people wouldn’t bother with.
Seems like that would foil a plugin, but I think it would effectively kill video scrubbing, or simultaneous streams, depending on how that restriction was implemented. I still don’t see this working well for YouTube
always be detectable
Maybe with some content ID system… but you’ve just predicted their 2025 update which we might imagine would go something like this:
I briefly touched on this in a lengthy comment when this scheme was originally floated a few months ago. Your prediction, which granted is something that Youtube/Google absolutely would try if they thought they could get away with it, would only work on viewers that remained within the confines of Youtube's native player.
Any third party app capable of bullying or tricking Youtube into handing them the video data is free to do whatever it wants to with it afterwards, even if this ultimately means impeccably pretending to be the official Youtube player in order to get the server to fork over the data. Furthermore, video playback is buffered so a hypothetical pirate client would have several seconds worth of upcoming video to analyze and determine what it wants to do with it.
Youtube could certainly make this process rather difficult by including some kind of end-to-end DRM or something, but at the end of the day you need to make a playable video stream arrive on the client's device or computer somehow, and if you can't guarantee full control of the entire environment in which that happens, dedicated nerds will find a away to screw with that data.
Oh, the year is 2100 and YouTube only plays on dedicated Alphabet-produced hardware (available “free” of course) with cam-proof screens? Storytelling will come back in style with a vengeance overnight!
…and then, with the passion of a man whose next meal depends on it, he pleads:
”like and subscribe.”
OK kids good night!
I wish I had more upvotes to give this comment cause you are so on the money.
My brain just does that anyway, after decades of ads I just tune them out.
And at home I use ad blockers.
That's not how it works. Or, rather, that's not only how it works. Sure, advertisers dream of users who see an ad once and run to buy a product. But ad effects are spread over time. They build brand recognition. They fake familiarity. Say you are in a supermarket and you want to buy a new type of product that you haven't bought before. Very likely you'll pick something familiar-sounding, which you heard in an ad. Ads pollute the mind even if the most obvious effects are, well, obvious and easily discarded, more subtle influence remains.
If it makes you feel any better, I intentionally never use products that have intentionally repetitive messaging or earworm tendencies out of spite. Though I know I'm probably in the minority
Do we unintentionally use products we didn’t realize repetitively messaged us?
We’ll never know…
Just kidding, we can be sure it’s incredibly well studied given the billions and billions of dollars going into ads!
Totally no bias in these studies at all either, they totally wouldn't try to skew these studies for personal gain and to try and justify the huge spending on ad money right?
You can fool some of the people some of the time… right? :)
I’d expect nothing less than executives at a number of the Fortune 50 to be ruthlessly cutthroat, including when it comes to vetting the claims of their marketing teams.
(I know I’m speaking about studies I only assume to exist by the way, will have to research it later)
surely large corpos would waste billions on ads if they didn't see any financial return right!
Also, we should be taking a page from the propaganda playbook right now, that should pretty much tell us all we need to know lol.
I think the main problem is that this type of reasoning can't actually be proven scientifically, even if we have a study there's not a guarantee it's unbiased (who do you think funds research on advertising effectiveness). Then there is the problem that every product or brand in modern advertising is likely one of the handful of pseudo monopoly brands. One might argue that a person bought their product because they heard it in an ad, but in reality they might not have really had much choice, that makes it hard to say if people buy the products because they're familiar or if they just don't have much option.
The main point I'd like to make is that advertisers would like to believe they aren't wasting money or time, they need people to believe it in some capacity, because if enough people don't, eventually the dumb and blind companies who give them money will realize it too and stop giving them money. That's why the ad-funded internet is considered a bubble, it's not worth it, or necessary in a lot of cases, and the moment the dumb and blind corpos realize that, they'll stop dumping money into a hole.
The reason we're absolutely fucking blasted away with ads is because even if they only have a 0.01% success rate, that's enough to make them super profitable. So if you and 998 other people all pay zero attention to ads, they still make money.
There's also lots of people (like one of my family members) who become absolutely irate by ads but still buy the shit they're shilling anyway.
Advertisers claim that it'll work eventually which is how they can justify companies paying them to display ads, and how they can justify paying for ads on a service like YouTube or even a website. In a sense they are being hung out to dry, many of the big companies seen in ads these days don't actually need to convince you to buy their product because they have an almost complete monopoly on the market, they're only technically not monopolies, so you're going to buy their products anyway or live without the convenience.
This is why among other things Ad-funded internet is considered a bubble in a sense, because advertisers are spending money paying websites to show people things they don't think or care about, but somehow this translates into profits? Seems like the only one profiting is the site being paid, and the creator on it.
I'm sure Nestle, Pepsi Co. P&G, CocaCola Bottling Co. Walmart, Amazon, and the other big boys really need to tell others about them or people wouldn't know they exist and buy from them. Get real, these companies have their foot in the door, when it comes to the whole consumers buying from them. You can't not buy from them and live as anyone else would, it takes effort to cut them out, and in many cases living without the convenience they bring.
i remember when i put a video at 2x speed the next ad i got was also at 2x speed lmao
No you don't have to be able to detect it if you can't skip. Since they're injecting the stream directly every time you hit skip they move the counter and when you come back in it just continues to stream you the ad. Just let the time code go negative at the end of the video if you skipped.
All they have to do is not really care about minutes and seconds displaying correctly exactly if you're working around with fast forward. Alternately they could also just disable fast forward and rewind if they detect you're using it to abuse commercials.
I think Sooner or later, pretty much all blocking becomes a store the entire video with commercials and strip the commercials out with comskip end. If you're just storing the buffer off, and stripping it out privately there's not really a lot they can do about that.
I may not like it, but you do make an interesting technical argument.
I think it would still be detectable though because of buffering.
What you're saying assumes that videos are streamed frame-by-frame: "here's a frame", "okay, I watched that frame", "okay, here's the next frame".
With buffering videos will preload the next 30 seconds of video, and so if you pressed a button to skip ahead 10 seconds, that often happens instantly because the computer has already stored the next 30 seconds of video. Your plan to just pretend to skip ahead doesn't work in this case, because my computer can know whether or not it really did skip ahead, because of buffering.
i feel like with a relatively basic audio and visual analysis you could probably get a decently accurate detection of ads, paired with a collective "sponsor block" type system, this would like be very reliable. Even just ignoring the stream info itself.
That depends on what video player you use. Of we have control of that, then sure it works. I use mpv to play things, so for radio streams or live videos I can go back/forward as long as it's cached.
But if it's the web service, even though the browser video player has something cached, the player is still controlled by the website. And considering most of the people use chrome/chromium derivatives or YouTube app, it wouldn't be hard for them to make it so that the player itself will collaborate with whatever they want to do.
If YouTube was a separate organization it wouldn't have been the problem it is because of how Google has been taking over all the different parts they need for advertising.
There will probably be a hundred different tits for tats that we can only both dream of.
In the end, they have some form of knowledge of how many minutes of data they've sent you. You have the entirety of the MPEG stream and a cell phone powerful enough to do things to it.
There are different levels of crazy that can be waged If they were to do something like custom stream encryption to their client. We'd be playing cat and mouse with keys much like satellite dish hacking back in the day.
Just let the time code go negative at the end of the video if you skipped.
horrendously bad UI, this should never be done, recalculate the time, maybe. But don't just make it negative, that's fucking stupid.
If you recalculate the time you've given away the ad.
If they do make it so you can speed up or skip the ad sections of a video, mission accomplished.
Mission failed sucessfully, if people can speed up or scroll through the ad, then it kind of defeats the point since people can skip ahead or increase the speed.
Hence "mission accomplished"
Unless you are watching live content, you are correct
surely they're going to make the ads vary in speed, that would be a horrid UI mistake.
I'm getting tired, man. these people are truly just the shittiest individuals ever.
MBAs on their way to destroy their company's relationship with their customers and cause a socioeconomic disaster (their numbers will grow by 0.01% 💪💪)
If you don’t pay for something, you are not a customer, you are the product. If you pay for Youtube, you don’t see the ads, but you are also still their product. Lose /Lose
Okay, but if you sell cows, and all your cows escape or die, your business is still ruined
The network effect is too strong. The minority that are whining here isn’t going to make a dent. Next time you’re out, look at how many people are using ads ridden apps instead of paying $0.99 or whatever to remove them. The users have already decided their time and privacy is worthless and would rather getting the service for “free”.
Reddit is still going strong I feel.
Line go up 💹
Hey don't blame us, blame the nepos who got on the board without even needing to study for it!
My MBA track actively rewards me for thinking like a socialist XD.
Imagine all the cool stuff we could be doing if we weren’t wasting the time of hundreds of engineers figuring out how to shove ads in people’s faces.
This is ad driven economy and bar must go 🆙
"Line go up" is the animating force of the age, the critical philosophical principal around which our entire society is arranged.
Gives me a fucking headache.
“Line go up” is the animating force of the agethe rich and powerful, the critical philosophical principal around which our entire societytheir livesis are arranged.
I choose not to confuse their values as mine or that of my community.
Agreed. I really hate it when people see the problems in the world, fall for misanthropy, and blame everyone, most of whom are blameless beyond their failure to put their lives at risk to change things.
People are great. We've done great things. We're a species who's defining advantage is cooperation. None of what we see today would be possible if most of us were greedy, hateful, idiots.
People can be lead astray. but who can blame them? We've created a world more complicated than any one of us could fully understand. It's bad enough that a handful of psychopaths can take advantage of that, we don't need to add to it by making it seem like everyone's at fault for not instantly bashing their heads in.
I really appreciate this take. It's good-hearted and makes good sense. I'll try to remember it going forward, when cynicism overwhelms.
Thank you.
Unfortunately, the powerful have the power so they're arranging my life too. To the best of their ability, at least.
You're right that we should not confuse their values for our own, however.
All time high all time!
Machines could be doing all the work. We could have clean energy , air ,water and food and shelter for all....
Honestly, I've kind of always wondered why they didn't just do this. It's always seemed like the obvious thing to me.
I mean, I hope it doesn't work, because screw Google, but I'm still surprised it took them this long to try it.
Because it's much more expensive. What they're talking about here is basically modifying the video file as they stream it. That costs CPU/GPU cycles. Given that only about 10% of users block ads, this is only worth doing if they can get the cost down low enough that those extra ad views actually net them revenue.
It wouldn't cost any CPU with custom software that Google can afford to write. The video is streamed by delivering blocks of data from drives where the data isn't contiguous. It's split across multiple drives on multiple servers. Video files are made of key frames and P frames and B in between the key frames. Splicing at key frames need no processing. The video server when sending the next block only needs a change to send blocks based on key frames. It can then inject ads without any CPU overhead.
Wouldn't it still need overhead to chose those blocks and send them instead of the video? Especially if they're also trying to do it in a way that prevents the user from just hitting the "skip 10 seconds" button like they might if it was served as part of the regular video.
It has to know which blocks to chose to get the next part of the file anyway. Except the next part of the file is an ad. So yes there is overhead but not for the video stream server. It doesn't need to re encode the video. It's not any more taxing than adding the non skip ads at the beginning that they already do.
Compared to the cost of reencoding the video (or even segments of it) it would be basically nothing, though.
You're forgetting the part where the video is coming from a cache server that isn't designed to do this
They're already appending ads to the front of the video. Instead of appending an ad at key frame 1 they append the ad at key frame 30,000.
This isn't how YouTube has streamed videos for many, many years.
Most video and live streams work by serving a sequence of small self-contained video files (often in the 1-5s range). Sometimes audio is also separate files (avoids duplication as you often use the same audio for all video qualities as well as enables audio-only streaming). This is done for a few reasons but primarily to allow quite seamless switching between quality levels on-the-fly.
Inserting ads in a stream like this is trivial. You just add a few ad chunks between the regular video chunks. The only real complication is that the ad needs to start at a chunk boundary. (And if you want it to be hard to detect you probably want the length of the ad to be a multiple of the regular chunk size). There is no re-encoding or other processing required at all. Just update the "playlist" (the list of chunks in the video) and the player will play the ad without knowing that it is "different" from the rest of the chunks.
This is not necessarily the case.
You could only use this new system if the old one fails, ie. only for the say 10% of users that block ads, and so even if it were more expensive it would still be more profitable than letting them block all ads.
But I don’t think even that is the case, as they can essentially just "swap out" the video they’re streaming (as they don’t really stream "one video" per video anyway), bringing additional running costs to nearly zero.
The only thing definitely more expensive and resource intensive is the development of said custom software
But I don’t think even that is the case, as they can essentially just "swap out" the video they’re streaming
You're forgetting that the "targeted" component of their ads (while mostly bullshit) is an essential part of their business model. To do what you're suggesting they'd have to create and store thousands of different copies of each video, to account for all the different possible combinations of ads they'd want to serve to different customers.
10% where do you get that. The data I have heard is it’s around a third of all internet users globally.
To say that it's just much more expensive would be a huge understatement. This is not going to work, at least not in a near future..
I think more and more people are getting really tired of the ads, so it's starting to affect their revenue a little bit with all the ad blockers.
this has more to do with they got caught lying about their ad numbers and inflated their ad prices. So now they are doing this to show their shareholders they are doing something to protect their revenue and thus keep their stock price inflated.
Yeah, I've thought the same. It's like with ads on websites - ads are served from different domains and as blockers work by denying requests to those domains. If they really wanted they could serve the ads from the same domain as the rest of the website. I guess one day they might but so far it must not be worth it.
I also wondered why they didn’t do this, but I think it’s tricky because the ad that gets inserted might need to be selected right at the moment of insertion. That could complicate weaving it into the video itself. But I guess they finally found a way to do it.
I'm really getting the push I need to finally get rid of the last couple Google services I still use
It's only a matter if time til they enshittificate gmail as well.
Imma start subscribing to the RSS feeds of torrents made for specific channels before i watch ads.
If youtube wants to make their website so hostile its easier to get better versions of youtube videos without YouTube then those games will be played.
RSS feed -> yt-dlp script -> auto queue the folder into the player of your choice. Hmm...
(Edit: Though that may not actually work considering this is apparently fully server side. Gonna have to get clever...)
(Edit: Though that may not actually work considering this is apparently fully server side. Gonna have to get clever…)
Next step is machine learning to recognize ads and cut them out automatically hah.
Don't need to go that far, i think. If you had your extension hash some piece of each keyframe (basically: tokenize some IDs for each keyframe) and submit them to a database you could then see which parts were shown to everyone vs only to some people and only display those. Basically similar to how sponsorblock crowd sources its sponsor segment detection but automated. Some people would see the ads but then you'd know what the og video was unless it gets edited.
This is assuming they're not reencoding the video for each advertisement, which they probably aren't. If they are it probably gets easier, actually. Sponsorblock could do that.
Oh that's a smart way of doing it!
[Enshittification intensifies]
Well it’s what people want. No one even is complaining about the ads wants to pay for anything. And stuff costs money no matter what people choose to believe. Creators need to eat YouTube has costs. Money has to come from somewhere.
Honestly, if there was a remotely reasonably priced premium version of just youtube, no music or movies or whatever they try to shove down your throat nowadays, I would pay for that. But instead they rather price hike and make the ads more intrusive.
maybe if youtube didn't club itself over the head with the adpocalypses that happened, they wouldn't be in a position right now where every youtuber ever just integrates their ads directly into their videos.
They're monetizing in other ways as well, memberships especially.
If YouTube offered premium without music for a discounted price I'd probably be willing to pay for it. But I just want no ads, not a bunch of bundled stuff.
This is exactly me.
I’ve been paying £5 a month by using a VPN to sign up for Premium from Ukraine. Been doing so for the past couple of years without complaint. Literally all I need from them is to fuck off the adverts. I have Apple Music for music and I’m happy with it.
Now they’ve rumbled us and will be cutting off our Premium next month.
I am fucked if I’m paying those ratfuckers £20 a month just so I can watch other people’s hard work without the adverts they force in. Fuck that noise.
So I’m now researching ways to get my subs onto Plex so I can carry on watching on my Apple TV.
Note they will throttle ips so I recommend a vpn if you’re snagging huge channels.
I've said it many times but I would gladly pay for Premium if they would just make the first-party experience not absolute garbage. My experience has been better with literally every other 3rd party app/service. It's not that hard. Just stop cramming shit down my throat and give me control over what I want to see.
Also they need to do something about the midroll ads.
I get what you’re saying, but YouTube music is pretty much just a different front end for the normal site.
Sure, it does some filtering to attempt to be music only (though I’ve seen non music stuff sneak in before) but in the end, you get pretty much the same core experience if you open up the YouTube app and start “watching” a song (with premium for the background play capability).
I’d be willing to bet this is why they won’t go the route you’re talking about.
I'd prefer some kind of limited amount of viewing. I don't watch a ton of YT, so give me some kind of reasonable ad-free cap. I'm willing to pay to not see ads, but I don't watch enough to be worth their asking price.
I would rather micro transactions. Like just load up a dollar and get like 1000 minutes ad free...with the ability to turn off and save for later.
Yeah, I'm guessing an ad makes them at most a couple cents, and I'm totally willing to compensate them for not getting the ad revenue. I just don't like the current options: ads or tons of money per month for a service I don't use enough to justify.
Don’t think a dollar is going to give you anywheee near 1000 minutes of ad free video.
It should. That's more than I would spend on things they are advertising
Even then it doesn't have sponsorblock or a customisable UI like revanced does.
It's crazy how unofficial free is actually better than official paid.
See, I don’t really mind the sponsored segments. Some creators actually have fun with their ad reads, like the Map Men or Colin Furze. But if it’s boring I just tap the forward button on my Apple TV remote and skip past.
If I'm paying for premium, I just don't want ads! But they keep trying to shove it down my throat regardless
Different ads though. One is from YouTube and one is from the creator.
Irrelevant
Exactly. In my opinion, that's Google's biggest mistake, and I can't believe some people are okay with it. Everyone attacks YouTube as if they are the biggest villains, but let's not forget that without them, most creators would be nothing. Most people here are aware of how difficult it is to maintain such a platform, yet they are unrealistic with their attacks. And yes, I am someone who has LineageOS installed, which says enough about what I think of Google, but sometimes you have to be fair. If they banned creators from having ads within their videos, I might even consider paying for premium.
And then there are people like me, who aren't opposed to paying for access in theory, but will never be okay with having the videos I watch be tied to an account. It's inconvenient and I don't trust Google with my watch history, even when the option is turned off.
Also I wouldn't pay until: Youtube stops showing ads for hate groups; stops its manipulative recommendations and push towards right-leaning and extremist content; stops manipulating creators to all make the same kind of video in order to please the algorithm; removes hate content and extremist content; stops auto-flagging and removing fair-use content.
I'm a bit surprised they don't do this actually. Premium is good valued off you use the music side of it as well, which I do, but not for just ad free YouTube.
yep, we're back at "piracy is a service issue"
Why are we the ones that need to pay?
Bandwidth and storage is not free. So the person uploading something and using the platform to distribute that content should be the one paying? Right? Or did we totally forget that?
The ones that pay are the ones running the ads. If the content creators have to pay, they will be the ones doing ads. This is how AV content has worked since the dawn of broadcast radio.
So then you have to pay the content creator to watch their videos? Like float plane? Creators aren’t doing this for free and they need to make a living.
So, instead of iterating the ancient concept of frontal assault ads towards something less intrusive and more engaging, they go the black mirror path of force feeding ads?
Sounds about right regarding the decision makers have as much creativity as a Vogon.
Man I really hate those suit MBA circlejerk idiots in positions of power.
The sad thing is they inject ads to your feed even if you have premium. I keep seeing product videos in my feed named “Meet the x product”. Youtube and google is just shameless and I’m pretty sure they’re breaking a bunch of laws.
So YouTube Premium is as worthless as I thought. Google was never great in drawing recognizable lines between their free offering and paid... and it seems their solution is to make everything as shitty as possible and barely fix the stuff they fucked up.
Let's wait until Google Maps gets ads .... routing already seems fishy to me.
Thanks for your brief description... only shows me that my next Phone won't be a Pixel.
Definitely avoid Pixels. They look better than most Android devices in terms of software imo, although it’s because they’re really locking down the firmware similar to iOS, which breaks the purpose of using Android anyway. Also the processor on the Pixels are even behind 5-6 year old phones.
Btw…Google Maps has ads already, the square icons are all ads paid by the place owners. Routing is fishy yes, because they’re actively routing people through different routes in order to collect data for their algorithms.
The biggest reason I still use Google products is there is no alternative and they fully know this.
I got a Pixel 6 because I wanted to try something new .. it will probably be my last Pixel.
If there is a phone out there with Lineage/Cyanogen (or whatever it's called now) out of the box with decent HW, I would prefer that.
The last 2 years changed Google. They feel hollow like a blimp. Looking big but no real oomph any more.
Seeing as these ads will be targeted and of varying length, I wonder if a SponsorBlock-like extension with the ability to accept training data from users to help identify ads.
The Plex server application has a feature which scrubs videos and identifies intros so you can skip them like you can on Netflix. Wouldn’t it be sort of like that?
Seems like a good use of AI/ML.
I wonder if a SponsorBlock-like extension with the ability to accept training data from users to help identify ads.
That's...how SponsorBlock works? The ads come at different entry and exit points for every user. Otherwise it wouldn't be a problem for sponsorblock.
The Plex server application has a feature which scrubs videos and identifies intros
Pretty sure they just use timestamps from a crowdsourced database, just like sponsorblock.
The ads come at different entry and exit points for every user.
They're not referring to the YouTube ads, but the "let's take a minute to talk about today's sponsor nordvpn that I used on my trip to Antarctica." This is a part of the video file itself, and it starts and ends at the same time for all users.
This is a part of the video file itself, and it starts and ends at the same time for all users.
Except it doesn't when a YouTube ad is injected in the middle. Then all timestamps after the ad are offset by the length of the ad. That's not from me, that's from SponsorBlock themselves in the OP.
Pretty sure they just use timestamps from a crowdsourced database, just like sponsorblock.
Nope, it’s analyzing the sound to guess where the intro starts and ends. Turns out this is pretty simple to implement, but quite reliable. Source: worked for Plex
That's great, but it won't work if each user receives a different file.
This is about intro detection in TV shows, not ad blocking. I’m not proposing this as a good way to block ads, just noting that this feature in Plex doesn’t use a database.
The fucked up part is that I have to use SponsorBlock even with Premium. I thought I was paying for no ads…like wtf?
The article makes it sound like a new concept, but it's a very old approach for adding ads to video streams. I mean, it's essentially how regular TV works.
I just hope they don't start running commercials during the streams like quarter and half screen commercials over top the existing content. A lot of TV channels started doing that when DVRs first popped up.
I suspect that this will be a thing eventually... It's a reasonably easy way to defeat apps/systems like Comskip that detect and remove ads from videos. Comskip is what Plex, Jellyfin, etc. use to detect ads in DVR recordings.
Those ad removal systems usually find ads by looking for changes in the video. For example, sometimes there's black frames before and after the ads, sometimes there's a TV station logo that goes away during ads (especially on channels like CNN), sometimes there's a change in volume, etc. If they make the ads look similar enough to actual content, it becomes very difficult to automatically remove them. Online platforms like YouTube are trying to achieve the same thing - Make ads "look like" non-ads to make them harder to block.
Comskip has a pretty wide array of detection. They also look at percent scene change,volume , closed captioning, aspect ratios and duration patterns. The sweet part about the duration patterns is we know the contents supposed length. You could analyze the piece of media figure out how long it would be without it and look around for other options that are less obvious but make the right time code.
I've been using comskip for years, I suspect if it ends up being the tool we need will have an arsenal of people working on it to tune it for whatever YouTube's doing.
They're just looking to knock out the easy methods, they're not going to try to wage a full-on ground war. Their primary goals are probably to stop ublock and brave, and keep YT-DLP from downloading without ads. secondary goals being to stop or slow down revanced, though I think Google's going to try to do that for them in security.
I think the next logical step if they can't block us with reasonable means would be to do some custom encryption in the app. Again not insurmountable but hard to crack out right.
I think using a server to download the whole steam with ads then remove the ads, compress and store the files is really the hardest thing for them to stop.
The fact that they can do expensive, on-the-fly video processing like this, and still make a profit, proves that video hosting costs are not an insurmountable barrier for the open-source internet. We need to make hardware accelerated peertube ubiquitous, and get creators to move over.
Processing isn't the expensive part. It's bandwidth. Transferring that much data gets expensive.
Storage more likely. Google owns fiber backbones and peers against the tier 1 providers directly. The over all point of 'no, it's still prohibitively expensive' stands unless you've got 20B of dark fiber in your pocket.
Bit of A, bit of B?
Right, that's probably true. Video encoding hardware and storage is incredibly cheap, but we get talks from netflix engineers where they're talking about how they're limited by dram bandwidth on their servers.
A 1080p av1 stream is roughly 2-3mbits, maybe 5mbits for 60fps. You could serve all of those users with 14tbps of bandwidth, then.
Stockholm peering pricing for 14tbps (rough ballpark at this scale tbf) over 43x 400gbit ports at a Stockholm Internet eXchange, would cost about 240k EUR/month, with a 25% volume discount.
For comparison, Mastodon's monthly donations are about 30k EUR/month, and lemmy.world receives about 2k EUR/month.
Super rough calculations, but there's probably enough of a base in the fediverse for us to take over like 5% of Youtube's viewer base, funded through donations. Not as cheap as wikipedia, but still doable with a committed open-source community. Beyond that, and a netflix/spotify/nebula subscription model would allow to fund further market share.
It's notable to see though that Nebula seems to have millions in monthly revenue, but only about 700k subscribers (aka barely 100k concurrent streams). However I believe the majority of their expenses are going towards their creators and towards marketing for future growth.
But yeah, I think network effect is a bigger barrier than cost here.
Think your numbers are a little off. I think YouTube has more thrn 7 million concurrent users. Largest streaming platform by a large margin.
And our own bandwidth, too. Google isn't paying my Internet bill. Hope the rest of my content creators switch soon, otherwise I'll miss them.
What could content creators switch to that would save your own bandwidth?
Something not wasting it on endless ads.
Yes, that's also why bittorrent (which PeerTube runs on, by the way) is a figment of our collective imaginations, impossible to viably implement.
Torrenting was created precisely to solve the bandwidth problem of monolithic servers. You very obviously have no idea how torrents (or PeerTube for that matter) works.
Was my sarcasm not thick enough?
My point was that PeerTube works just fine because BitTorrent is viable.
But it’s not. People don’t upload as much as they download. Also internet connections are inferior in the upload speed.
I caught it, down voters suck at reading lol
Well it sounds more scary than it realistically will be.
YouTube must pass to the player the metadata of where the ads start/end. Why? Because they need to be unskippable/unseekable/etc.
If the metadata is there it is possible to force the seek 🤷♂️
Just matter of time
Why would that be the case? The player can simply be locked into ad mode till it gets the cue from the server all of the ads have been streamed. Only then will the player unlock. When watching what amounts to a video stream, this doesn't have to be handled clientside.
Well the player and its controls are client side.
and making them server site, while possible would introduce tremendous amounts of lag, and put that much more load on the servers. Imagine a server that has to handle playback of billions of users all at once. That's probably quite a bit worse than most average, or even high-level DDoS attacks.
I'm not talking about the player or the controls being server-side. I'm talking about the player being locked into a streaming mode where it does nothing but stream the ads. After the ads are streamed, the player returns to normal video mode and the server sends the actual video data.
This means no metadata about the ads are required on the player side about the ads.
Sure you can hack the player into not being locked during the streaming of the ads. But that won't get you very far, since it's a live stream. You can't skip forward, because the data isn't sent yet. You can skip backwards if you'd like, with what's in the current buffer, but why would you want to? You can have the player not display the ads, but that means staring at a blank screen till the ads are over. And that's always the case, one can simply walk away during the ads.
Technically I can think of several ways to implement this, without the client having meta data about the ads. And with little to none ways of getting around the ads. Once the video starts it's business as usual, so it doesn't impact regular viewing.
So you would need buffer barrieres essentially.
Still user watches video. Ad avoidance skips forward to buffer barrier to play ad in the background. Streamed ad is thrown away and new buffer data is received. User does not notice if the video is long enough.
In this case the buffer limit is the metadata.
Yeah I'm thinking of a system like this:
A user opens a session to watch a video, the user is assigned a token to watch the requested video. When the user isn't a premium subscriber and the video is monetized the token is used to enforce ads. To get video data from the server, the user needs to supply the token. That token contains a "credit" with how many seconds (or whatever they use internally) the user can watch for that video.
In order to get seconds credited to the token, the user needs to stream ad content to their player. New ad content is only available to stream, once the number of seconds they were credited have been elapsed.
One way to get around this is to have something in the background "watch" the video for you, invisible, including the ads. Then records the video data, so it's available for you to watch without ads. But it would be easy to rate limit the number of tokens a user can have. There's ways to get around that as well. But this seems to me well beyond what a simple browser plugin can do, this would require a dedicated client.
The idea is to make it harder for users to get around the ads, so they'll watch them instead of looking for a way to block ads. In the end there isn't anything to be done, users can get around the ads. Big streaming services use DRM and everything and their content gets ripped and shared. With YouTube it would be easy for someone to have a Premium account, rip the vids and share them. But by putting up a barrier, people watch the ads. YouTube doesn't care if a percentage of users doesn't watch the ads, as long as most of them do.
My point was, there's ways to implement the ads without sending metadata about the ads to the client.
I just read your list and it confirms mine.
Small buffer AND can't skip ahead on a boring video because you can only get served the ads to unlock further video after time equal to the served video duration has passed.
That is not YouTube, it's online TV and there will be an impact on the product.
Preloading a video via a 3rd party client will still easily beat this scheme. Just get a headstart equal to the first ad break.
No, you misunderstand. You get seconds assigned to your token. It doesn't matter where in the video you use those seconds.
So if you watch an ad you get say 60 secs of video until you need to watch an ad again. You can watch 30 secs, then skip 2 minutes ahead and watch another 30 secs, then you get an ad. In reality the times would be larger, but to illustrate a point.
In the current setup YT uses, if you watch an ad, watch 2 secs of video, then skip ahead of the next adbreak, you get more ads.
And yes as stated, a separate client can get around this. But as also stated there will always be ways around it, it's just a matter of making it harder. If it's beyond what a simple browser plugin can do, it's good enough. And YT has been banning 3rd party clients anyways, so that makes it even harder.
Sure if you fundamentally change what YouTube you can make it work.
You need very small buffers or complete disablement of seeking even outside of ads. Otherwise a client can reconstruct the video without viewer interruption.
People however expect to be able to skip ahead in YouTube videos, otherwise its just TV.
Nope that's not necessary at all, the client experience can be the same as it's always been. See my other response for what I was thinking of.
Also, this doesn't work very well in the current YT implementation. If you skip around a video with ads, sometime you'll get ads even though you've just watched a pre-roll for example.
Oh well.
YouTube can be past-tense. There's a million places to post a video these days. Spill out some whiskey and read a book. Fuck em.
Agreed, it's just hard to find a suitable replacement for many things like tvs, since there's a lack of alternative apps for other platforms on things like roku or LG tvs
It all sounds insane to me because I treat every TV like a computer monitor. Whatever I plug into it is what it displays. I usually ignore the onboard software as much as possible.
That's exactly what I started doing this year. I've read 32 books already and it gives me much more satisfaction than watching stupid "like & subscribe to my patreon" videos.
The arms race continues.
Only if premium did not have ads. They show you ad videos as if they’re part of your “recommendations”. They also allow creators to get sponsorships within videos. So even the premium experience isn’t really ad-free and they tout that shit everywhere.
i would consider paying for premium if they broke out the payments properly, i don't fucking want youtube tv youtube music or whatever other bullshit is attached, just fucking get rid of the ads and charge me like 5 bucks a month and i'll fuck off.
I remember subscribing to YouTube Red when it first came out (and had a reasonable price), literally the first video I watched after subbing included an ad for YouTube Red in it. I was so fucking pissed lmao, thank goodness for SponsorBlock.
As a YT Premium subscriber I really don't mind the sponsor sections. Money goes to the creator and a few taps and I'm back to watching. Also, I think outright banning sponsor segments is going to make creators more creative in a bad way..
I totally understand your views, although I’m paying this platform to not show me ads, that money should then go to the creators if they have to insert ads into their videos for some change. This is the platform’s fault.
I mean, it's very easy money given you already have a channel and a name dor youself. What would YT have to pay creators to not care about such easy money?
On my phone I use youtube revanced and adguard dns, kiwi browser with ublock origin. On my PC I use just ublock origin. So far** I havent run into issues
AB testing, you probably haven't been affected yet
I've been getting around it by setting my frontend to use an embed request, that way YouTube thinks it's a third party embed and the ad injection doesn't work. I've also in the past geospoofed to Russia and that works to block ads too.
MythTV solved this long ago. We already have the tech to bypass this shit.
Could you supply a source for this?
Go download MythTV yourself. Shit's been available for decades. I used to use it with a capture card to timeshift/DVR cable television. The source is me. I used it. It was great. It auto-removed TV ads when it recorded your shows.
I read about some sucker that paid for YouTube premium and still got ads in his pause screen. Lol.
I just want the Temu ads to stop
Most of the ads we see on our Roku Tv are political. I don't know about Temu’s but I’d rather get non-political ads.
Crowdsourced "tagging" of the affected area of the video timeline (like Sponsorblock) would fix this, unless Google get really devious and randomize the placement of the ad for various users.
It will always be randomized, otherwise it's not targeted. There's no reason to run Swedish pampers ads in the US or Walmart ads in Japan.
I mean placement within the video timeline. E.g. do all users see the ad at 0:00 or 2:00 or does it jump around for everyone to prevent it from being tagged.
And when the pampers ad is 24 second long and the walmart ad is 55 seconds, even if they start at the same time, they won't end at the same time, and now the next ad, even if it starts at 5:00 in the video, starts at a different time as well.
[Edit] actually, it doesn't matter. Old timestamps need to work, so when a user links to 5:00 in the video,the actual video stream needs to align with that, but the ad will be injected to the stream before. So trying to jump over the ad would just play you another ad first.
Sure, in a reality where that happens, but that isn't ours. Ads are overwhelmingly made to match the standard 0:15 and 0:30.
In Youtube, where you can get entire movies or 5-hour live streams as ads? That reality? Where the limit for a skippable mid-roll add is anywhere up to 12 hours?
"Placement" ie. on the timeline, friend. Not target.
Right but the swedish pampers ad and the walmart as will be different lengths so the timings wont be the same
Not necessarily, but sure?
So then after one person has had 2 ads that last a total of 40 seconds and another has had 2 that lasted 70 the timing is completly off for how far into the videos the ads are
So, you don't work in the industry?
Adtech? Fuck no I have self respect.
Yeah, it was a rhetorical comment on your understanding of how that process works at all, no offense.
Feel free to enlighten me (and others who've said the same) with your superior knowledge of how timestamps of ads stay constant when they are of different lengths.
Did you read the article? The article shows a post from Sponsorblock and it specifically states that they turned off sponsor block submissions on effected browsers since they can't be reliable with the new ad delivery method
This breaks the current SB implementation, but if the ad duration is known and consistent across the userbase then it will fix itself as users tag videos with the "new" timestamps.
That only works if the ads served are all the same or at least same time length. Which is very unlikely.
Yeah, but the article didn't say anything about consistent durations and spacing. It might be the case, but I have no idea how to find that out.
Consistent duration can be assumed, because that's how advertising works. The 15-second spot is still the standard.
I mean it might be, or they could decide to deliver 30 second ads to people they think are more likely to watch and 15s to ones they don't. I don't know enough about this implementation, for all I know they could have offset it by a few seconds because of Sponsorblock. Seems like they'd do anything to try to push more ads so who really knows at this point?
I wonder if you could just download the video twice and then remove any frame not present in both copies
It's like Alphabet hate guaranteed money.
"How can we boost the next six months of investment for sake of stable income over the next decade?"
"More ads. Studies show everyone with internet access fucking loves them."
*Brilliant! Welcome to entry level lower senior-ish management, Jenkins."
"YESSSSS! I can't wait to tell the family about this when I'm on leave from this wonderfully accommodating work campus. All hail, G."
"All hail, G."
Fuck them, but it's not like anything changes for people who currently watch ads, or who pay for Premium. It's us who they're fighting, and we don't generate any income.
Let's make an actual useful AI that detects ads and muted/blacks out the screen during ads. Haha
Comskip, it's not AI, and it works fine.
I'm surprised it took them so incredibly long to crack down on adblockers.
They used to still be only a small percentage until the entire internet got completely decimated by ads in the past 5 years.
So AdGuard works on the YouTube website. I haven't been there for some time - I use 2 other methods to watch YouTube ad-free.
Newpipe - Android app that works by parsing the website, will probably be affected?
YouTube Kodi add-on - works with Google YouTube API, I was wondering when this loophole is going to be plugged..
Anyone with knowledge of the matter care to comment? So far my YouTube watching is still ad-free.
I also run pi-hole in front of my WiFi. Nothing gets through. Or will it?
I noticed some podcasts these days have random server injected ads - usually the same ad repeated 2 or 3 times, is this going to be my video stream soon?
If ads are injected server-side like the article is taking about, your downloads in Newpipe and Kodi are going to have the ads in them.
use ublock origin, so far it's been pretty much problem free.
Outside of this, use something like yt-dlp to run your own jellyfin instance or something.
Pihole will not work because it works on the DNS queries. With server side injection it’s gonna be tougher to block ads, but I’m sure we’ll find a way
Nothing gets through. Or will it?
You would have to block the video itself to get rid of them
now I need to move away from Telegram & YouTube at the same time.. oef
YouTube alternatives?
until it stops working, yt-dlp and jellyfin.
Wouldn't yt-dlp be forced to download the server-side ads, too?
hence the until it stops working, but even then it will likely get worked around for the most part.
There is software for commercial detection and removal from static MP4. That's not a hard problem to solve.
Happy I left google 90% and I am trying to leave the services that I cannot change my email or require a Google account
My last bastions of Google are:
Email. Its rock solid stable, but I know they are using it to mine data. This is a good service...but im still looking at proton at some point to make the switch. Or coming up with a solution myself.
Maps. Maps is also another really good service they give out for free. I have tried a huge number of alternatives, but still have no real alternative. OSM+ is the closest and works really well in emergencies but its pretty terrible at searching for anything specific to get to.
Youtube. This is the one I think I can possibly remove at some point. Some creators have their videos on other sites so it might be a mishmash for a while. But the best ones dont. I might just get into audio-books or some other sort of entertainment. Peertube is also a great alternative. And throwing money at !tilvids@mstdn.social might be better in the long run.
Ironically their search has taken a turn for the worse, so other sites are much better in my opinion.
For me it's prob
Google play store:
Cannot DEGoogle phone at this time
Gmail (partially and currently moving)
Youtube (idk if this counts but a frontend am using to watch yt videos)
Google maps partially (only for streetview Usally)
Fdroid is pretty good, I get most of my apps from there by now. I don't game on my phone though.
yeah same tbh
Wouldn't that technology make them easy to rewind fast-forward?
rewind forward
As a child of the cassette era, this phrase hurts my soul.
ok, i fixed that 😆
This comment confuses me
When Twitch this I rented a VPS in Russia that costs me $3 a month. I now route all my traffic through it and have no ads in Twitch (and im assuming YT too now?)
No you have to switch your vpn to Albania to avoid YouTube ads.
I'm really curious if they can make video injection of ads cost effective.
It feels like mangeling video streams into one, potentially re-encoding the video as they go... sounds expensive
Video encoding works by combining key frames, the whole picture and delta frames, what and how it changed. As long as you swap the stream at a key frame there is no need for a reencoding.
Why would it involve re encoding?
There was a brief point in YouTube’s history where there were little-to-no ads, and creators weren’t expecting to make a living off the videos they made. Somewhere down the line, it feels like the wrong turn was taken from a content consumers perspective.
Yes, hosting is expensive between the infrastructure and bandwidth requirements, but there already was a model in traditional web hosting where the hosting provider charges for the hosting infrastructure, as well as storage and bandwidth costs.
While we’re all so accustomed to accessing sites for free and fast, I think that there should’ve been a “free” tier for uploads which could’ve been kept at 10 mins or w/e and rate limited, while offering paid tiers for longer, higher quality/fidelity content , and larger bandwidth buckets before rate limiting which could help offset YTs costs, as well as temper expectations of what it means to create and watch.
Heck, there could even be a paid tier for viewers that could even allow viewers to watch “free” uploads without being limited, and the viewer would be supporting as well.
Yes, that means that large scale, Mr. Beast style productions would be a lot less feasible, but I feel like it’s not just the platform that being enshittified, but also the amount of aspiring creators who’ve also come out of the woodwork copying or re-uploading other creators content in hopes of getting blessed by the algorithm for a free payout.
I know these are 2 separate issues, and the ship has sailed long ago, but I can’t help but feel like this whole business model is being done wrong from a sustainability perspective.
reply to me with youtube URLs videos, channels or playlists that you find interesting.
::: spoiler optionally specify these tags so I can organize the data better
it's video component is nesisary (VIDEO)
it's video component is summerised by a single image (STILL)
it's mostly talking (COMMENTARY)
it's a person talking into a camera (FACE)
it's music (MUSIC)
it's a square thumbnail or video (SQUARE)
Its a 4 by 3 thumbnail or video (4BY3)
high resolution video (HIRES)
:::
Ive been archiving for years and this looks like it may be the final clean batch I can produce.
Feel free to specify other tags that may be useful and I will add them.
Can I ask why people act like YouTube is so evil for trying to make money off their site? They provide a service I value and it costs money to do so. No disrespect to anyone who doesn't want to watch ads or pay (like I do, I use it a LOT) but I don't understand why some people seem to be personally insulted by the idea that they can't get it for free forever with no strings attached.
Honest question, please don't flame me 🙏
I pay other sites for creators. So for me $$ isn't the issue. Not when premium is less than 20.
The biggest issue with YouTube for me is that their ads are very intrusive/track quite a bit about what you do/can actually be malware. On addition, there's a good chance that money is mostly going to YouTube and not the people creating their works. There's a reason patreon is a thing for most successful creators. I also hate ads. I don't hate people getting paid, I hate YouTube for shoving ads down my throat and then turning around not paying people their dues. And in my opinion the worst way possible.
YouTube is/ its ads are are extremely privacy intrusive and there isn’t really an alternative to the platform. Next to the comparatively obvious network effects all social media platforms rely on is also because YouTube on its own is not that profitable and probably only really makes Google money via the data collected on the platform. This means only platforms that have a gigantic ad network themselves and are able to monetize said data as well as Google can can actually compete with YouTube— and as you see, there are basically none.
Also, the whole blocking ad blockers thing is trying to fundamentally reverse the power equilibrium between the website (the server) and the person visiting it (the client); because for the last 40 years or so, the server had the purpose of delivering content to the client which could decide what to do with and how to present said content.
This sharing of responsibility between the two comes in many forms, starting with simple things such as screen readers or a reading mode for the browser.
Partially for the same reason I don't pay for Xbox live and whatever Nintendo and Sony have; I refuse to pay a service charge for an online platform when I already purchased the hardware (in this case, computer/phone) and pay an ISP for internet access.
If they want my data and to use my bandwidth they can damn well pay for it.
Do you realize you're using their bandwidth, too? They have to pay for upload/download just like you do.
I pay for Nebula - $30 a year which is about £22.50. That won't even cover two months of YouTube Premium (£12 pm), and there's not even the discounted yearly option in the UK.
And "if you're not paying you're the product" is wrong - YouTube/Google would still be datamining my viewing habits to sell to advertisers.
Noooo, this is Lemmy. If it isn't free to use and 20% as good as the paid version, its evil.
So if YouTube is now serving up the ads directly to me, does that mean they're finally liable for the content of those ads? Can we have them investigated for all the malware, phishing, illegal hate speech, etc.?
No, because that would be communism, and that killed 100 million people. You also think genocide is bad, aren't you? And besides of that, if there were less regulations, you could make your own video platform to challenge Google's monopoly! /s
i think people may have missed that you're not serious
Reading comprehension is for people who paid attention in school. Nerds.
The problem with pretending to be a dumbass on the Internet, is it's almost impossible to outdo the professionals.
Poe's law
It’s not possible for everyone to just tell if it’s supposed to be sarcasm. ADHD makes it hard. A bad day makes it hard. A tiring day makes it hard.
The downside of the misunderstanding isn’t just downvotes. It’s possibly a proliferation of misinformation and an impression that there are people who DO think that way.
Being not serious while saying something grim is not a globally understood culture either. It’s more common and acceptable in the Western world as a joke.
So… call it accessibility, but it’s just more approachable for everyone to just put an “/s”.
Well... Communism is directly responsible for multiple famines that killed into the hundreds of millions. Then there are the inevitable purges that have taken millions of lives and hosts of terrors as well.
You're free to dispute history if you need to, and claim that theoretically communism is nice, but in practice, history tells us that living under communism reaaaalllyy sucks.
There are people here not from western europe or north america, we felt all of that and beyond with capitalism too. Do you think Asia and Africa, who received aid and support from the soviet union to free themselves from capitalist Europeans will fall for that ? Where did you arrive at ''multiple famines that killed into the hundreds of millions" ? Even the soviet famines of 1930s and chinese great famine 'only' killed at maximum intervals of estimation 9 and 50 millions each, and this article over-viewing all atrocities maxes at 150 million, with a low 10-20 million estimation, not hundreds of millions in famines alone.
Are you paraphrasing that 'Black Book of Communism' shtick ? It is a propaganda tool not valid in actual academic research, even by liberals that are not fraudsters, because the author twists every single communist countries-adjacent deaths as ''mass killing caused by communism'', including brilliant takes like total number of abortions (ex: France, that practices 250.000 abortions per year must be enraged with a capitalist regime that killed 5 million people only in the 21st century !) and all WW2 eastern front deaths (so both the nazi germans and allies that invaded USSR and USSR soldiers and civilians killed count as 'killed by communism').
Last but not least, the USSR had much higher GDP per capita and living standards than the average third world capitalist country (which is where the demographic majority of capitalist people live), so even if the USSR could not equate Switzerland, they achieved a good quality of life better than the world average.
why would this be relevant? The US had a higher per capita GDP than the USSR and it was capitalist, surely that means that capitalism would be better here?
that's like saying capitalism is directly responsible for school shootings because it happens all the time in the US. but no one's dumb enough to claim that because that's not how things work.
well, technically the USSR exported lots and lots of grain during the 30s famine. So.
It's still not perfect, but you could argue there was mismanagement there.
TBF, stalinism wasn't really communism, it was more authoritarianism than anything, but.
This kind of messages should have a "/s" attached. IMHO, that's just proper Netiquette.
I kind of inferred the /s by the end of the post, but respect that such inference isn't universal. Also there are many /s comments that I wouldn't infer if it wasn't explicit.
Now there's a term I've not seen in many years.
And dates both of us, I expect... 😄
This is a good question.
Great, now it's Russian roulette every time you hit that pause button. ¡BOOM ZERODAY MALWARE!
no because of sec 230 and publisher rights, they were still directly serving them before, the only difference now is that it's tied into the video stream directly, rather than broken out as a second one.
In the past they have always said that they aren't transmitting the content and so it's the responsibility of the transmitter of the data. Now the content at least appears to be coming from youtube not the advertisers. So I'm curious if that's enough to make it fall under section 230 which would require that they make a good faith effort to remove "objectionable" content.
legally that's the same as far as courts care.
The only thing that would change this is a ruling on advertiser responsibility. Or something tangentially related that would force them to properly regulate ads for example.
Ultimately i'm guessing unless youtube rolls their own in home ads, instead of allowing other advertising agencies to run their ads on youtube, it simply wouldn't apply here.
No, at least not in the USA. They're still protected under Section 230, which makes them immune from liability of third-party content on their platform.
What do you think they were doing before? 🤔
Does anybody know how this will affect the EU?
Ads will always be detectable because you cannot speed up or skip an ad like you can the rest of the video.
If they do make it so you can speed up or skip the ad sections of a video, mission accomplished.
If all else fails, I'd enjoy a plugin that just blanks the video and mutes the sound whenever an ad is playing. I'll enjoy the few seconds of quiet, and hopefully I can use that time to break out of the mentally unhealthy doom spiral that is the typical YouTube experience.
Yep. YouTube must include a manifest with each video to tell the player what time ranges are un-skippable. Baked in ads were doomed from the beginning 🤡
Are they? What if the server refuses to serve the video until the ad’s duration has passed? You’d have no better option than to hide it, which most people wouldn’t bother with.
Seems like that would foil a plugin, but I think it would effectively kill video scrubbing, or simultaneous streams, depending on how that restriction was implemented. I still don’t see this working well for YouTube
Maybe with some content ID system… but you’ve just predicted their 2025 update which we might imagine would go something like this:
I briefly touched on this in a lengthy comment when this scheme was originally floated a few months ago. Your prediction, which granted is something that Youtube/Google absolutely would try if they thought they could get away with it, would only work on viewers that remained within the confines of Youtube's native player.
Any third party app capable of bullying or tricking Youtube into handing them the video data is free to do whatever it wants to with it afterwards, even if this ultimately means impeccably pretending to be the official Youtube player in order to get the server to fork over the data. Furthermore, video playback is buffered so a hypothetical pirate client would have several seconds worth of upcoming video to analyze and determine what it wants to do with it.
Youtube could certainly make this process rather difficult by including some kind of end-to-end DRM or something, but at the end of the day you need to make a playable video stream arrive on the client's device or computer somehow, and if you can't guarantee full control of the entire environment in which that happens, dedicated nerds will find a away to screw with that data.
Introducing…
Oh, the year is 2100 and YouTube only plays on dedicated Alphabet-produced hardware (available “free” of course) with cam-proof screens? Storytelling will come back in style with a vengeance overnight!
I wish I had more upvotes to give this comment cause you are so on the money.
What about a message reminding you what the real fight is?
My brain just does that anyway, after decades of ads I just tune them out. And at home I use ad blockers.
That's not how it works. Or, rather, that's not only how it works. Sure, advertisers dream of users who see an ad once and run to buy a product. But ad effects are spread over time. They build brand recognition. They fake familiarity. Say you are in a supermarket and you want to buy a new type of product that you haven't bought before. Very likely you'll pick something familiar-sounding, which you heard in an ad. Ads pollute the mind even if the most obvious effects are, well, obvious and easily discarded, more subtle influence remains.
If it makes you feel any better, I intentionally never use products that have intentionally repetitive messaging or earworm tendencies out of spite. Though I know I'm probably in the minority
Do we unintentionally use products we didn’t realize repetitively messaged us?
We’ll never know…
Just kidding, we can be sure it’s incredibly well studied given the billions and billions of dollars going into ads!
Totally no bias in these studies at all either, they totally wouldn't try to skew these studies for personal gain and to try and justify the huge spending on ad money right?
You can fool some of the people some of the time… right? :)
I’d expect nothing less than executives at a number of the Fortune 50 to be ruthlessly cutthroat, including when it comes to vetting the claims of their marketing teams.
(I know I’m speaking about studies I only assume to exist by the way, will have to research it later)
surely large corpos would waste billions on ads if they didn't see any financial return right!
Also, we should be taking a page from the propaganda playbook right now, that should pretty much tell us all we need to know lol.
I think the main problem is that this type of reasoning can't actually be proven scientifically, even if we have a study there's not a guarantee it's unbiased (who do you think funds research on advertising effectiveness). Then there is the problem that every product or brand in modern advertising is likely one of the handful of pseudo monopoly brands. One might argue that a person bought their product because they heard it in an ad, but in reality they might not have really had much choice, that makes it hard to say if people buy the products because they're familiar or if they just don't have much option.
The main point I'd like to make is that advertisers would like to believe they aren't wasting money or time, they need people to believe it in some capacity, because if enough people don't, eventually the dumb and blind companies who give them money will realize it too and stop giving them money. That's why the ad-funded internet is considered a bubble, it's not worth it, or necessary in a lot of cases, and the moment the dumb and blind corpos realize that, they'll stop dumping money into a hole.
The reason we're absolutely fucking blasted away with ads is because even if they only have a 0.01% success rate, that's enough to make them super profitable. So if you and 998 other people all pay zero attention to ads, they still make money.
There's also lots of people (like one of my family members) who become absolutely irate by ads but still buy the shit they're shilling anyway.
Advertisers claim that it'll work eventually which is how they can justify companies paying them to display ads, and how they can justify paying for ads on a service like YouTube or even a website. In a sense they are being hung out to dry, many of the big companies seen in ads these days don't actually need to convince you to buy their product because they have an almost complete monopoly on the market, they're only technically not monopolies, so you're going to buy their products anyway or live without the convenience. This is why among other things Ad-funded internet is considered a bubble in a sense, because advertisers are spending money paying websites to show people things they don't think or care about, but somehow this translates into profits? Seems like the only one profiting is the site being paid, and the creator on it.
I'm sure Nestle, Pepsi Co. P&G, CocaCola Bottling Co. Walmart, Amazon, and the other big boys really need to tell others about them or people wouldn't know they exist and buy from them. Get real, these companies have their foot in the door, when it comes to the whole consumers buying from them. You can't not buy from them and live as anyone else would, it takes effort to cut them out, and in many cases living without the convenience they bring.
i remember when i put a video at 2x speed the next ad i got was also at 2x speed lmao
No you don't have to be able to detect it if you can't skip. Since they're injecting the stream directly every time you hit skip they move the counter and when you come back in it just continues to stream you the ad. Just let the time code go negative at the end of the video if you skipped.
All they have to do is not really care about minutes and seconds displaying correctly exactly if you're working around with fast forward. Alternately they could also just disable fast forward and rewind if they detect you're using it to abuse commercials.
I think Sooner or later, pretty much all blocking becomes a store the entire video with commercials and strip the commercials out with comskip end. If you're just storing the buffer off, and stripping it out privately there's not really a lot they can do about that.
I may not like it, but you do make an interesting technical argument.
I think it would still be detectable though because of buffering.
What you're saying assumes that videos are streamed frame-by-frame: "here's a frame", "okay, I watched that frame", "okay, here's the next frame".
With buffering videos will preload the next 30 seconds of video, and so if you pressed a button to skip ahead 10 seconds, that often happens instantly because the computer has already stored the next 30 seconds of video. Your plan to just pretend to skip ahead doesn't work in this case, because my computer can know whether or not it really did skip ahead, because of buffering.
i feel like with a relatively basic audio and visual analysis you could probably get a decently accurate detection of ads, paired with a collective "sponsor block" type system, this would like be very reliable. Even just ignoring the stream info itself.
That depends on what video player you use. Of we have control of that, then sure it works. I use mpv to play things, so for radio streams or live videos I can go back/forward as long as it's cached.
But if it's the web service, even though the browser video player has something cached, the player is still controlled by the website. And considering most of the people use chrome/chromium derivatives or YouTube app, it wouldn't be hard for them to make it so that the player itself will collaborate with whatever they want to do.
If YouTube was a separate organization it wouldn't have been the problem it is because of how Google has been taking over all the different parts they need for advertising.
There will probably be a hundred different tits for tats that we can only both dream of.
In the end, they have some form of knowledge of how many minutes of data they've sent you. You have the entirety of the MPEG stream and a cell phone powerful enough to do things to it.
There are different levels of crazy that can be waged If they were to do something like custom stream encryption to their client. We'd be playing cat and mouse with keys much like satellite dish hacking back in the day.
horrendously bad UI, this should never be done, recalculate the time, maybe. But don't just make it negative, that's fucking stupid.
If you recalculate the time you've given away the ad.
Mission failed sucessfully, if people can speed up or scroll through the ad, then it kind of defeats the point since people can skip ahead or increase the speed.
Hence "mission accomplished"
Unless you are watching live content, you are correct
surely they're going to make the ads vary in speed, that would be a horrid UI mistake.
I'm getting tired, man. these people are truly just the shittiest individuals ever.
MBAs on their way to destroy their company's relationship with their customers and cause a socioeconomic disaster (their numbers will grow by 0.01% 💪💪)
If you don’t pay for something, you are not a customer, you are the product. If you pay for Youtube, you don’t see the ads, but you are also still their product. Lose /Lose
Okay, but if you sell cows, and all your cows escape or die, your business is still ruined
The network effect is too strong. The minority that are whining here isn’t going to make a dent. Next time you’re out, look at how many people are using ads ridden apps instead of paying $0.99 or whatever to remove them. The users have already decided their time and privacy is worthless and would rather getting the service for “free”.
Reddit is still going strong I feel.
Line go up 💹
Hey don't blame us, blame the nepos who got on the board without even needing to study for it!
My MBA track actively rewards me for thinking like a socialist XD.
As in my profits, our losses?
As in our profits and minimized losses.
Imagine all the cool stuff we could be doing if we weren’t wasting the time of hundreds of engineers figuring out how to shove ads in people’s faces.
This is ad driven economy and bar must go 🆙
"Line go up" is the animating force of the age, the critical philosophical principal around which our entire society is arranged.
Gives me a fucking headache.
I choose not to confuse their values as mine or that of my community.
Agreed. I really hate it when people see the problems in the world, fall for misanthropy, and blame everyone, most of whom are blameless beyond their failure to put their lives at risk to change things.
People are great. We've done great things. We're a species who's defining advantage is cooperation. None of what we see today would be possible if most of us were greedy, hateful, idiots.
People can be lead astray. but who can blame them? We've created a world more complicated than any one of us could fully understand. It's bad enough that a handful of psychopaths can take advantage of that, we don't need to add to it by making it seem like everyone's at fault for not instantly bashing their heads in.
I really appreciate this take. It's good-hearted and makes good sense. I'll try to remember it going forward, when cynicism overwhelms.
Thank you.
Unfortunately, the powerful have the power so they're arranging my life too. To the best of their ability, at least.
You're right that we should not confuse their values for our own, however.
All time high all time!
Machines could be doing all the work. We could have clean energy , air ,water and food and shelter for all....
Honestly, I've kind of always wondered why they didn't just do this. It's always seemed like the obvious thing to me.
I mean, I hope it doesn't work, because screw Google, but I'm still surprised it took them this long to try it.
Because it's much more expensive. What they're talking about here is basically modifying the video file as they stream it. That costs CPU/GPU cycles. Given that only about 10% of users block ads, this is only worth doing if they can get the cost down low enough that those extra ad views actually net them revenue.
It wouldn't cost any CPU with custom software that Google can afford to write. The video is streamed by delivering blocks of data from drives where the data isn't contiguous. It's split across multiple drives on multiple servers. Video files are made of key frames and P frames and B in between the key frames. Splicing at key frames need no processing. The video server when sending the next block only needs a change to send blocks based on key frames. It can then inject ads without any CPU overhead.
Wouldn't it still need overhead to chose those blocks and send them instead of the video? Especially if they're also trying to do it in a way that prevents the user from just hitting the "skip 10 seconds" button like they might if it was served as part of the regular video.
It has to know which blocks to chose to get the next part of the file anyway. Except the next part of the file is an ad. So yes there is overhead but not for the video stream server. It doesn't need to re encode the video. It's not any more taxing than adding the non skip ads at the beginning that they already do.
Compared to the cost of reencoding the video (or even segments of it) it would be basically nothing, though.
You're forgetting the part where the video is coming from a cache server that isn't designed to do this
They're already appending ads to the front of the video. Instead of appending an ad at key frame 1 they append the ad at key frame 30,000.
This isn't how YouTube has streamed videos for many, many years.
Most video and live streams work by serving a sequence of small self-contained video files (often in the 1-5s range). Sometimes audio is also separate files (avoids duplication as you often use the same audio for all video qualities as well as enables audio-only streaming). This is done for a few reasons but primarily to allow quite seamless switching between quality levels on-the-fly.
Inserting ads in a stream like this is trivial. You just add a few ad chunks between the regular video chunks. The only real complication is that the ad needs to start at a chunk boundary. (And if you want it to be hard to detect you probably want the length of the ad to be a multiple of the regular chunk size). There is no re-encoding or other processing required at all. Just update the "playlist" (the list of chunks in the video) and the player will play the ad without knowing that it is "different" from the rest of the chunks.
This is not necessarily the case.
You could only use this new system if the old one fails, ie. only for the say 10% of users that block ads, and so even if it were more expensive it would still be more profitable than letting them block all ads.
But I don’t think even that is the case, as they can essentially just "swap out" the video they’re streaming (as they don’t really stream "one video" per video anyway), bringing additional running costs to nearly zero.
The only thing definitely more expensive and resource intensive is the development of said custom software
You're forgetting that the "targeted" component of their ads (while mostly bullshit) is an essential part of their business model. To do what you're suggesting they'd have to create and store thousands of different copies of each video, to account for all the different possible combinations of ads they'd want to serve to different customers.
10% where do you get that. The data I have heard is it’s around a third of all internet users globally.
To say that it's just much more expensive would be a huge understatement. This is not going to work, at least not in a near future..
I think more and more people are getting really tired of the ads, so it's starting to affect their revenue a little bit with all the ad blockers.
this has more to do with they got caught lying about their ad numbers and inflated their ad prices. So now they are doing this to show their shareholders they are doing something to protect their revenue and thus keep their stock price inflated.
Yeah, I've thought the same. It's like with ads on websites - ads are served from different domains and as blockers work by denying requests to those domains. If they really wanted they could serve the ads from the same domain as the rest of the website. I guess one day they might but so far it must not be worth it.
I also wondered why they didn’t do this, but I think it’s tricky because the ad that gets inserted might need to be selected right at the moment of insertion. That could complicate weaving it into the video itself. But I guess they finally found a way to do it.
I'm really getting the push I need to finally get rid of the last couple Google services I still use
It's only a matter if time til they enshittificate gmail as well.
Imma start subscribing to the RSS feeds of torrents made for specific channels before i watch ads.
If youtube wants to make their website so hostile its easier to get better versions of youtube videos without YouTube then those games will be played.
RSS feed -> yt-dlp script -> auto queue the folder into the player of your choice. Hmm...
(Edit: Though that may not actually work considering this is apparently fully server side. Gonna have to get clever...)
Next step is machine learning to recognize ads and cut them out automatically hah.
Don't need to go that far, i think. If you had your extension hash some piece of each keyframe (basically: tokenize some IDs for each keyframe) and submit them to a database you could then see which parts were shown to everyone vs only to some people and only display those. Basically similar to how sponsorblock crowd sources its sponsor segment detection but automated. Some people would see the ads but then you'd know what the og video was unless it gets edited.
This is assuming they're not reencoding the video for each advertisement, which they probably aren't. If they are it probably gets easier, actually. Sponsorblock could do that.
Oh that's a smart way of doing it!
[Enshittification intensifies]
Well it’s what people want. No one even is complaining about the ads wants to pay for anything. And stuff costs money no matter what people choose to believe. Creators need to eat YouTube has costs. Money has to come from somewhere.
Honestly, if there was a remotely reasonably priced premium version of just youtube, no music or movies or whatever they try to shove down your throat nowadays, I would pay for that. But instead they rather price hike and make the ads more intrusive.
maybe if youtube didn't club itself over the head with the adpocalypses that happened, they wouldn't be in a position right now where every youtuber ever just integrates their ads directly into their videos.
They're monetizing in other ways as well, memberships especially.
If YouTube offered premium without music for a discounted price I'd probably be willing to pay for it. But I just want no ads, not a bunch of bundled stuff.
This is exactly me.
I’ve been paying £5 a month by using a VPN to sign up for Premium from Ukraine. Been doing so for the past couple of years without complaint. Literally all I need from them is to fuck off the adverts. I have Apple Music for music and I’m happy with it.
Now they’ve rumbled us and will be cutting off our Premium next month.
I am fucked if I’m paying those ratfuckers £20 a month just so I can watch other people’s hard work without the adverts they force in. Fuck that noise.
So I’m now researching ways to get my subs onto Plex so I can carry on watching on my Apple TV.
I use this for my plex yet subscriptions https://ytdl-sub.readthedocs.io/en/latest/
Note they will throttle ips so I recommend a vpn if you’re snagging huge channels.
I've said it many times but I would gladly pay for Premium if they would just make the first-party experience not absolute garbage. My experience has been better with literally every other 3rd party app/service. It's not that hard. Just stop cramming shit down my throat and give me control over what I want to see.
Also they need to do something about the midroll ads.
I get what you’re saying, but YouTube music is pretty much just a different front end for the normal site.
Sure, it does some filtering to attempt to be music only (though I’ve seen non music stuff sneak in before) but in the end, you get pretty much the same core experience if you open up the YouTube app and start “watching” a song (with premium for the background play capability).
I’d be willing to bet this is why they won’t go the route you’re talking about.
I'd prefer some kind of limited amount of viewing. I don't watch a ton of YT, so give me some kind of reasonable ad-free cap. I'm willing to pay to not see ads, but I don't watch enough to be worth their asking price.
I would rather micro transactions. Like just load up a dollar and get like 1000 minutes ad free...with the ability to turn off and save for later.
Yeah, I'm guessing an ad makes them at most a couple cents, and I'm totally willing to compensate them for not getting the ad revenue. I just don't like the current options: ads or tons of money per month for a service I don't use enough to justify.
Don’t think a dollar is going to give you anywheee near 1000 minutes of ad free video.
It should. That's more than I would spend on things they are advertising
Even then it doesn't have sponsorblock or a customisable UI like revanced does.
It's crazy how unofficial free is actually better than official paid.
See, I don’t really mind the sponsored segments. Some creators actually have fun with their ad reads, like the Map Men or Colin Furze. But if it’s boring I just tap the forward button on my Apple TV remote and skip past.
If I'm paying for premium, I just don't want ads! But they keep trying to shove it down my throat regardless
Different ads though. One is from YouTube and one is from the creator.
Irrelevant
Exactly. In my opinion, that's Google's biggest mistake, and I can't believe some people are okay with it. Everyone attacks YouTube as if they are the biggest villains, but let's not forget that without them, most creators would be nothing. Most people here are aware of how difficult it is to maintain such a platform, yet they are unrealistic with their attacks. And yes, I am someone who has LineageOS installed, which says enough about what I think of Google, but sometimes you have to be fair. If they banned creators from having ads within their videos, I might even consider paying for premium.
And then there are people like me, who aren't opposed to paying for access in theory, but will never be okay with having the videos I watch be tied to an account. It's inconvenient and I don't trust Google with my watch history, even when the option is turned off.
Also I wouldn't pay until: Youtube stops showing ads for hate groups; stops its manipulative recommendations and push towards right-leaning and extremist content; stops manipulating creators to all make the same kind of video in order to please the algorithm; removes hate content and extremist content; stops auto-flagging and removing fair-use content.
I'm a bit surprised they don't do this actually. Premium is good valued off you use the music side of it as well, which I do, but not for just ad free YouTube.
yep, we're back at "piracy is a service issue"
Why are we the ones that need to pay?
Bandwidth and storage is not free. So the person uploading something and using the platform to distribute that content should be the one paying? Right? Or did we totally forget that?
The ones that pay are the ones running the ads. If the content creators have to pay, they will be the ones doing ads. This is how AV content has worked since the dawn of broadcast radio.
So then you have to pay the content creator to watch their videos? Like float plane? Creators aren’t doing this for free and they need to make a living.
So, instead of iterating the ancient concept of frontal assault ads towards something less intrusive and more engaging, they go the black mirror path of force feeding ads?
Sounds about right regarding the decision makers have as much creativity as a Vogon.
Man I really hate those suit MBA circlejerk idiots in positions of power.
The sad thing is they inject ads to your feed even if you have premium. I keep seeing product videos in my feed named “Meet the x product”. Youtube and google is just shameless and I’m pretty sure they’re breaking a bunch of laws.
So YouTube Premium is as worthless as I thought. Google was never great in drawing recognizable lines between their free offering and paid... and it seems their solution is to make everything as shitty as possible and barely fix the stuff they fucked up.
Let's wait until Google Maps gets ads .... routing already seems fishy to me.
Thanks for your brief description... only shows me that my next Phone won't be a Pixel.
Definitely avoid Pixels. They look better than most Android devices in terms of software imo, although it’s because they’re really locking down the firmware similar to iOS, which breaks the purpose of using Android anyway. Also the processor on the Pixels are even behind 5-6 year old phones.
Btw…Google Maps has ads already, the square icons are all ads paid by the place owners. Routing is fishy yes, because they’re actively routing people through different routes in order to collect data for their algorithms.
The biggest reason I still use Google products is there is no alternative and they fully know this.
I got a Pixel 6 because I wanted to try something new .. it will probably be my last Pixel.
If there is a phone out there with Lineage/Cyanogen (or whatever it's called now) out of the box with decent HW, I would prefer that.
The last 2 years changed Google. They feel hollow like a blimp. Looking big but no real oomph any more.
Seeing as these ads will be targeted and of varying length, I wonder if a SponsorBlock-like extension with the ability to accept training data from users to help identify ads.
The Plex server application has a feature which scrubs videos and identifies intros so you can skip them like you can on Netflix. Wouldn’t it be sort of like that?
Seems like a good use of AI/ML.
That's...how SponsorBlock works? The ads come at different entry and exit points for every user. Otherwise it wouldn't be a problem for sponsorblock.
Pretty sure they just use timestamps from a crowdsourced database, just like sponsorblock.
They're not referring to the YouTube ads, but the "let's take a minute to talk about today's sponsor nordvpn that I used on my trip to Antarctica." This is a part of the video file itself, and it starts and ends at the same time for all users.
Except it doesn't when a YouTube ad is injected in the middle. Then all timestamps after the ad are offset by the length of the ad. That's not from me, that's from SponsorBlock themselves in the OP.
Nope, it’s analyzing the sound to guess where the intro starts and ends. Turns out this is pretty simple to implement, but quite reliable. Source: worked for Plex
That's great, but it won't work if each user receives a different file.
This is about intro detection in TV shows, not ad blocking. I’m not proposing this as a good way to block ads, just noting that this feature in Plex doesn’t use a database.
The fucked up part is that I have to use SponsorBlock even with Premium. I thought I was paying for no ads…like wtf?
The article makes it sound like a new concept, but it's a very old approach for adding ads to video streams. I mean, it's essentially how regular TV works.
I just hope they don't start running commercials during the streams like quarter and half screen commercials over top the existing content. A lot of TV channels started doing that when DVRs first popped up.
I suspect that this will be a thing eventually... It's a reasonably easy way to defeat apps/systems like Comskip that detect and remove ads from videos. Comskip is what Plex, Jellyfin, etc. use to detect ads in DVR recordings.
Those ad removal systems usually find ads by looking for changes in the video. For example, sometimes there's black frames before and after the ads, sometimes there's a TV station logo that goes away during ads (especially on channels like CNN), sometimes there's a change in volume, etc. If they make the ads look similar enough to actual content, it becomes very difficult to automatically remove them. Online platforms like YouTube are trying to achieve the same thing - Make ads "look like" non-ads to make them harder to block.
Comskip has a pretty wide array of detection. They also look at percent scene change,volume , closed captioning, aspect ratios and duration patterns. The sweet part about the duration patterns is we know the contents supposed length. You could analyze the piece of media figure out how long it would be without it and look around for other options that are less obvious but make the right time code.
I've been using comskip for years, I suspect if it ends up being the tool we need will have an arsenal of people working on it to tune it for whatever YouTube's doing.
They're just looking to knock out the easy methods, they're not going to try to wage a full-on ground war. Their primary goals are probably to stop ublock and brave, and keep YT-DLP from downloading without ads. secondary goals being to stop or slow down revanced, though I think Google's going to try to do that for them in security.
I think the next logical step if they can't block us with reasonable means would be to do some custom encryption in the app. Again not insurmountable but hard to crack out right.
I think using a server to download the whole steam with ads then remove the ads, compress and store the files is really the hardest thing for them to stop.
The fact that they can do expensive, on-the-fly video processing like this, and still make a profit, proves that video hosting costs are not an insurmountable barrier for the open-source internet. We need to make hardware accelerated peertube ubiquitous, and get creators to move over.
Processing isn't the expensive part. It's bandwidth. Transferring that much data gets expensive.
Storage more likely. Google owns fiber backbones and peers against the tier 1 providers directly. The over all point of 'no, it's still prohibitively expensive' stands unless you've got 20B of dark fiber in your pocket.
Bit of A, bit of B?
Right, that's probably true. Video encoding hardware and storage is incredibly cheap, but we get talks from netflix engineers where they're talking about how they're limited by dram bandwidth on their servers.
Some napkin math:
Youtube has ~7M average concurrent viewers.
https://streamscharts.com/overview?platform=youtube
A 1080p av1 stream is roughly 2-3mbits, maybe 5mbits for 60fps. You could serve all of those users with 14tbps of bandwidth, then.
Stockholm peering pricing for 14tbps (rough ballpark at this scale tbf) over 43x 400gbit ports at a Stockholm Internet eXchange, would cost about 240k EUR/month, with a 25% volume discount.
https://www.netnod.se/ix/netnod-ix-pricing
For comparison, Mastodon's monthly donations are about 30k EUR/month, and lemmy.world receives about 2k EUR/month.
Super rough calculations, but there's probably enough of a base in the fediverse for us to take over like 5% of Youtube's viewer base, funded through donations. Not as cheap as wikipedia, but still doable with a committed open-source community. Beyond that, and a netflix/spotify/nebula subscription model would allow to fund further market share.
It's notable to see though that Nebula seems to have millions in monthly revenue, but only about 700k subscribers (aka barely 100k concurrent streams). However I believe the majority of their expenses are going towards their creators and towards marketing for future growth.
But yeah, I think network effect is a bigger barrier than cost here.
Think your numbers are a little off. I think YouTube has more thrn 7 million concurrent users. Largest streaming platform by a large margin.
And our own bandwidth, too. Google isn't paying my Internet bill. Hope the rest of my content creators switch soon, otherwise I'll miss them.
What could content creators switch to that would save your own bandwidth?
Something not wasting it on endless ads.
Yes, that's also why bittorrent (which PeerTube runs on, by the way) is a figment of our collective imaginations, impossible to viably implement.
Torrenting was created precisely to solve the bandwidth problem of monolithic servers. You very obviously have no idea how torrents (or PeerTube for that matter) works.
Was my sarcasm not thick enough?
My point was that PeerTube works just fine because BitTorrent is viable.
But it’s not. People don’t upload as much as they download. Also internet connections are inferior in the upload speed.
I caught it, down voters suck at reading lol
Well it sounds more scary than it realistically will be.
YouTube must pass to the player the metadata of where the ads start/end. Why? Because they need to be unskippable/unseekable/etc. If the metadata is there it is possible to force the seek 🤷♂️
Just matter of time
Why would that be the case? The player can simply be locked into ad mode till it gets the cue from the server all of the ads have been streamed. Only then will the player unlock. When watching what amounts to a video stream, this doesn't have to be handled clientside.
Well the player and its controls are client side.
and making them server site, while possible would introduce tremendous amounts of lag, and put that much more load on the servers. Imagine a server that has to handle playback of billions of users all at once. That's probably quite a bit worse than most average, or even high-level DDoS attacks.
I'm not talking about the player or the controls being server-side. I'm talking about the player being locked into a streaming mode where it does nothing but stream the ads. After the ads are streamed, the player returns to normal video mode and the server sends the actual video data.
This means no metadata about the ads are required on the player side about the ads.
Sure you can hack the player into not being locked during the streaming of the ads. But that won't get you very far, since it's a live stream. You can't skip forward, because the data isn't sent yet. You can skip backwards if you'd like, with what's in the current buffer, but why would you want to? You can have the player not display the ads, but that means staring at a blank screen till the ads are over. And that's always the case, one can simply walk away during the ads.
Technically I can think of several ways to implement this, without the client having meta data about the ads. And with little to none ways of getting around the ads. Once the video starts it's business as usual, so it doesn't impact regular viewing.
So you would need buffer barrieres essentially.
Still user watches video. Ad avoidance skips forward to buffer barrier to play ad in the background. Streamed ad is thrown away and new buffer data is received. User does not notice if the video is long enough.
In this case the buffer limit is the metadata.
Yeah I'm thinking of a system like this:
A user opens a session to watch a video, the user is assigned a token to watch the requested video. When the user isn't a premium subscriber and the video is monetized the token is used to enforce ads. To get video data from the server, the user needs to supply the token. That token contains a "credit" with how many seconds (or whatever they use internally) the user can watch for that video. In order to get seconds credited to the token, the user needs to stream ad content to their player. New ad content is only available to stream, once the number of seconds they were credited have been elapsed.
One way to get around this is to have something in the background "watch" the video for you, invisible, including the ads. Then records the video data, so it's available for you to watch without ads. But it would be easy to rate limit the number of tokens a user can have. There's ways to get around that as well. But this seems to me well beyond what a simple browser plugin can do, this would require a dedicated client.
The idea is to make it harder for users to get around the ads, so they'll watch them instead of looking for a way to block ads. In the end there isn't anything to be done, users can get around the ads. Big streaming services use DRM and everything and their content gets ripped and shared. With YouTube it would be easy for someone to have a Premium account, rip the vids and share them. But by putting up a barrier, people watch the ads. YouTube doesn't care if a percentage of users doesn't watch the ads, as long as most of them do.
My point was, there's ways to implement the ads without sending metadata about the ads to the client.
I just read your list and it confirms mine.
Small buffer AND can't skip ahead on a boring video because you can only get served the ads to unlock further video after time equal to the served video duration has passed.
That is not YouTube, it's online TV and there will be an impact on the product. Preloading a video via a 3rd party client will still easily beat this scheme. Just get a headstart equal to the first ad break.
No, you misunderstand. You get seconds assigned to your token. It doesn't matter where in the video you use those seconds.
So if you watch an ad you get say 60 secs of video until you need to watch an ad again. You can watch 30 secs, then skip 2 minutes ahead and watch another 30 secs, then you get an ad. In reality the times would be larger, but to illustrate a point.
In the current setup YT uses, if you watch an ad, watch 2 secs of video, then skip ahead of the next adbreak, you get more ads.
And yes as stated, a separate client can get around this. But as also stated there will always be ways around it, it's just a matter of making it harder. If it's beyond what a simple browser plugin can do, it's good enough. And YT has been banning 3rd party clients anyways, so that makes it even harder.
Sure if you fundamentally change what YouTube you can make it work.
You need very small buffers or complete disablement of seeking even outside of ads. Otherwise a client can reconstruct the video without viewer interruption.
People however expect to be able to skip ahead in YouTube videos, otherwise its just TV.
Nope that's not necessary at all, the client experience can be the same as it's always been. See my other response for what I was thinking of.
Also, this doesn't work very well in the current YT implementation. If you skip around a video with ads, sometime you'll get ads even though you've just watched a pre-roll for example.
Oh well.
YouTube can be past-tense. There's a million places to post a video these days. Spill out some whiskey and read a book. Fuck em.
Agreed, it's just hard to find a suitable replacement for many things like tvs, since there's a lack of alternative apps for other platforms on things like roku or LG tvs
It all sounds insane to me because I treat every TV like a computer monitor. Whatever I plug into it is what it displays. I usually ignore the onboard software as much as possible.
That's exactly what I started doing this year. I've read 32 books already and it gives me much more satisfaction than watching stupid "like & subscribe to my patreon" videos.
The arms race continues.
Only if premium did not have ads. They show you ad videos as if they’re part of your “recommendations”. They also allow creators to get sponsorships within videos. So even the premium experience isn’t really ad-free and they tout that shit everywhere.
i would consider paying for premium if they broke out the payments properly, i don't fucking want youtube tv youtube music or whatever other bullshit is attached, just fucking get rid of the ads and charge me like 5 bucks a month and i'll fuck off.
I remember subscribing to YouTube Red when it first came out (and had a reasonable price), literally the first video I watched after subbing included an ad for YouTube Red in it. I was so fucking pissed lmao, thank goodness for SponsorBlock.
As a YT Premium subscriber I really don't mind the sponsor sections. Money goes to the creator and a few taps and I'm back to watching. Also, I think outright banning sponsor segments is going to make creators more creative in a bad way..
I totally understand your views, although I’m paying this platform to not show me ads, that money should then go to the creators if they have to insert ads into their videos for some change. This is the platform’s fault.
I mean, it's very easy money given you already have a channel and a name dor youself. What would YT have to pay creators to not care about such easy money?
On my phone I use youtube revanced and adguard dns, kiwi browser with ublock origin. On my PC I use just ublock origin. So far** I havent run into issues
AB testing, you probably haven't been affected yet
I've been getting around it by setting my frontend to use an embed request, that way YouTube thinks it's a third party embed and the ad injection doesn't work. I've also in the past geospoofed to Russia and that works to block ads too.
MythTV solved this long ago. We already have the tech to bypass this shit.
Could you supply a source for this?
Go download MythTV yourself. Shit's been available for decades. I used to use it with a capture card to timeshift/DVR cable television. The source is me. I used it. It was great. It auto-removed TV ads when it recorded your shows.
https://www.mythtv.org/wiki/Removing_Commercials#Automatically_removing_commercials
The battle goes on and on.
I read about some sucker that paid for YouTube premium and still got ads in his pause screen. Lol.
I just want the Temu ads to stop
Most of the ads we see on our Roku Tv are political. I don't know about Temu’s but I’d rather get non-political ads.
Crowdsourced "tagging" of the affected area of the video timeline (like Sponsorblock) would fix this, unless Google get really devious and randomize the placement of the ad for various users.
It will always be randomized, otherwise it's not targeted. There's no reason to run Swedish pampers ads in the US or Walmart ads in Japan.
I mean placement within the video timeline. E.g. do all users see the ad at 0:00 or 2:00 or does it jump around for everyone to prevent it from being tagged.
And when the pampers ad is 24 second long and the walmart ad is 55 seconds, even if they start at the same time, they won't end at the same time, and now the next ad, even if it starts at 5:00 in the video, starts at a different time as well.
[Edit] actually, it doesn't matter. Old timestamps need to work, so when a user links to 5:00 in the video,the actual video stream needs to align with that, but the ad will be injected to the stream before. So trying to jump over the ad would just play you another ad first.
Sure, in a reality where that happens, but that isn't ours. Ads are overwhelmingly made to match the standard 0:15 and 0:30.
In Youtube, where you can get entire movies or 5-hour live streams as ads? That reality? Where the limit for a skippable mid-roll add is anywhere up to 12 hours?
"Placement" ie. on the timeline, friend. Not target.
Right but the swedish pampers ad and the walmart as will be different lengths so the timings wont be the same
Not necessarily, but sure?
So then after one person has had 2 ads that last a total of 40 seconds and another has had 2 that lasted 70 the timing is completly off for how far into the videos the ads are
So, you don't work in the industry?
Adtech? Fuck no I have self respect.
Yeah, it was a rhetorical comment on your understanding of how that process works at all, no offense.
Feel free to enlighten me (and others who've said the same) with your superior knowledge of how timestamps of ads stay constant when they are of different lengths.
Did you read the article? The article shows a post from Sponsorblock and it specifically states that they turned off sponsor block submissions on effected browsers since they can't be reliable with the new ad delivery method
This breaks the current SB implementation, but if the ad duration is known and consistent across the userbase then it will fix itself as users tag videos with the "new" timestamps.
That only works if the ads served are all the same or at least same time length. Which is very unlikely.
Yeah, but the article didn't say anything about consistent durations and spacing. It might be the case, but I have no idea how to find that out.
Consistent duration can be assumed, because that's how advertising works. The 15-second spot is still the standard.
I mean it might be, or they could decide to deliver 30 second ads to people they think are more likely to watch and 15s to ones they don't. I don't know enough about this implementation, for all I know they could have offset it by a few seconds because of Sponsorblock. Seems like they'd do anything to try to push more ads so who really knows at this point?
Affected*
Wasn't sure which one to use, thanks
I wonder if you could just download the video twice and then remove any frame not present in both copies
It's like Alphabet hate guaranteed money.
"How can we boost the next six months of investment for sake of stable income over the next decade?"
"More ads. Studies show everyone with internet access fucking loves them."
*Brilliant! Welcome to entry level lower senior-ish management, Jenkins."
"YESSSSS! I can't wait to tell the family about this when I'm on leave from this wonderfully accommodating work campus. All hail, G."
"All hail, G."
Fuck them, but it's not like anything changes for people who currently watch ads, or who pay for Premium. It's us who they're fighting, and we don't generate any income.
Let's make an actual useful AI that detects ads and muted/blacks out the screen during ads. Haha
Comskip, it's not AI, and it works fine.
I'm surprised it took them so incredibly long to crack down on adblockers.
They used to still be only a small percentage until the entire internet got completely decimated by ads in the past 5 years.
So AdGuard works on the YouTube website. I haven't been there for some time - I use 2 other methods to watch YouTube ad-free.
Anyone with knowledge of the matter care to comment? So far my YouTube watching is still ad-free.
I also run pi-hole in front of my WiFi. Nothing gets through. Or will it?
I noticed some podcasts these days have random server injected ads - usually the same ad repeated 2 or 3 times, is this going to be my video stream soon?
If ads are injected server-side like the article is taking about, your downloads in Newpipe and Kodi are going to have the ads in them.
use ublock origin, so far it's been pretty much problem free.
Outside of this, use something like yt-dlp to run your own jellyfin instance or something.
Pihole will not work because it works on the DNS queries. With server side injection it’s gonna be tougher to block ads, but I’m sure we’ll find a way
You would have to block the video itself to get rid of them
now I need to move away from Telegram & YouTube at the same time.. oef
YouTube alternatives?
until it stops working, yt-dlp and jellyfin.
Wouldn't yt-dlp be forced to download the server-side ads, too?
hence the until it stops working, but even then it will likely get worked around for the most part.
There is software for commercial detection and removal from static MP4. That's not a hard problem to solve.
Odysee (they said no to ads recently)
Rumble, Peertube
To follow creators you could try GrayJay https://grayjay.app/
Happy I left google 90% and I am trying to leave the services that I cannot change my email or require a Google account
My last bastions of Google are:
Ironically their search has taken a turn for the worse, so other sites are much better in my opinion.
For me it's prob
Google play store: Cannot DEGoogle phone at this time
Gmail (partially and currently moving)
Youtube (idk if this counts but a frontend am using to watch yt videos)
Google maps partially (only for streetview Usally)
Fdroid is pretty good, I get most of my apps from there by now. I don't game on my phone though.
yeah same tbh
Wouldn't that technology make them easy to
rewindfast-forward?As a child of the cassette era, this phrase hurts my soul.
ok, i fixed that 😆
This comment confuses me
When Twitch this I rented a VPS in Russia that costs me $3 a month. I now route all my traffic through it and have no ads in Twitch (and im assuming YT too now?)
No you have to switch your vpn to Albania to avoid YouTube ads.
I'm really curious if they can make video injection of ads cost effective.
It feels like mangeling video streams into one, potentially re-encoding the video as they go... sounds expensive
Video encoding works by combining key frames, the whole picture and delta frames, what and how it changed. As long as you swap the stream at a key frame there is no need for a reencoding.
Why would it involve re encoding?
There was a brief point in YouTube’s history where there were little-to-no ads, and creators weren’t expecting to make a living off the videos they made. Somewhere down the line, it feels like the wrong turn was taken from a content consumers perspective.
Yes, hosting is expensive between the infrastructure and bandwidth requirements, but there already was a model in traditional web hosting where the hosting provider charges for the hosting infrastructure, as well as storage and bandwidth costs. While we’re all so accustomed to accessing sites for free and fast, I think that there should’ve been a “free” tier for uploads which could’ve been kept at 10 mins or w/e and rate limited, while offering paid tiers for longer, higher quality/fidelity content , and larger bandwidth buckets before rate limiting which could help offset YTs costs, as well as temper expectations of what it means to create and watch.
Heck, there could even be a paid tier for viewers that could even allow viewers to watch “free” uploads without being limited, and the viewer would be supporting as well.
Yes, that means that large scale, Mr. Beast style productions would be a lot less feasible, but I feel like it’s not just the platform that being enshittified, but also the amount of aspiring creators who’ve also come out of the woodwork copying or re-uploading other creators content in hopes of getting blessed by the algorithm for a free payout.
I know these are 2 separate issues, and the ship has sailed long ago, but I can’t help but feel like this whole business model is being done wrong from a sustainability perspective.
reply to me with youtube URLs videos, channels or playlists that you find interesting.
::: spoiler optionally specify these tags so I can organize the data better
Ive been archiving for years and this looks like it may be the final clean batch I can produce. Feel free to specify other tags that may be useful and I will add them.
Can I ask why people act like YouTube is so evil for trying to make money off their site? They provide a service I value and it costs money to do so. No disrespect to anyone who doesn't want to watch ads or pay (like I do, I use it a LOT) but I don't understand why some people seem to be personally insulted by the idea that they can't get it for free forever with no strings attached.
Honest question, please don't flame me 🙏
I pay other sites for creators. So for me $$ isn't the issue. Not when premium is less than 20.
The biggest issue with YouTube for me is that their ads are very intrusive/track quite a bit about what you do/can actually be malware. On addition, there's a good chance that money is mostly going to YouTube and not the people creating their works. There's a reason patreon is a thing for most successful creators. I also hate ads. I don't hate people getting paid, I hate YouTube for shoving ads down my throat and then turning around not paying people their dues. And in my opinion the worst way possible.
YouTube is/ its ads are are extremely privacy intrusive and there isn’t really an alternative to the platform. Next to the comparatively obvious network effects all social media platforms rely on is also because YouTube on its own is not that profitable and probably only really makes Google money via the data collected on the platform. This means only platforms that have a gigantic ad network themselves and are able to monetize said data as well as Google can can actually compete with YouTube— and as you see, there are basically none.
Also, the whole blocking ad blockers thing is trying to fundamentally reverse the power equilibrium between the website (the server) and the person visiting it (the client); because for the last 40 years or so, the server had the purpose of delivering content to the client which could decide what to do with and how to present said content. This sharing of responsibility between the two comes in many forms, starting with simple things such as screen readers or a reading mode for the browser.
Partially for the same reason I don't pay for Xbox live and whatever Nintendo and Sony have; I refuse to pay a service charge for an online platform when I already purchased the hardware (in this case, computer/phone) and pay an ISP for internet access.
If they want my data and to use my bandwidth they can damn well pay for it.
Do you realize you're using their bandwidth, too? They have to pay for upload/download just like you do.
I pay for Nebula - $30 a year which is about £22.50. That won't even cover two months of YouTube Premium (£12 pm), and there's not even the discounted yearly option in the UK.
And "if you're not paying you're the product" is wrong - YouTube/Google would still be datamining my viewing habits to sell to advertisers.
Noooo, this is Lemmy. If it isn't free to use and 20% as good as the paid version, its evil.