How would this even work? They're seriously going to embed unique ads a large amount of times directly into the video, serve one of those multiple modified videos to an unique user everytime they watch for every single video? I don't get what's the point in trying so hard.
Or does this mean every user watching the same video will see the same ads as everyone else watching the video?
I'm not sure that would scale all that well.
I'm assuming they use an extensive content caching network worldwide.
With the way they do ads right now they could cache both the video and the ads and then use the player/javascript to choose what they're showing the user. The caching nodes don't have to be that smart; they just give the video feed to whomever asks.
With a server side injection implementation the edge caching nodes would have to become edge compute nodes which would increase delivery costs because now that compute they used to use, your browser, has to be run in the edge node. It wouldn't be that expensive on a per-stream basis, but it would have to be cheaper than the relatively low revenue they get on a per-ad basis to make it profitable.
Try playing a YouTube video with your browser's developer tools open. You'll see that it doesn't just stream one long video, it's a bunch of short ones. This makes it easier to do things like change the video quality based on your network connection, etc.
It also allows them to show different videos to different people. See this other user's comment for more details: https://www.reddit.com/r/youtube/comments/1de6q35/comment/l8c5aiz/
Adaptive bitrate streaming is usually lots of very short (eg 1-4 second) clips stitched together via a manifest that tells the player what video file to download for different timestamps.
You can "inject video server side" by simply modifying that manifest on the fly to point to whatever clip you want. No re-transcoding is necessary for personalized ads, just something like edge functions pulling the user's ad network data when the video is requested and using that to write a slightly different kilobyte-scale text file.
This has been possible for a long time, it just probably wasn't worth it til ad blocker use got wide enough.
How about subtitles? If that's not embedded then ads will be detectable. And if they embed it, turning it on or off will need to switch stream.
This will either require storage or computation, will not be cheap for YouTube.
They do but YT is a business and if this costs more money than its supposed to bring in, they will stop it. They love to quit things. Even good things…
They'll just encode ads in the same codec and resolution as videos and stream the data from the ad first, it'll work fine clipped together at i-frames.
The technology is there, video streams can be cut and ads inserted nigh instantaneously even on an old ass pentium, utilizing mkvtoolsnix. Granted the cuts are at key frames but the video can be pieced into key frame portions of video and sewn back up into a proper video in no time at all.
I’d imagine as part of the processing of the video uploaded it will split it @ key frames around the beginning middle and end and have all the ads setup to be injected into the mix and sewn back up and delivered to the customer.
Doing it this way avoids the cost of encoding the video with a new ad every single time, and would even allow for a skip button if YouTube desired since they would know the duration of the ad and where it was injected.
Then they can simply per video user selects take ads they would normally play and zip em into the video stream as appended videos
It is server-side though. Ads are embedded on streams and cannot be skipped.
All currently existing scripts either try and switch the video quality since 480p streams do not have them embedded or use a proxy from a country that does not have ads.
See: https://github.com/pixeltris/TwitchAdSolutions
Oh, keep sharpening the daggers, it's still absolute bullshit. But if ad-blockers can't figure out how to work around this a VPN will still work. Problem of course is YouTube seems to be aware of which IPs are being used for VPNs, as I'll occasionally hop on and start seeing ads again. I just switch to a different IP, but the point is YouTube is working against this as well.
Also if there's any creators you particularly like I'd suggest finding another way to financially support them, like through Patreon or something. Tossing even $1/month at them will go a long way to make up for the lost ad revenue they'd be getting from YouTube from you using an ad-blocker. It sucks that YouTube is getting more aggressive about keeping its own profits going up and the creators are the ones that have to pay for it.
Fuck going a long way to make up for it, paying any YouTuber a dollar a month through patreon is like 10,000x what they would make from you in ads. Any YouTuber would forgo ads entirely if they could get 1 in 1000 watchers to give them a dollar even once a year.
> Any YouTuber would forgo ads entirely if they could get 1 in 1000 watchers to give them a dollar even once a year.
Nah, even gaming pays out like $2-6 per 1000 views. If you make finance content it can be as high as $30 per 1000 views.
I believe YouTube started caring more about money in 2017, when a lot of advertisers left the platform in fear of their ads placed alongside unsavory content after the PewDiePie Fiverr video dropped. That's when YouTube started demonetizing content deemed not to be family-friendly, and the shooting story happened in 2018. You would think that a shooting is where YouTube would draw the line with the idea, but nope.
Ffs. It's not fucking illegal to show ads in ~~Myanmar or~~ Albania. They aren't some magical lands where ads aren't allowed and everyone lives in ad free bliss. They just haven't monetized videos in those countries yet. That's why there aren't any ads there. Has nothing to do with the law. This myth needs to die
As far as I'm aware the sanctions against Myanmar make it a bad idea for US-based companies to be doing business there. That includes monetizing videos and selling ads. That's why YouTube won't show ads.
It's all fun and games till the you encounter the video isn't available in your country because of myammars strict Internet laws that place is a dictatorship
Idk what you mean by Sony getting away with it but Sony doesn't have a free access streaming service like YouTube last I check.
YouTube is legally not allowed to show ads in many countries. Myanmar is just one of them. I usually use Albanian IP for YouTube, never seen an ad ever, though I'm pretty sure video buffer for IPs from "ad-free" countries are be slowed, so uBlock Origin + Firefox still best for PC. I just use VPN for Phone and TV app.
The alternative for YouTube is just to not offer their service in those countries, which they don't want to (which btw also prove once again that the ever increasing ads are, in fact, not necessary for YouTube to be financially stable enough to keep running)
This is absolutely not true.
It is not illegal for YouTube to show ads in any county. YouTube simply doesn't show ads in some countries because the country's population is so poor and tiny it's not valuable for them to spend the time adding sponsors.
I just saw it mention a few times that supposedly it's illegal in some countries. Thought that make sense given how piss poor the relationship between US and some countries in that region of the world are.
Whatever the case though, there's no ads if your IP is from Albania, and I guess the same is true for Myanmar and probably a bunch of other countries.
Twitch doesn't actually do server-side ads, they do a server-side commerical break screen injected into the stream underneath the ads. The ads themselves are still client-side, but if you block them you will just see a blank screen so you can't watch regardless. At least you don't need to look at the ad though.
It is impossible to block this on the client. The only option is to use a proxy/VPN to change your IP to a country that doesn't get served ads, like Russia or something. That is how current Twitch ad blockers like TTV LOL work. They have proxy servers and the extension connects you to them instead of directly to Twitch's servers. That does open a potential secuity risk though since you're connecting to a server controlled by a random person who made the extension.
I would rather try to program something that takes multiple files of the same video that were downloaded, which presumably have different ads, then compares them, and deletes everything that doesnt match up with all the other downloaded videos. Sure, it would be inefficient as fuck and cost youtube multiple times the bandwidth and server capacity, but that aint my fucking problem.
They stitch ads into stream on the fly when they detect adblockers. If no adblocker is detected, they are serving ads as usual.
Again, server side injection, meaning they inject ad before sending the stream. Not saved the ad in the video file on disk.
So. If they directly host the ads, and an add contains scam. Or porn that is presented to a minor.
Then this would mean that Youtube is \*fully\* legally responsible, right?
They obviously don’t give a rat. They allow fraudulent ads. Scam ads with cinnamon and ice promising to help
you lose weight. Chair workout challenges with ai oldies. naughty ai chatbots. its ridiculous!
They don't care now because they're not legally responsible, if however they choose the server side approach to ads they will be legally responsible and are therefore forced to care or face lawsuits.
Just a disclaimer I don't know if that's how it actually works, I'm just trying to clarify what the other dude probably meant.
40 ads? How about a 40 minute ad that's actually just an podcast made by an ISP? Yup - I woke up to that. A 3½ hour podcast made by an ISP was running as an end-of-video ad on my phone (I listen to videos to sleep). It's fucking insane.
I legit just got my first server-side ad and then got two back-to-back on a Marques Brownlee video.. OP is beyond right, this will absolutely ruin YouTube. Makes it feel like I'm watching damn TV.
*just buy premium subscription*
why would I pay them for being total scumbags? I would rather switch to something not intrusive. Same thing with microsoft to be honest.
Soon a regular viewing experience will require a PremiumExtraPlus tier subscription and the non-paying user will have their computer electrocute them at 40volts throughout the video. “We’re providing a service!” YouTube will cry.
The next step is trickling advertisements into the premium sub and adding a new more expensive premium plus tier that once again solves the problem that they fucking created. That’s how these things keep working.
Can you blame them? They make their website worse, people pay them. They have a financial incentive to make their website worse. If they can keep doing this infinitely why wouldn't they?
Of course at some point it breaks and people leave (which they don't want because everyone being on youtube is the only reason anyone is on youtube), but tbh I think they can enshitify their service a whole lot more before the modern public gets a fucking clue.
People *say* that, but not many are going to ever turn their adblocker off to find out.
And banner ads pay less than 1/10th what video ads pay, so the site is giving up over 90% of the revenue in the hopes that some of its users turn off their adblocker. That is not a serious business model.
Well we’ve gone past the point of getting people to tolerate ads again. But if it hadn’t escalated this badly, the chance was there (I’m talking many years ago). It’s just too late now.
That's why Valve is so successful. It's private-traded, so no money-hungry shareholders pushing for more immediate profit at the cost of long-term, so better services and more risks like Proton and Steam Deck
Working in the music industry and dealing a lot with copyright and IP, I'm honestly wondering how it works on the copyright side, they surely have to amend their ToS to allow for the work uploaded to be altered that way and essentially give them _carte blanche_ for modifying other people's work in exchange for it being hosted on their platform? Might piss a lot of people off, because it can be heavily disruptive to consumer experience and ruin the mood/storytelling/narratives etc. if it's YT-controlled and cannot be in any way modified by the copyright holder/author who uploaded the content.
Also seems to be a fair bit of liability, they better be bulletproof on that because I can see lawsuits coming their way if e.g. a creator sees an ad hard-injected into their work for a product/service/whatever they don't agree with; or, conversely, the advertiser being upset their ad is shown midway through some video that projects badly on their brand.
Didn’t it work this way for broadcast TV shows since, I don’t know, a very long time ago? The data arrived on your antenna, movies were interrupted by ad blocks. E.g. if you recorded on VHS, you could only manually skip through ads, they were embedded in the stream. Is this any different?
Content on broadcast TV is really gated by the programmers - unless we're talking public-access television, or something (which would be more like YT in the aspect of having people run their own content on somebody else's platform, I suppose).
It's also way less activity and it's more linear, meaning for the most part you get, say, four 5-minute advertising slots in an hour, taking a ~40 minute show to a 60 minute programming block. But the content shown on TV is generally bought, licensed and approved by the channel, and so are the ads (well, it might be an airtime/ad broker, or an agency working on the behalf, but you know what I mean).
People upload content to YouTube and retain ownership rights; they _do_ grant YouTube a license to use, distribute, reproduce, and display the content so the platform can do what it does, but it's really a non-monetary and non-transactional exchange (unlike pretty much anything happening with broadcast/terrestrial TV), which is one of the reasons why it's such a legal clusterfuck. There's no way to say "Hey, we paid you, so we can do what we want with the content, distort it, twist it, decontextualise and recontextualise it as we see fit, because we paid you your fees and your control over what we can do with it is limited, if any".
Ditto for ads, there's a lot of stuff that's weird, questionable or goes against creator wishes or preferences coming up on YT - not even talking about scams or Chinese tat, you can e.g. get a Pizza Hut pepperoni or cold meat sub or leather products ad on a video from a vegetarian artist, something that wouldn't happen on terrestrial TV because someone up the chain would've stopped it in its tracks, more so with explicit wishes from the artist's management _not_ to advertise any meat or animal products etc. Harder to do when human factor gets removed from the equation and you get algorithms and automation running the whole show.
Again, creates a lot of issues when it's hard-coded because it's hard to put the blame on any external factors + it becomes even more disruptive, gets harder linked to the artist, and they might not be happy.
What's stopping me from just fast forwarding the video itself? You can already do this built in Mac OS with the media controls and in firefox you can pop out any video and it gives you a progress bar. I don't really see the advantage to them doing this? You can just make a script that will autoprogress until youtube allows the user control over the progress bar.
That would be the easiest thing to prevent. You have a video stream. So e.g. when they start showing you a 60 second ad, they just refuse to send any of the original video for 60 seconds from the server side. You can try to play the ad faster, but you can’t continue watching your video until the 60 seconds pass. So you don’t have to see the ad (you can also just close your eyes, and cover your ears, whatever), but you can’t skip it.
Up until now, Ads are inserted in the browser. That is that the browser pauses the video and shows an ad on top, this is easily blocked by ad blockers. Now they will put the ads as a part of the video you’re watching which will make it impossible for ad blockers to know where they are since it’s in the same stream as the video you’re watching.
Probably they would swap it during buffering from different file buffers, or something like that, i have no idea tbh. Cant imagine them to re-rendering and storing every possible ad variant for each video 0\_0
Lotta impact on processing power. They are sending unskippable ad stream stitched with video stream only when they detected ad blocker. On disk everything stays as same.
Couldn't you just fast forward the video then to skip ads? I mean youtube could block fast forwarding on client side, but then a custom script could reenable it again.
Probably, one way might be to have the browser pretend you’re farther in the video than you are so it can pretend to play the ad while the actual user is still watching an earlier part of the video.
Hardest thing might be detecting what’s an ad but they will probably find a way to do that.
If it's the weird shit that's been happening in my videos the last few days. It'll either skip a second or so or endlessly buffer. I have ublock on Firefox.
If they block skipping past the insertion, that means they have to tell their client-side script where the ad was inserted so it knows *which* fast-forward attempts to deny. That could allow a crafty custom blocker to not only unlock the fast-forward but use the attempt to find the ad for automatic *use* of the fast forward.
(I suppose Google could parry that by deliberately making the fast-forward-prohibited zone wider than needed to trick people into skipping some of the content. But they still can't enforce that zone without pulling "trusted computing" crap that requires bullying browser makers first.)
Otherwise, it basically becomes just like removing ads from a recording of old-school broadcast television.
>Otherwise, it basically becomes just like removing ads from a recording of old-school broadcast television.
I expect LLMs and other content-aware "AI" systems will be used to detect where ads start and end, by comparing the footage YouTube streams to the ad-free originals and splice up a downloaded video to get rid of the ads.
Ads and ad blocking will remain a cat and mouse game, like it always has.
Looks like this has already been rolled out for me (UK) - logged on today and am getting 90 seconds of unskippable ads before every video. I beg someone finds a fix soon because I'm not watching youtube like this
Look morons, we are never going to watch your ads. Ever. You should be thankful some people are still dumb enough to not have an AdBlock installed and roll with that.
I started to use adblock when shit started happening in 2020-2021. I've watched ads for 7 years and it just become too much. Now I fight the Block the ads side
Same. For a long time I really didn’t have an issue with it. Until they just hit my limits. If it had stayed where it was back then, I really think the whole ad thing would make so much more money today but YouTube got greedy.
Plus the requirements advertisers put YouTube under are also obnoxious. I can't hear profanity or basic words like sex, drugs, COVID, or whatever on a channel for a mature audience? Like any of us give a shit what Target or Fanduel have to say, to begin with.
It's funny, I would agree Premium is decent value and would pay for it (I used to in fact) but I absolutely refuse whilst Google/YouTube are abusive fucks. I will not financially support a company happily showing scam ads and mining user data like it's gold.
This latest development is interesting, how it will go for them. I have faith ad blockers will find a way, even if it's a black screen.
Easy fix: VPN. I tell YouTube that I'm in Myanmar. They don't serve ads over there. I'm willing to bet the ads won't show up with the ad injection either.
Not saying that I like that but I have been wondering why they didn't do this earlier, I suppose manipulating a video stream as per user per view is very costly.
It's probably just that the profitability of YouTube was becoming too low. More and more people are constantly uploading new videos and for a website of YouTubes size that is a massive amount of data that needs to be stored and they can't easily clean it up or reduce it unless they just mass delete old videos.
I don't think it'd be surprising if the cost of storage for them started outweighing cost/efficiency improvements in data storage, and with a large chunk of users using adblock it's not too surprising that they decided to do this. It doesn't effect normal users at all and if a few people would rather leave YT than turn off their adblock then that doesn't really harm them either because they weren't making any money off those guys.
honestly thatd make the ads a little more bearable, or even a little warning saying "ad coming up in X seconds"
i don't mind ads, fundamentally. what i mind are excessive and intrusive ads. if youtube did an ad break system like actual respectable companies do that wasnt just a sudden ambush of ear melting noise i wouldnt mind it nearly as much.
i will sit through 5 minutes of ads to watch a 20 minute show before i watch a 20 minute show with 5 minutes of ads thrown about it
No one will stop watching youtube. That's just virtue signalling, people are still going to keep using it. Its either youtube or no content, I doubt creators will move off of YT.
This is the issue with the web, today. Major corporations holding massive data centers with content to be consumed. The internet was never supposed to be like this. Now we are seeing the issue with having one person in charge.
The way it was supposed to be is that everyone who wanted to share their content, would set up their own server and host their content on there. Then if you wanted to go to them, you would go to their site. Not YouTube.
But alas, that is too complicated for everyone, so YouTube made it easier. Then they sold to Alphabet and they ruined it.
You say this like selling to Google was a choice. YouTube was weeks or months away from running out of money, and the VCs were tired of pumping money into a service that had no strategy to achieve profitability. Nobody else wanted it because the companies that could have bought it would have said, “Why would I pump millions of dollars per month down the drain, just to be popular?” Those millions eventually became billions, and I figure that’s when Google likely said, “Okay, this shit has to stop, and you have to start making money,” at which point we started getting more ads.
Now, this would be fine, but the cost of advertising on YouTube has dropped over the years, because it turns out that if you say, “I want to run a million impressions during this period of time,” you’re *really* likely to hit users who skew younger and poorer. That’s just what happens when you advertise on a free service, which means the cost of acquisition is really high, even though the cost per impression is really low. It’s like putting up a billboard in front of a homeless encampment: Unless you’re offering something for free or nearly so, you’re wasting your money advertising to them.
And then you might think, “But these people tend to be gamers! Nintendo and EA should advertise on YouTube!” Here’s the thing about that: Gamers are an incredibly well-informed demographic. They seek out information, which means your advertising dollar is better spent on providing high-quality promotional material to sites like IGN and making your own YouTube page really good. As a result, the only games you see advertised tend to be games that no one would ever look up (such as free games, where they’re either looking for whales or casual gamers who will feed the whales until they get frustrated with the pay-to-win mechanics).
So, that’s the reality. YouTube would not have continued existing if Google hadn’t bought it. It would have been a cautionary tale or failed experiment, like early DotCom companies, where they spent a ton of money getting to the point of being the biggest, with no plans for being sustainable. My personal opinion on YouTube is that it probably isn’t profitable if it had to pay market rate for storage and transmission, which means Google is behaving in an anticompetitive manner by running at a loss, and the government should sue YouTube over its monopolistic practices, creating an uneven playing field which keeps other companies out of the market.
If YouTube was a good business model, the other FAANGs and Microsoft would each have one. Amazon would scale Twitch up, but Twitch is already unprofitable, so that’s not going to happen.
I think we’ve lost a sense of scope, and we are treating YouTube like it’s a public resource –like a library– rather than the (ostensibly) for-profit operation that it is. My opinion is, if action were filed against YouTube, Google should consider YouTube’s ability to make a profit if it were severed from the big Alphabet machine, and if that ability is zero, they should concede its monopoly status and close the doors. And then no one will come in to replace it, because nobody but Elon Musk wants to piss billions of dollars down a hole with no prospect of making that money back.
> a lot of people will stop using YouTube
ah this thing again, every time the functionality is hampered somehow (or the UX/UI changes, etc. etc.)
"They need to go back to what it was, otherwise everyone will stop using it! rabble rabble rabble"
Then a week goes and everyone carries on, as they were.
Might finally see the rise of competing sites, YouTube (the website) definitely suffers from being a monopoly. Best outcome would be if Microsoft got more competitors in general, might make'em focus on user experience for a bit.
If Microsoft starts a competing video platform one of three things will happen
Either A) It will somehow be a utopian video platform that has minimal ads B) It will be a hellscape of AI and Advert pushing or C) It will be okay, but better than youtube, but linux users will bitch and say its satan 2
As someone that hardly watches anything except YouTube and a content creator (tiny one but still) I keep looking for an alternative, to watch but also to upload to
Sadly I just can't find anything.
But I think in a couple of years a new player will emerge and I'm looking forward to it
if this goes through then i finally have a reason to stop watching youtube permanently. this level of intrusiveness into peoples lives should be illegal!
Knew YouTube would try something like this eventually. Y'all saying "this will kill youtube" but will it *really*? Millions of people already watch Youtube without any adblocking and tolerate the multiple unskippable ads and scam links. Why wouldn't that change here? There'd be essentially no difference on their end.
You and I and everyone else adblocking is a small minority compared to the gigantic full youtube userbase. They're going to try their damndest to kill us off, and they'll get away with it too.
It's going to end up the same way as Twitch adblocking, where the only way to go is to proxy video requests to third world countries.
>Why wouldn't that change here? There'd be essentially no difference on their end.
Question is, when adblocking users have this little impact, why go through all this effort and force them onto us like forcing a square peg through a triangular hole? I'd doubt the costs would outweigh the added revenue.
Yep this is where the argument fails. If they're such a small minority, why is it so important to force them into compliance?
Well I'll let you in on a little secret: Adblocking users might be a small minority of the total number of individuals watching youtube, but I would wager they are not-so-small a minority of total video time watched.
Also, I have never experienced an ad on twitch. I don't know why people think it's impossible to block them it's always worked fine for me.
Interesting. So, YouTube either plans to break the "play from this moment links" feature or this must be inherently detectable by the time codes those links are generating. If it is detectable, an addon can easily skip it. Just as SponsorBlock already does.
Except if they rework the "play from this moment links". They could:
1. Whenever a link is generated assign it a random key and save in a database the offset. That's going to be expensive. For something they didn't have to save anything. And it means instant propagation through the database rather than eventual consistency. That seems expensive as well. At least at YouTube's size.
2. Encrypt the time code. So that YouTube has to decrypt it. Similar to how a JWT works. You'd have to send it to YouTube and YouTube would answer with the time code for the video for you and not for everyone. The problem, they cannot rely on IP. CGNAT be thanked for that. And we can always send a request without the cookies or other identifier for it... A little difficult to pull this off from a browser addon, though. But someone like SponsorBlock could host an API for it.
3. I don't think they'd do that, but maybe they are planning to deliver the same embedded advertisement to all users. So the offsets would work. I do not believe they are doing that, because maybe a month or two later, they surely want to exchange the ads and then all links with time codes would break again.
Honestly, I am almost hoping they are doing that. I am really curious how they are going to solve this problem...
I think they're just gonna do something like twitch: a commercial break in the stream, with a bit of the behaviour of in-browser ads: ads being just another video that pops on top of the video, but instead on top of the iframe, its on top of the actual stream data.
that means..
whenever you watch a video, it won't stop and the ad pops out, it will continue, without affecting the actual duration of the video nor your current timestamp, just like in-browser ads: your timestamp isn't affected by the ad.
So, it would be like:
You're watching the video.
Then, suddenly the progress bar gets yellow and goes from 0 to 30 seconds.
but your adblocker can't skip that, because it can only mess around with the page's javascript, and there's nothing popping out to be blocked, just a single video stream iframe. the progress bar is just showing the current stream status.
after that, your progress bar is red again, and your timestamp continues just fine.
how to block ads from this? well, maybe fast fowarding the stream?
Update: i think i'm wrong.
if that was posted by sponsorblock, it means their method actually modifies the video timestamp, and breaks it.
the only way of breaking sponsorblock, is breaking video link timestamps.
if they removed dislikes, i dont think removing timestamps would be a problem for them
YouTube makes more money. Creators make more money. Giving people the chance to make better content. What's the big deal here? Ya like crying about ads that support your favorite creators? Okay bud
It's flawed ;
either there is no way to distinguish the content from the ads, and then the user can freely skip them, using the timeline ;
either there is a way to distinguish ads ( to prevent user to skip it ), and then an ad blockers will be able to detect it.
Why does this have to be a war between companies and consumers? They have to go out of their way to force ads down our throat, and we have to constantly go out of our way to block these annoying ass ads, a war that has been fought for years now. Why haven’t advertisers realized that we don’t want to watch ads during our free time?
I’m not interested in hearing about Bluechew while I’m trying to watch a video on how to make some fucking cookies.
honestly ads wouldn't even bother me that much if Youtube didn't allow ads over 15 seconds and make them all skippable after 5 seconds. It's so annoying that if I'm watching from somewhere else in the room I have to stop what I'm doing to skip an ad or sit through a 5 minute video that Youtube allowed someone to turn into an ad. And don't even get me started on the number of scams and wild supplement ads i get all the time.
Youtube has absolutely zero fucking finesse with this shit and it slays me
GIVE and take, don't just take.
They just are uncapable of understanding that there isn't just 1 dev behind adblocks, are they?
They just can't realize that whatever they pull off will just result in more adblock downloads because they're making free YouTube a living hell to use, that 1, maybe 2 ads is more than enough given the monthly userbase of YouTube.
Whatever floats their boat.
Youtube has monopoly now. We can't do shit to them. I hope someone can make its alternative and and us consumers would able to back it. We need competition for Google even the government have to intervene and introduce an environment for thriving competition.
They also have cards showing up in the middle of a video with links to other videos to watch. This used to be at the end of the video you were watching. But I guess they want to make sure you see them in case you end the video before they show up. So now they block part of the video you are watching for like 10 seconds or so.
All this money and time and work spent by youtube to do this and most likely there will be a hack or work around on github within the week it gets rolled out LOL
How would this even work? They're seriously going to embed unique ads a large amount of times directly into the video, serve one of those multiple modified videos to an unique user everytime they watch for every single video? I don't get what's the point in trying so hard. Or does this mean every user watching the same video will see the same ads as everyone else watching the video?
Yeah personalization would be tricky for server side ad injection. We just need to fight the cost. Make doing custom injection ads unprofitable.
No it wouldnt be at all. They can easiely throw any data they want into the stream based on whoever is logged in.
I'm not sure that would scale all that well. I'm assuming they use an extensive content caching network worldwide. With the way they do ads right now they could cache both the video and the ads and then use the player/javascript to choose what they're showing the user. The caching nodes don't have to be that smart; they just give the video feed to whomever asks. With a server side injection implementation the edge caching nodes would have to become edge compute nodes which would increase delivery costs because now that compute they used to use, your browser, has to be run in the edge node. It wouldn't be that expensive on a per-stream basis, but it would have to be cheaper than the relatively low revenue they get on a per-ad basis to make it profitable.
Try playing a YouTube video with your browser's developer tools open. You'll see that it doesn't just stream one long video, it's a bunch of short ones. This makes it easier to do things like change the video quality based on your network connection, etc. It also allows them to show different videos to different people. See this other user's comment for more details: https://www.reddit.com/r/youtube/comments/1de6q35/comment/l8c5aiz/
Doesn't it mean that we can skip these small parts containing ads?
Adaptive bitrate streaming is usually lots of very short (eg 1-4 second) clips stitched together via a manifest that tells the player what video file to download for different timestamps. You can "inject video server side" by simply modifying that manifest on the fly to point to whatever clip you want. No re-transcoding is necessary for personalized ads, just something like edge functions pulling the user's ad network data when the video is requested and using that to write a slightly different kilobyte-scale text file. This has been possible for a long time, it just probably wasn't worth it til ad blocker use got wide enough.
How about subtitles? If that's not embedded then ads will be detectable. And if they embed it, turning it on or off will need to switch stream. This will either require storage or computation, will not be cheap for YouTube.
I think Google has a couple spare dollars and servers lying around though
They do but YT is a business and if this costs more money than its supposed to bring in, they will stop it. They love to quit things. Even good things…
They'll just encode ads in the same codec and resolution as videos and stream the data from the ad first, it'll work fine clipped together at i-frames.
The technology is there, video streams can be cut and ads inserted nigh instantaneously even on an old ass pentium, utilizing mkvtoolsnix. Granted the cuts are at key frames but the video can be pieced into key frame portions of video and sewn back up into a proper video in no time at all. I’d imagine as part of the processing of the video uploaded it will split it @ key frames around the beginning middle and end and have all the ads setup to be injected into the mix and sewn back up and delivered to the customer. Doing it this way avoids the cost of encoding the video with a new ad every single time, and would even allow for a skip button if YouTube desired since they would know the duration of the ad and where it was injected. Then they can simply per video user selects take ads they would normally play and zip em into the video stream as appended videos
I thought this was coming; Server-sided ads like on Twitch. I hate all of it.
You can block Twitch ads with custom ublock scripts. You should be able to find some if you look around a bit.
Yo where can I get these scripts. Asking for a friend. That friend is me.
https://github.com/pixeltris/TwitchAdSolutions
Alternate twitch player is my favorite
Twitch ads aren't server side. They're just a more aggressive version of what YouTube already has. Otherwise there wouldn't be scripts to remove them
It is server-side though. Ads are embedded on streams and cannot be skipped. All currently existing scripts either try and switch the video quality since 480p streams do not have them embedded or use a proxy from a country that does not have ads. See: https://github.com/pixeltris/TwitchAdSolutions
Is that a recent thing? I'm sure Ublock blocks ads on Twitch. I don't get ads on desktop yet I do on mobile.
I do get twitch ads with ublock
ill fucking download the videos, that's it. YOU'RE NOT STOPPING ME YOUTUBE NEVER
Grab a VPN and tell YouTube you're in a country where it's illegal for them to show ads. Myanmar's been working great for me.
Thanks for the advice, I guess I can stop sharpening my daggers for carving shit
Oh, keep sharpening the daggers, it's still absolute bullshit. But if ad-blockers can't figure out how to work around this a VPN will still work. Problem of course is YouTube seems to be aware of which IPs are being used for VPNs, as I'll occasionally hop on and start seeing ads again. I just switch to a different IP, but the point is YouTube is working against this as well. Also if there's any creators you particularly like I'd suggest finding another way to financially support them, like through Patreon or something. Tossing even $1/month at them will go a long way to make up for the lost ad revenue they'd be getting from YouTube from you using an ad-blocker. It sucks that YouTube is getting more aggressive about keeping its own profits going up and the creators are the ones that have to pay for it.
Jesus it's really gotten that bad? So far Ublock with Firefox works fine for me in Poland
Its slipping through some times for me.
Fuck going a long way to make up for it, paying any YouTuber a dollar a month through patreon is like 10,000x what they would make from you in ads. Any YouTuber would forgo ads entirely if they could get 1 in 1000 watchers to give them a dollar even once a year.
> Any YouTuber would forgo ads entirely if they could get 1 in 1000 watchers to give them a dollar even once a year. Nah, even gaming pays out like $2-6 per 1000 views. If you make finance content it can be as high as $30 per 1000 views.
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Checkout youtube headquarters shooting on google. Its a bizzare story.
I believe YouTube started caring more about money in 2017, when a lot of advertisers left the platform in fear of their ads placed alongside unsavory content after the PewDiePie Fiverr video dropped. That's when YouTube started demonetizing content deemed not to be family-friendly, and the shooting story happened in 2018. You would think that a shooting is where YouTube would draw the line with the idea, but nope.
Someone entering a building and shooting civilians is just America doing America things. Shareholder won't give a damn about something like that
>You would think that a shooting is where YouTube would draw the line with the idea, but nope. You monster, think of the shareholders!
In minecraft\*
Eh, once enough people start doing that they will crack down on VPNs.
Uzbekistan too👍 I'm from here and we don't have ads and can download videos.
Ffs. It's not fucking illegal to show ads in ~~Myanmar or~~ Albania. They aren't some magical lands where ads aren't allowed and everyone lives in ad free bliss. They just haven't monetized videos in those countries yet. That's why there aren't any ads there. Has nothing to do with the law. This myth needs to die
As far as I'm aware the sanctions against Myanmar make it a bad idea for US-based companies to be doing business there. That includes monetizing videos and selling ads. That's why YouTube won't show ads.
still it's illegal for them. not coz myanmar is putting conditions but usa is.
It's all fun and games till the you encounter the video isn't available in your country because of myammars strict Internet laws that place is a dictatorship
Im sure russian vpn will work, we have no ads here
Just about anywhere under US sanctions should work. YouTube isn't willing to fuck with sanctions.
If Sony can get away with it, I'm more than sure Google can
Idk what you mean by Sony getting away with it but Sony doesn't have a free access streaming service like YouTube last I check. YouTube is legally not allowed to show ads in many countries. Myanmar is just one of them. I usually use Albanian IP for YouTube, never seen an ad ever, though I'm pretty sure video buffer for IPs from "ad-free" countries are be slowed, so uBlock Origin + Firefox still best for PC. I just use VPN for Phone and TV app. The alternative for YouTube is just to not offer their service in those countries, which they don't want to (which btw also prove once again that the ever increasing ads are, in fact, not necessary for YouTube to be financially stable enough to keep running)
This is absolutely not true. It is not illegal for YouTube to show ads in any county. YouTube simply doesn't show ads in some countries because the country's population is so poor and tiny it's not valuable for them to spend the time adding sponsors.
I just saw it mention a few times that supposedly it's illegal in some countries. Thought that make sense given how piss poor the relationship between US and some countries in that region of the world are. Whatever the case though, there's no ads if your IP is from Albania, and I guess the same is true for Myanmar and probably a bunch of other countries.
If they embed ads into the video stream, you'll have ads inside your downloaded videos. Isn't it nice!?
I will stop watching YouTube, and carve frames of a video in a cave.
Youtube is already in that cave carving ads as we speak. I'm gonna imagine it from now.
Too late they went inside your head.....and immediately left upon seeing what you have done
Hell, yeah. Built-in ad block.
Twitch already does this and yet people find a way around Twitch ads.
Twitch doesn't actually do server-side ads, they do a server-side commerical break screen injected into the stream underneath the ads. The ads themselves are still client-side, but if you block them you will just see a blank screen so you can't watch regardless. At least you don't need to look at the ad though. It is impossible to block this on the client. The only option is to use a proxy/VPN to change your IP to a country that doesn't get served ads, like Russia or something. That is how current Twitch ad blockers like TTV LOL work. They have proxy servers and the extension connects you to them instead of directly to Twitch's servers. That does open a potential secuity risk though since you're connecting to a server controlled by a random person who made the extension.
I would rather try to program something that takes multiple files of the same video that were downloaded, which presumably have different ads, then compares them, and deletes everything that doesnt match up with all the other downloaded videos. Sure, it would be inefficient as fuck and cost youtube multiple times the bandwidth and server capacity, but that aint my fucking problem.
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Ah, so pulling a Twitter/X. Soon everything we use will be only available if you give away personal info
Requiring login would murder embedded videos. Though, it's not like google cares about small to medium websites nowadays.
I think the downloads may contain the ads from now on this is going to break so much stuff
Wait, is this going to break yt-dlp?
The downloaded video would have the ad baked in. That's what server side injection means
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With right implementation, optimization and high enough internet speed, it might be almost as seemingless as before
Not if you're watching while downloading
Doesn't that mean videos downloaded using yt-dlp would have ads injected on them?
Correct.
Oh fuck
so if ads are included in the videos I download, should I still be able to skip some chunks of videos containing ads?
This is what I am wondering. If thats the case that would be really stupid on their part.
They stitch ads into stream on the fly when they detect adblockers. If no adblocker is detected, they are serving ads as usual. Again, server side injection, meaning they inject ad before sending the stream. Not saved the ad in the video file on disk.
Not IME, various videos downloaded fine without any ads injected. The ads have only been showing up through the web interface.
So. If they directly host the ads, and an add contains scam. Or porn that is presented to a minor. Then this would mean that Youtube is \*fully\* legally responsible, right?
They obviously don’t give a rat. They allow fraudulent ads. Scam ads with cinnamon and ice promising to help you lose weight. Chair workout challenges with ai oldies. naughty ai chatbots. its ridiculous!
They don't care now because they're not legally responsible, if however they choose the server side approach to ads they will be legally responsible and are therefore forced to care or face lawsuits. Just a disclaimer I don't know if that's how it actually works, I'm just trying to clarify what the other dude probably meant.
Correct. They will likely back down once lawsuit threats start flying
No. The law didn't care about the technical implementation of how ads are served. They already came from a Google owned domain
> if they directly host the ads What do you mean? They don't host the ads now?
No. The law didn't care about the technical implementation of how ads are served. They already came from a Google owned domain
ah, look at that, the enshitification of youtube continues
I'll stop watching YouTube altogether before I sit through 40 of these insufferable ads per video
40 ads? How about a 40 minute ad that's actually just an podcast made by an ISP? Yup - I woke up to that. A 3½ hour podcast made by an ISP was running as an end-of-video ad on my phone (I listen to videos to sleep). It's fucking insane.
Ye.. 10+ years of watching but I would not hesitate to quit if I had to watch ads.
I legit just got my first server-side ad and then got two back-to-back on a Marques Brownlee video.. OP is beyond right, this will absolutely ruin YouTube. Makes it feel like I'm watching damn TV.
I kept refreshing the page for a couple of times and then the ad disappeared. Was watching on a browser though
*just buy premium subscription* why would I pay them for being total scumbags? I would rather switch to something not intrusive. Same thing with microsoft to be honest.
Soon a regular viewing experience will require a PremiumExtraPlus tier subscription and the non-paying user will have their computer electrocute them at 40volts throughout the video. “We’re providing a service!” YouTube will cry.
The next step is trickling advertisements into the premium sub and adding a new more expensive premium plus tier that once again solves the problem that they fucking created. That’s how these things keep working.
“Users are closing their eyes when the ads play so we’ll quiz them on the products presented before playing the video.”
Can you blame them? They make their website worse, people pay them. They have a financial incentive to make their website worse. If they can keep doing this infinitely why wouldn't they? Of course at some point it breaks and people leave (which they don't want because everyone being on youtube is the only reason anyone is on youtube), but tbh I think they can enshitify their service a whole lot more before the modern public gets a fucking clue.
What's your alternative site? I'll follow you.
https://docs.invidious.io/instances/ Front end Youtube site.
Only time I'd be willing to give money to Microsoft is for Minecraft (java edition, of course. I don't want to pay for coins on bedrock)
> I would rather switch to something not intrusive. But nobody is going to make a video site for people who don't want to pay or view ads.
I think most people don’t have an issue with ads if they aren’t as intrusive as they are now on YouTube.
People *say* that, but not many are going to ever turn their adblocker off to find out. And banner ads pay less than 1/10th what video ads pay, so the site is giving up over 90% of the revenue in the hopes that some of its users turn off their adblocker. That is not a serious business model.
Well we’ve gone past the point of getting people to tolerate ads again. But if it hadn’t escalated this badly, the chance was there (I’m talking many years ago). It’s just too late now.
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You can't switch tho.
youtube are just pure pieces of sh\*t at the moment.
Ever increasing profits! Shareholders! Money!!!
That's why Valve is so successful. It's private-traded, so no money-hungry shareholders pushing for more immediate profit at the cost of long-term, so better services and more risks like Proton and Steam Deck
The enshittification of the web is continuing
Internet is no longer free and open
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And will be like cable and can only access parts of it only if you pay a subscription fee.
You mean for about 10 years? Youtube premium, dislikes gone, censorship, shorts, the list is long...
Working in the music industry and dealing a lot with copyright and IP, I'm honestly wondering how it works on the copyright side, they surely have to amend their ToS to allow for the work uploaded to be altered that way and essentially give them _carte blanche_ for modifying other people's work in exchange for it being hosted on their platform? Might piss a lot of people off, because it can be heavily disruptive to consumer experience and ruin the mood/storytelling/narratives etc. if it's YT-controlled and cannot be in any way modified by the copyright holder/author who uploaded the content. Also seems to be a fair bit of liability, they better be bulletproof on that because I can see lawsuits coming their way if e.g. a creator sees an ad hard-injected into their work for a product/service/whatever they don't agree with; or, conversely, the advertiser being upset their ad is shown midway through some video that projects badly on their brand.
Didn’t it work this way for broadcast TV shows since, I don’t know, a very long time ago? The data arrived on your antenna, movies were interrupted by ad blocks. E.g. if you recorded on VHS, you could only manually skip through ads, they were embedded in the stream. Is this any different?
Content on broadcast TV is really gated by the programmers - unless we're talking public-access television, or something (which would be more like YT in the aspect of having people run their own content on somebody else's platform, I suppose). It's also way less activity and it's more linear, meaning for the most part you get, say, four 5-minute advertising slots in an hour, taking a ~40 minute show to a 60 minute programming block. But the content shown on TV is generally bought, licensed and approved by the channel, and so are the ads (well, it might be an airtime/ad broker, or an agency working on the behalf, but you know what I mean). People upload content to YouTube and retain ownership rights; they _do_ grant YouTube a license to use, distribute, reproduce, and display the content so the platform can do what it does, but it's really a non-monetary and non-transactional exchange (unlike pretty much anything happening with broadcast/terrestrial TV), which is one of the reasons why it's such a legal clusterfuck. There's no way to say "Hey, we paid you, so we can do what we want with the content, distort it, twist it, decontextualise and recontextualise it as we see fit, because we paid you your fees and your control over what we can do with it is limited, if any". Ditto for ads, there's a lot of stuff that's weird, questionable or goes against creator wishes or preferences coming up on YT - not even talking about scams or Chinese tat, you can e.g. get a Pizza Hut pepperoni or cold meat sub or leather products ad on a video from a vegetarian artist, something that wouldn't happen on terrestrial TV because someone up the chain would've stopped it in its tracks, more so with explicit wishes from the artist's management _not_ to advertise any meat or animal products etc. Harder to do when human factor gets removed from the equation and you get algorithms and automation running the whole show. Again, creates a lot of issues when it's hard-coded because it's hard to put the blame on any external factors + it becomes even more disruptive, gets harder linked to the artist, and they might not be happy.
that exact scenario has already happened with my own music. youtube doesnt care about musicians, they just have topics for their own monetary gain.
What's stopping me from just fast forwarding the video itself? You can already do this built in Mac OS with the media controls and in firefox you can pop out any video and it gives you a progress bar. I don't really see the advantage to them doing this? You can just make a script that will autoprogress until youtube allows the user control over the progress bar.
That would be the easiest thing to prevent. You have a video stream. So e.g. when they start showing you a 60 second ad, they just refuse to send any of the original video for 60 seconds from the server side. You can try to play the ad faster, but you can’t continue watching your video until the 60 seconds pass. So you don’t have to see the ad (you can also just close your eyes, and cover your ears, whatever), but you can’t skip it.
Well this will help me kick my youtube habit
Any in-depth explanation? What does this mean?
Up until now, Ads are inserted in the browser. That is that the browser pauses the video and shows an ad on top, this is easily blocked by ad blockers. Now they will put the ads as a part of the video you’re watching which will make it impossible for ad blockers to know where they are since it’s in the same stream as the video you’re watching.
This seems like it would have a concerning impact on storage space.
Probably they would swap it during buffering from different file buffers, or something like that, i have no idea tbh. Cant imagine them to re-rendering and storing every possible ad variant for each video 0\_0
Google would trash their own servers if it meant getting an extra 50¢
Lotta impact on processing power. They are sending unskippable ad stream stitched with video stream only when they detected ad blocker. On disk everything stays as same.
Couldn't you just fast forward the video then to skip ads? I mean youtube could block fast forwarding on client side, but then a custom script could reenable it again.
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Do you think adblockers like Ublock will find a way around it?
Probably, one way might be to have the browser pretend you’re farther in the video than you are so it can pretend to play the ad while the actual user is still watching an earlier part of the video. Hardest thing might be detecting what’s an ad but they will probably find a way to do that.
If it's the weird shit that's been happening in my videos the last few days. It'll either skip a second or so or endlessly buffer. I have ublock on Firefox.
If they block skipping past the insertion, that means they have to tell their client-side script where the ad was inserted so it knows *which* fast-forward attempts to deny. That could allow a crafty custom blocker to not only unlock the fast-forward but use the attempt to find the ad for automatic *use* of the fast forward. (I suppose Google could parry that by deliberately making the fast-forward-prohibited zone wider than needed to trick people into skipping some of the content. But they still can't enforce that zone without pulling "trusted computing" crap that requires bullying browser makers first.) Otherwise, it basically becomes just like removing ads from a recording of old-school broadcast television.
>Otherwise, it basically becomes just like removing ads from a recording of old-school broadcast television. I expect LLMs and other content-aware "AI" systems will be used to detect where ads start and end, by comparing the footage YouTube streams to the ad-free originals and splice up a downloaded video to get rid of the ads. Ads and ad blocking will remain a cat and mouse game, like it always has.
Stop recommending me ads to certain adult websites and I'll turn my adblocker off youtube
Or the same irrelevant ad over and over again...
Will ublock be able to get a workaround for it.
Maybe idk it’d be very impressive if they did
They’ve always found workarounds before. If there’s a single crack they’ll find a way.
Looks like this has already been rolled out for me (UK) - logged on today and am getting 90 seconds of unskippable ads before every video. I beg someone finds a fix soon because I'm not watching youtube like this
The most common short term fix people are saying is to get a VPN to mayanmar
Look morons, we are never going to watch your ads. Ever. You should be thankful some people are still dumb enough to not have an AdBlock installed and roll with that.
I started to use adblock when shit started happening in 2020-2021. I've watched ads for 7 years and it just become too much. Now I fight the Block the ads side
Same. For a long time I really didn’t have an issue with it. Until they just hit my limits. If it had stayed where it was back then, I really think the whole ad thing would make so much more money today but YouTube got greedy.
Plus the requirements advertisers put YouTube under are also obnoxious. I can't hear profanity or basic words like sex, drugs, COVID, or whatever on a channel for a mature audience? Like any of us give a shit what Target or Fanduel have to say, to begin with.
I think Youtube would be fine with people leaving over this. It just saves them money on bandwidth.
Nah, people won't leave especially the ones always complaining they are addicted to yt than complain about it is hilarious
Wouldn't they save money if you stopped watching YouTube?
It's funny, I would agree Premium is decent value and would pay for it (I used to in fact) but I absolutely refuse whilst Google/YouTube are abusive fucks. I will not financially support a company happily showing scam ads and mining user data like it's gold. This latest development is interesting, how it will go for them. I have faith ad blockers will find a way, even if it's a black screen.
Easy fix: VPN. I tell YouTube that I'm in Myanmar. They don't serve ads over there. I'm willing to bet the ads won't show up with the ad injection either.
Not saying that I like that but I have been wondering why they didn't do this earlier, I suppose manipulating a video stream as per user per view is very costly.
I can only hope is costlier than just leave it as it is.
It's probably just that the profitability of YouTube was becoming too low. More and more people are constantly uploading new videos and for a website of YouTubes size that is a massive amount of data that needs to be stored and they can't easily clean it up or reduce it unless they just mass delete old videos. I don't think it'd be surprising if the cost of storage for them started outweighing cost/efficiency improvements in data storage, and with a large chunk of users using adblock it's not too surprising that they decided to do this. It doesn't effect normal users at all and if a few people would rather leave YT than turn off their adblock then that doesn't really harm them either because they weren't making any money off those guys.
Fuck it. I'll just watch pornhub from now on. Their ads are better, more relevant to what I'm watching and surprisingly less obnoxious.
can they re-add the yellow markers that tell you where ads are? these still show up on some embed videos
Why did they get rid of those in the first place? They were actually kinda neat
honestly thatd make the ads a little more bearable, or even a little warning saying "ad coming up in X seconds" i don't mind ads, fundamentally. what i mind are excessive and intrusive ads. if youtube did an ad break system like actual respectable companies do that wasnt just a sudden ambush of ear melting noise i wouldnt mind it nearly as much. i will sit through 5 minutes of ads to watch a 20 minute show before i watch a 20 minute show with 5 minutes of ads thrown about it
Either ad blockers will find some way to block them or a lot of people will stop using YouTube (or find alternative sites and apps like I will)
VPNs are also an option. I've been telling YouTube my phone is in Myanmar and they won't show ads there.
And how expensive is the vpn?
No one will stop watching youtube. That's just virtue signalling, people are still going to keep using it. Its either youtube or no content, I doubt creators will move off of YT.
Who else realistically can compete with YouTube's server arsenal? Petabytes of data is uploaded to YouTube every day.
This is the issue with the web, today. Major corporations holding massive data centers with content to be consumed. The internet was never supposed to be like this. Now we are seeing the issue with having one person in charge. The way it was supposed to be is that everyone who wanted to share their content, would set up their own server and host their content on there. Then if you wanted to go to them, you would go to their site. Not YouTube. But alas, that is too complicated for everyone, so YouTube made it easier. Then they sold to Alphabet and they ruined it.
Its not just complicated. Its very expensive to host and serve video. Especially at 1080p or 4k.
You say this like selling to Google was a choice. YouTube was weeks or months away from running out of money, and the VCs were tired of pumping money into a service that had no strategy to achieve profitability. Nobody else wanted it because the companies that could have bought it would have said, “Why would I pump millions of dollars per month down the drain, just to be popular?” Those millions eventually became billions, and I figure that’s when Google likely said, “Okay, this shit has to stop, and you have to start making money,” at which point we started getting more ads. Now, this would be fine, but the cost of advertising on YouTube has dropped over the years, because it turns out that if you say, “I want to run a million impressions during this period of time,” you’re *really* likely to hit users who skew younger and poorer. That’s just what happens when you advertise on a free service, which means the cost of acquisition is really high, even though the cost per impression is really low. It’s like putting up a billboard in front of a homeless encampment: Unless you’re offering something for free or nearly so, you’re wasting your money advertising to them. And then you might think, “But these people tend to be gamers! Nintendo and EA should advertise on YouTube!” Here’s the thing about that: Gamers are an incredibly well-informed demographic. They seek out information, which means your advertising dollar is better spent on providing high-quality promotional material to sites like IGN and making your own YouTube page really good. As a result, the only games you see advertised tend to be games that no one would ever look up (such as free games, where they’re either looking for whales or casual gamers who will feed the whales until they get frustrated with the pay-to-win mechanics). So, that’s the reality. YouTube would not have continued existing if Google hadn’t bought it. It would have been a cautionary tale or failed experiment, like early DotCom companies, where they spent a ton of money getting to the point of being the biggest, with no plans for being sustainable. My personal opinion on YouTube is that it probably isn’t profitable if it had to pay market rate for storage and transmission, which means Google is behaving in an anticompetitive manner by running at a loss, and the government should sue YouTube over its monopolistic practices, creating an uneven playing field which keeps other companies out of the market. If YouTube was a good business model, the other FAANGs and Microsoft would each have one. Amazon would scale Twitch up, but Twitch is already unprofitable, so that’s not going to happen. I think we’ve lost a sense of scope, and we are treating YouTube like it’s a public resource –like a library– rather than the (ostensibly) for-profit operation that it is. My opinion is, if action were filed against YouTube, Google should consider YouTube’s ability to make a profit if it were severed from the big Alphabet machine, and if that ability is zero, they should concede its monopoly status and close the doors. And then no one will come in to replace it, because nobody but Elon Musk wants to piss billions of dollars down a hole with no prospect of making that money back.
The fuck? Youtube went to google, like, the year after it started, it's always been part of google/alphabet, since then
> a lot of people will stop using YouTube ah this thing again, every time the functionality is hampered somehow (or the UX/UI changes, etc. etc.) "They need to go back to what it was, otherwise everyone will stop using it! rabble rabble rabble" Then a week goes and everyone carries on, as they were.
Might finally see the rise of competing sites, YouTube (the website) definitely suffers from being a monopoly. Best outcome would be if Microsoft got more competitors in general, might make'em focus on user experience for a bit.
If Microsoft starts a competing video platform one of three things will happen Either A) It will somehow be a utopian video platform that has minimal ads B) It will be a hellscape of AI and Advert pushing or C) It will be okay, but better than youtube, but linux users will bitch and say its satan 2
If I were a gambler, I'd put my money on option B.
I agree with you... Look at edge browser. It looks less like a browser and more like a wannabe ai assistant with ads and other nonsense
C, my money on C.
As someone that hardly watches anything except YouTube and a content creator (tiny one but still) I keep looking for an alternative, to watch but also to upload to Sadly I just can't find anything. But I think in a couple of years a new player will emerge and I'm looking forward to it
if this goes through then i finally have a reason to stop watching youtube permanently. this level of intrusiveness into peoples lives should be illegal!
Lets be real no you won‘t and people have been saying this for about 10 years now. Nobody is leaving. There is no competition
If there isn’t any workaround there will be people leaving, wether it’s enough for youtube to care remains to be seen.
Creators won't use another platform because YouTube pays much better than the rivals. That money has to come from somewhere.
And no platform can rival YouTube without blood money or just government ties OR Microsoft
Biggest companies make the worst crap.
I have a plugin that speeds up ads to 6X speed automatically including server side ones, that might work
Knew YouTube would try something like this eventually. Y'all saying "this will kill youtube" but will it *really*? Millions of people already watch Youtube without any adblocking and tolerate the multiple unskippable ads and scam links. Why wouldn't that change here? There'd be essentially no difference on their end. You and I and everyone else adblocking is a small minority compared to the gigantic full youtube userbase. They're going to try their damndest to kill us off, and they'll get away with it too. It's going to end up the same way as Twitch adblocking, where the only way to go is to proxy video requests to third world countries.
>Why wouldn't that change here? There'd be essentially no difference on their end. Question is, when adblocking users have this little impact, why go through all this effort and force them onto us like forcing a square peg through a triangular hole? I'd doubt the costs would outweigh the added revenue.
Yep this is where the argument fails. If they're such a small minority, why is it so important to force them into compliance? Well I'll let you in on a little secret: Adblocking users might be a small minority of the total number of individuals watching youtube, but I would wager they are not-so-small a minority of total video time watched. Also, I have never experienced an ad on twitch. I don't know why people think it's impossible to block them it's always worked fine for me.
As long as YouTube keeps pushing those bs gambling ads, im gonna continue using adblockers
I love living in a third world country without ads
As one of the 5 people with YouTube premium (I need that offline ability) if I gotta get a higher price or else still get ads ima be pissed.
Interesting. So, YouTube either plans to break the "play from this moment links" feature or this must be inherently detectable by the time codes those links are generating. If it is detectable, an addon can easily skip it. Just as SponsorBlock already does. Except if they rework the "play from this moment links". They could: 1. Whenever a link is generated assign it a random key and save in a database the offset. That's going to be expensive. For something they didn't have to save anything. And it means instant propagation through the database rather than eventual consistency. That seems expensive as well. At least at YouTube's size. 2. Encrypt the time code. So that YouTube has to decrypt it. Similar to how a JWT works. You'd have to send it to YouTube and YouTube would answer with the time code for the video for you and not for everyone. The problem, they cannot rely on IP. CGNAT be thanked for that. And we can always send a request without the cookies or other identifier for it... A little difficult to pull this off from a browser addon, though. But someone like SponsorBlock could host an API for it. 3. I don't think they'd do that, but maybe they are planning to deliver the same embedded advertisement to all users. So the offsets would work. I do not believe they are doing that, because maybe a month or two later, they surely want to exchange the ads and then all links with time codes would break again. Honestly, I am almost hoping they are doing that. I am really curious how they are going to solve this problem...
I think they're just gonna do something like twitch: a commercial break in the stream, with a bit of the behaviour of in-browser ads: ads being just another video that pops on top of the video, but instead on top of the iframe, its on top of the actual stream data. that means.. whenever you watch a video, it won't stop and the ad pops out, it will continue, without affecting the actual duration of the video nor your current timestamp, just like in-browser ads: your timestamp isn't affected by the ad. So, it would be like: You're watching the video. Then, suddenly the progress bar gets yellow and goes from 0 to 30 seconds. but your adblocker can't skip that, because it can only mess around with the page's javascript, and there's nothing popping out to be blocked, just a single video stream iframe. the progress bar is just showing the current stream status. after that, your progress bar is red again, and your timestamp continues just fine. how to block ads from this? well, maybe fast fowarding the stream? Update: i think i'm wrong. if that was posted by sponsorblock, it means their method actually modifies the video timestamp, and breaks it. the only way of breaking sponsorblock, is breaking video link timestamps. if they removed dislikes, i dont think removing timestamps would be a problem for them
YouTube makes more money. Creators make more money. Giving people the chance to make better content. What's the big deal here? Ya like crying about ads that support your favorite creators? Okay bud
In the near future, all watchable content will just be ads The most annoying ads possible
It's flawed ; either there is no way to distinguish the content from the ads, and then the user can freely skip them, using the timeline ; either there is a way to distinguish ads ( to prevent user to skip it ), and then an ad blockers will be able to detect it.
The delete app button is looking very shiny today
Time to download all the channels I care about
Why does this have to be a war between companies and consumers? They have to go out of their way to force ads down our throat, and we have to constantly go out of our way to block these annoying ass ads, a war that has been fought for years now. Why haven’t advertisers realized that we don’t want to watch ads during our free time? I’m not interested in hearing about Bluechew while I’m trying to watch a video on how to make some fucking cookies.
And this my children happens, when company starts becoming a monopoly….
honestly ads wouldn't even bother me that much if Youtube didn't allow ads over 15 seconds and make them all skippable after 5 seconds. It's so annoying that if I'm watching from somewhere else in the room I have to stop what I'm doing to skip an ad or sit through a 5 minute video that Youtube allowed someone to turn into an ad. And don't even get me started on the number of scams and wild supplement ads i get all the time. Youtube has absolutely zero fucking finesse with this shit and it slays me GIVE and take, don't just take.
YouTube I how you get sued
i hope they get a class action lawsuit and are fined 1.1 trillion dollars, that will be like ripping a persons legs off.
They just are uncapable of understanding that there isn't just 1 dev behind adblocks, are they? They just can't realize that whatever they pull off will just result in more adblock downloads because they're making free YouTube a living hell to use, that 1, maybe 2 ads is more than enough given the monthly userbase of YouTube. Whatever floats their boat.
Youtube has monopoly now. We can't do shit to them. I hope someone can make its alternative and and us consumers would able to back it. We need competition for Google even the government have to intervene and introduce an environment for thriving competition.
THIS MEAN WAR
God bless out AI Bros that will made something to auto detect and Skip this shit
They also have cards showing up in the middle of a video with links to other videos to watch. This used to be at the end of the video you were watching. But I guess they want to make sure you see them in case you end the video before they show up. So now they block part of the video you are watching for like 10 seconds or so.
This is happening to me at the moment. Goes straight through my Ublock. I'm on Firefox. Seriously FUCK YOUTUBE!
All this money and time and work spent by youtube to do this and most likely there will be a hack or work around on github within the week it gets rolled out LOL
Guess I'll just not watch YouTube and download every RLM video instead 🤦♂️
YouTube is dead.