YouTube has been spotted testing server-side ads, which could pose a problem to ad blockers.
I’ll just download the video and skip the shit, idgaf, I’m not watching ads, google can suck it.
Try the app called Seal on FDroid
YouTube tests server-side ads to make
your coveted blockerYouTube obsoleteftfy
fucking YouTube, am i right?
no seriously, havent used it in months, and weirdly dont Miss it. i used to watch YouTube the whole day.
May I ask what do you use for content instead of YouTube? A lot of certain people I follow are on YouTube and music that I listen to are often only on YouTube these days. Not even Spotify has the niche songs (mainly Arabic and Japanese songs).
well, i would never even think of using it for music (except downloading what i cant find) same with spotify (i hate streaming). I just watched regular videos, which I just suddenly don’t do anymore, I started binging TV shows instead, -no ads .
I just couldn’t bare the ads, they’re that bad. and when I think of stuff that makes me mad, I can’t do anything associated with it, I.e. watch YouTube -know there will be ads (or not, because i have an adblocker) the mere thought that there WOULD be ads is so annoying to me, that I cannot stand watching YouTube.
but yeah back to the point, TV shows, and books, especially books have been my replacement, and I must say, they are much better.
What do you mean by “regular videos”?
Not music videos.
I would settle for something that simply turns the screen black and turns audio off whenever ads play. I don’t care if YouTube gets paid for it, I just want to decrease the value of ads and prevent myself from seeing them.
I don’t care if YouTube gets paid for it
Legally, YouTube have to detect if ads were blocked and and mark the impression as non-billable. They can’t charge advertisers for blocked ads.
I already put my phone down on my desk and turn the audio down whenever an ad pops up, they can’t tell it isn’t being viewed.
They can only tell that something is blocked because the ad wasn’t loaded from a server. If it’s not loaded, then they can’t count it as “viewed.”
If the ad is just blacked over, it is still loaded, and they wouldn’t know.
If the ad is just blacked over, it is still loaded, and they wouldn’t know.
If it became a common thing, they’d have to add detection for it. Not necessarily to stop people doing it, but to ensure advertisers aren’t charged for invalid impressions. Practically every major ad network has adblocking detection; they just don’t make it obvious (e.g. they silently log it).
If they were effectively able to detect it they would be able to block you watching the rest of the video.
Well they also infest the client side since they likely developed the main part of your web browser, so they can still know there’s a black cover in the DOM.
Have a sneaking suspicion that google is doing the classic spend 100 dollars to save 1 cent type scenario, cause all the money they’ve dumped into this anti-adblock shit? theres no way its less than what they’ve not made from adblockers.
Especially when all this money could have been spent on improving their ad service so people don’t have to view 2 hour ads, or malware laden bullshit, or just blatant pornographic advertising.
but why spend money moderating their own service, when they can spend 10x the money trying to force their open septic tank of a service on everyone.
Sounds good. It’s a waste of time anyway. Maybe I’ll do something else like go outside or create something of my own.
If they make it shitty enough I just wont use it.
Rumble and PeerTube
EDIT: I’m already paying YouTube with personal data and privacy.
I mean I’ll settle for the ad being blacked out and muted while I wait for the content. Or have it play elevator music while I wait.
or do some back end trickery where they can buffer the video for longer than youtube allows, then selectively clip out the ad parts so you can continue to seemlessly watch.
I wonder if the server throttles that ads so you can’t 2x the playback speed. Sounds like a good way to detect when the ads are being served.
I got the server-side ads a few weeks ago. Switched to another account and was ad-free again. I’d be happy to pay for Premium as it supports the creators I watch, but for ad-free alone it’s not worth the £13/mo. The other features jacking up the price aren’t much use to me.
Let’s go full guerilla: Plugin that lets you select the first and the last frame of an ad, thus allows to report the beginning and length to a synced database. When that frame is found in the buffer, skip X frames ahead.
For ergonomics, the plugin should be able to spot cuts in the video so you can easily select the correct frames.
For resilience, maybe settle for similar frames. Thinking about anti-abuse, maybe require a minimum number of reports relative to the views (and ofc allow to not skip stuff).
Oh. I like this. Sponsor block but network wide basically xD
For ergonomics, the plugin should be able to spot cuts in the video so you can easily select the correct frames.
This shouldn’t even be too hard, I doubt YouTube is completely rerendering every video with ads, they’d just insert the ad in before an I frame in the video. So each ad will start with an I frame, and the video will resume on an I frame, meaning just let the user select all the I frames, no fancy cut detection algorithm is needed.
I have no idea how to do this from JS though.
Also I mean video I frames, not HTML iframes.
That sounds very much like the idea of SponsorBlock (but might need a bit of refinement to work for different ads of different length). You should definitely check out Piped for watching YouTube videos without any tracking/ads/dark patterns, I am very sure they will do something to remove server-side ads as well (hopefully).
And if it is just five seconds instead of 15, it would be way better!
Due to legal reasons, and to keep advertisers happy, YouTube is forced to display the “Advertisement” mark and a link to the advertisers website. With these, all the required information exists to allow an adblocker to skip any ads embedded in the video stream. No community flagging of ads is required.
YouTube is forced to display the “Advertisement” mark
They’re forced to identify that it’s an ad, but they don’t have to do it in a machine-readable way. There’s many different approaches to show an “Advertisement” or “Sponsored” label that appears to users but thar blockers can’t easily find.
If they don’t link to the advertisers page, they’ll lose advertisers, which is the last thing YouTube would do. Legally, a video-embedded “Advertisement” indicator could work, but the link to the advertisers page remains.
Let’s go full guerilla: Plugin that lets you select the first and the last frame of an ad, thus allows to report the beginning and length to a synced database. When that frame is found in the buffer, skip X frames ahead.
This would fit in well with SponsorBlock, which already does the same thing for different parts of videos (eg sponsored segments, intro and outro animations, non music segments in music videos, etc).
I suspect YouTube will find ways around this, like running ads of differing lengths, add random amounts of padding at the start of the video or between ads, etc.
It actually already did break sponsorblock for a bit because user submissions would include the wrong timestamps, due to the ads changing the duration of the video.
This would be hard to implement, but I personally would be happy to donate more to fund the development costs for such features. Adblocking is the largest consumer boycott in history and I won’t let a corporation try to crush it again.
The challenge is that videos will have a varying amount or type of ads based on the client’s country/demographic and simply on the timing of ad campaigns.
Not baking-in ads was the advantage of Youtube and other streaming platforms over the likes of traditional TV. That’s why they were client-side in the first place. I wonder how much the extra effort, bandwidth, and processing will cost Youtube to achieve server-side ads. Would be funny if it simply ended up being too expensive for them.
They have a LOT of compute power… They could have several baked in ads per geographical area / demographic and only store them on servers in / close to the relevant country. There’s definitely associated costs but I wonder if it’d amortize well given their viewer count.
Let the games begin.
Won’t this totally break deep linking to time codes?
I’m so fucking sick of their greedy bullshit
Ive had no issues with Brave Browser on my Desktop, but NewPipe on Mobile has been all over the place the past few weeks.
Pipepipe on f-droid is kept much more up to date in my experience. It’s a fork so basically the same
NewPipe had to deal with some thing YouTube did to break things. And they fixed them super quick. Last time I had a video not work, I visited the GitHub site and saw there was a new release from 11 minutes ago. Installed it and the video worked perfectly.
Every other post about Ad blocking has someone pitching Brave.
Brave has experienced some controversies over time, including the CEO having problematic political views; alleged sales of copyrighted data for AI model training; auto-completing typed-in URLs to affiliate links that generate revenue for Brave; content creators receiving unsolicited donations they couldn’t collect; and automatically installing their VPN service without the user’s consent.
Brave is also, you know, run by probably one of the worlds most evil people.
Peter Thiel.
The guy who is part of a group of people (including JD Vance) who wants to hook you up (using bff elon’s neuralink) and use your body as a biofuel source instead of just killing you. As a “more humane alternative to genocide”
PS. This isn’t a joke.
https://newrepublic.com/article/183971/jd-vance-weird-terrifying-techno-authoritarian-ideas
Yet another reason I’m glad I use youtube-dl.
If they’re truly server-side injected, then they would also appear permanently in any downloaded copy because the server would be telling the client what pieces are available-including the ad pieces with no way to differentiate.
At least if still downloads them you can edit them out if it’s something you want to save.
At least I can trim those away if needed.
