- YouTube is testing server-side ad injection to counter ad blockers, integrating ads directly into videos to make them indistinguishable from the main content.
- This new method complicates ad blocking, including tools like SponsorBlock, which now face challenges in accurately identifying and skipping sponsored segments.
- The feature is currently in testing and not widely rolled out, with YouTube encouraging users to subscribe to YouTube Premium for an ad-free experience.
It sounds like this would be easy for tools like SponsorBlock to label and skip segments as ads. However, it would be tough on smaller channels where people might not be labeling them as such.
Nah, it would be very hard. Presumably this only works if they can insert ads on the fly so they can cycle ads based on region and time. Static ads on videos would have been easy to do and easy to bypass.
If you don’t know how many ads there are or what they look like or how long they are it becomes very hard to do timeline nonsense to avoid them. It also seems like it’d be expensive to do at the scale Youtube needs it, but maybe they figured it out. That would suck. We’ll see, I suppose.
A solution would be for an extension to download the entire video 2x and delete the difference. But if you want to watch on 4k you’d need a connection that is pretty fast (although still in the range of what many people already have). However if they find a way to throttle the max speed on the server side for each client based on the quality there are watching, that would kill this possibility. You could block their cookies and throttling by IP on IPv4 would not be a possibility for them, but when everyone is on IPv6 idk.
But also processing the video on the fly to delete the difference in real time would be heavy, though at least I think it is possible to access the GPU with browser extensions via webGL but I am not sure if for HD and 4k that would be realistic for most people.
This assumes the exact same ads will be injected in the same time markers for every viewer, every time. I doubt any of these will be true.
Edit: I got this backwards…
A solution would be for an extension to download the entire video 2x and delete the difference.
I don’t think that would work. It would be trivial for YT to put different ads in different time slots which would leave a differencing engine with no way to tell what was content and what was ad. However that thought gave me another one; the core problem is the ability to differentiate between content and ad. That problem is probably solvable by leveraging the NPU that everyone is so desperate to cram into computers today.
Nearly all of the YT content I watch, and it’s a lot, has predictable elements. As examples the host(s) are commonly in frame and when they’re not their voices are, their equipment is usually in frame somewhere and often features distinctive markings. Even in the cases where those things aren’t true an Ad often stands out because its so different in light, motion, and audio volume.
With those things in mind it should be possible to train software, similar to an LLM, to recognize the difference between content and ad. So an extension could D/L the video, in part or in whole, and then start chewing through it. If you were willing to wait for a whole D/L of the video then it could show you an ad free version, if you wanted to stream and ran out of ad-removed buffer then it could simply stop the stream (or show you something else) until it has more ad-free content to show you.
A great way to improve this would be by sharing the results of the local NPU ad detection. Once an ad is detected and its hash shared then everyone else using the extension can now reliably predict what that ad looks like and remove it from the content stream which would minimize the load on the local NPU. It should also be possible for the YT Premium users to contribute so that the hash of an ad-free stream, perhaps in small time based chunks, could be used to speed up ad identification for everyone else.
It wouldn’t be trivial but it’s not really new territory either. It’s just assembling existing tech in a new way.
A less expensive method could be to retrieve the subtitle twice, or the subtitle from a premium account and check where the time offsets are.
Usually ads have a significant volume above the content they sorround (which, by the way, is the thing annoys me the most), so you would only need to check audio for that, which is lot less load than processing the video.
Guessing you’d get a lot of false positives that way, but I like the ingenuity.
My kiddo watches stuff on youtube where the person on screen gets suddenly loud which could really mess with detecting ads by changes in volume. Apprently that is a widespread thing too.
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I think Twitch’s solution is different, isn’t it? I don’t watch enough live to know the details, but I imagine in Youtube’s scenario they’re not surfacing any details about what’s an ad and what isn’t beyond embedding something in the video itself. Otherwise it’s pretty pointless. But hey, I guess I’m rooting for them doing this poorly.
Then, I’ll use AI to filter it out.
I’ll just use I and stop using YouTube. I won’t purposefully poison my mind with ads.
You could still go for a premium subscription, but I don’t trust Google with my money either.
I hope this would make some quality content creators to move to another platform, but I don’t really believe in this.
Enjoying YouTube is quickly becoming a case of the juice not being worth the squeeze
Drink the Kool-aid instead and join Premium. It’s great. YouTube is my primary source of video entertainment. No ads on any device and countless thousands of hours of math and science videos, SNL clips, educational videos, game reviews, and on and on.
For the cost of two beers a month, I get access to the best video library in the world with no ads, plus saved video progress so you can resume videos later, and YouTube Music to boot.
Why everyone on Lemmy thinks everything in the world should be free when it costs money to run the servers and pay content creators is beyond me. Makes no sense.
You sound like an ad. It triggered my uncanny valley response. Please never do that again.
Would it help if I said “fuck off”?
Edgy
I pay for YouTube. It is without a doubt the best subscription I pay for, that I get major use out of. I know people are hardcore anti-ad and Google is like Ad Satan, but if you can afford it, YouTube is unironically worth it.
I’m not paying just to get back what we used to have without ad blockers. They need to offer more than just no ads. Like exclusive content.
Also:
plus saved video progress so you can resume videos later
You say that as if it’s a premium only feature. It’s not.
You say that as if it’s a premium only feature. It’s not.
Don’t give them ideas…
as an occasional creator of internet videos,I would much rather host my own videos, because bandwidth is actually very cheap. but YouTube has a complete monopoly on internet video, so I have to host my video on their website, subject to their weird and arbitrary conditions, their trigger happy copyright system, and their general terrible treatment of their creators. they pay an absolute pittance for impressions, which is why most professional YouTubers use other revenue streams
the company, Google, that you are paying, didn’t make the videos, doesn’t fairly compensate the people who did, and they are effectively holding them and the very concept of internet video hostage
people on Lemmy mostly support a free, non-corpo, decentralised internet instead of the parasites at Google because Lemmy is free and decentralised and non corporate
get real
What you don’t understand is that if YouTube manages to get enough people by the balls with their anti-adblocking efforts, the next step is to start jacking up the subscription price year after year to see how much people are willing to pay.
I prefer subscription models. That way I’m paying with my money and not my content. Of course with Google you’re doing both… but in principle I support it. I pay for a family plan and have some friends/ family on it.
It hate ads and to me it’s easily worth the monthly fee. I looked up a YouTube video on a TV that wasn’t signed in and there was like 60 seconds of ads! I’ve had YouTube premium / red for years I didn’t realize it was getting so bad.
But yeah, I support subscription model. More sustainable and honest way for a website to make a profit. In a subscription you are the buyer and the website is the product. In a free model ad companies are the buyer and you are the product.
They have more incentive under the subscription model to create a better experience for the user. In a free they have incentive to squeeze user as much as possible. I think it’s one of the main drivers of enshittification
They have more incentive under the subscription model to create a better experience for the user.
Then how would you explain what netflix is doing to their customers?
Well couple of things.
First, I said it gives more incentive. Not explicitly mandates it. So I’m not saying all subscription services are great to the consumer. I’m saying as a whole, it’s probably better than the alternative.
Second, Netflix is a bit of a unique case I think. They essentially created the streaming industry back during blockbuster days. Nobody thought streaming rights had any value so they licensed them to Netflix for cheap. Netflix blew up because it had access to a very large catalog of media.
After companies realized they could make more money streaming things themselves, they stopped renewing the licenses to Netflix.
Netflix was very large because of their access to these licenses. If they lose the license, they over the long term lose their customers. So they took a gamble and invested heavily in self-made media in many different languages. Some were a success, like Stranger Things, but most were flops.
Essentially they became this large corporate behemoth and they are desperately trying to remain in their top hegemon spot. Once a company reaches that size, they are an entirely different animal. And unfortunately because of the way streaming rights works, you’ll probably only see large corporate streaming sites in the foreseeable future
The monthly payment for my family subscription is less than 2 tickets to the movies, not including gas, popcorn, kids, etc.
Easily the most bang for the buck entertainment we get, we watch hours of YouTube every day. News, tech reviews, travel, kids songs, tutorials…
I canceled Disney+ and Netflix, but YouTube premium is not going anywhere.
I use premium and even I cringed at this. The first two thirds of this are written like an AI generated ad.
Will that fix their horrible site and mobile app that constatntly breaks on me? I’m not going to pay a corporation that treats users and creators like shit and can’t even make a good way to interact with the service with all that money. If they prpvided a fantastic service and were pro-consumer and pro-creator then I totally would. But they’re the opposite of that.
I have no problems with either. 🤷♂️ The site and all of their apps work fine.
Just pretend like the anti-consumer and anti-creator criticisms aren’t there. They can’t hurt you if you just don’t acknowledge that they exist.
I will never pay Google a dime. They make enough off of us. It’s really easy to download the video you want to watch and watch it on a stand alone player with you guessed it, NO FUCKING ADS.
For now. If Google succeeds at doing this it won’t be.
I also don’t trust them that they won’t sell my data if I pay them
You know they’ll still sell it.
I signed up for a family plan a couple years ago and it’s honestly one of the last subscriptions I would cancel. I can justify it by the literally hundreds of hours of watching ads me and my family would have been subjected to otherwise.
I think you missed a “not” in your last sentence
Yeah I wrote that out without thinking it through lol
Time to switch to odysee fully I guess
I don’t know why you’d go with a crypto scheme if what you actually need is video.
Peertube is federated just like lemmy, so it doesn’t have to cook the planet to achieve decentralisation.
Fair enough. I completely forgot about peertube. Been using newpipe predominantly and odysee was the first alternative that came to mind.
Thanks for reminding me about peer tube. A client recommendation would be great. I’ve used p2play.
I’ve heard that some versions of the Blockchain are not based on computing power and therefore are not nearly as awful re: emissions. But I don’t really know much about it so I decided to look into Odysee.
Instead I found out all about how the company that created the protocol was blasted out of existence by the SEC for selling unregistered securities & the website is full of Nazis because they don’t do anything about fucking Nazis.
Never did reach a conclusion about the blockchain thing. Kinda stopped caring. Sounds like a clusterfuck.
Proof of stake is what it’s called, but then it’s even more of a ponzi scheme because you have to buy in. Like they’re literally recreating coconut island.
Also nobody seems to actually be doing it, possibly for exactly that reason. It’s just a green-washing promise of an idea.
Federation and crypto are two completely opposite philosophies of decentralisation.
Crypto is based on zero-trust, which sounds cool and edgy if you’re 15, but in practice it turns out that the people drawn to a zero trust system are untrustworthy. It’s not surprising that it’s full of Nazis.
Federation is designed around trust, which is the way our meatspace social networks actually work, and I think it’s the only reasonable way forward.
And I’m testing no longer using YouTube.
Cable was gone years ago, followed by all streaming. Soon all I’ll have left are games and hobbies.
EA has been on the boycott list since mass effect 3
Can’t inject shitty ads in my mountain of board games.
I dunno… Hasbro kind of has a monopoly.
EA, Ubisoft, and Activision are all on my do not buy list. Their games aren’t even worth pirating.
OK, can I be real about this for a second?
I’m torn about Youtube ad stuff. Genuinely.
On the one hand the ads suck, we have a good way to bypass them and I certainly don’t want to watch Youtube videos if the ads are unskippable.
On the other hand, if I’m being honest I watch more Youtube than Netflix or Amazon Prime and I sure give those guys money for a subscription. If I counted the cost per watched minute, Youtube Premium would make way more sense than a bunch of subs I do pay.
But I also don’t want to watch a Youtube that is a paid service. That was never the point. The reason I engage with it so much is it’s supposed to be UGC, not TV.
So yeah, torn. Youtube is very weird and the relationship we all have with it is super dysfunctional, creators and viewers alike. We made a very strange future and now we have to deal with it.
I do try to block ads, but tbh it’s impossible to be mad at Google for pushing them. YouTube is a modern miracle of engineering – no other platform on the planet hosts the scale of video it does, indefinitely, with instant access, for free. It is more than fair for them to recoup the massive cost. Personally, if they had a cheaper version of Premium without the music features, I’d pay for it in a heartbeat.
Even if it’s a good product, you shouldn’t support the monopolist.
YouTube is a modern miracle of engineering – no other platform on the planet hosts the scale of video it does, indefinitely, with instant access, for free
Because Google chokes the market. There could be plenty of other competitors if Google charged for it like other companies would. Google subsidized YouTube with the rest of their company’s profits, not to provide us a free platform because they’re so nice, but to prevent competition. As long as YouTube was free, no other companies would be able to keep up with the costs, therefore no one else would enter the market.
If this shit is so expensive, and they want money, they can gate the content like every other streaming service, and then deal with the competition that would swell up.
If google “charged for it like other companies would” then youtube would not exist. The ONLY companies that can handle that volume of data are Google, Amazon, and Microsoft: The three big cloud service providers. And Microsoft noped the fuck out and Amazon have some strong purges on most streams.
And… there were other sites that tried to compete with youtube. Those of us who are old enough will remember subscribing to Rooster Teeth or Giant Bomb but watching the videos on youtube because “the site player is shit”. Let alone all the general purpose video sites that either became dirtier than a truck stop lizard who barebacks constantly or became liveleak and was all about Faces of Death and revenge porn… and then went out of business.
Videos is INCREDIBLY expensive. That is why the current rise of sites like Nebula and Gun Jesus’s site and Corridor Crew’s site all paywall watching anything. Because free video would cost way too much.
If this shit is so expensive, and they want money, they can gate the content like every other streaming service, and then deal with the competition that would swell up.
So… you actively dislike a model where you can choose to watch videos in exchange for watching an ad and instead insist upon paying to watch anything. AND still don’t want to pay to watch anything because Youtube Premium lets you do that anyway.
The problem is that user generated content still takes time. Which means money. Also, people don’t want vlogs with a drywall background anymore and the number of creators who can get away with simple prop free skits are double digit, at best. So making the videos also cost money.
People make up this fantaasy land where art should be done with no compensation to be pure. Which ignores that the vast majority of art in human history was either made by the independently wealthy or as a “patron” system where… an independently wealthy person paid an artist to make them look good.
And that even extends to the modern day. People get angry about “nepo babies” but… it takes a lot of time and money to refine your music to a meaningful degree. The garage bands that get discovered playing at a local bar are VERY much the exception and almost everyone universally considers their best albums to be the first couple after they got signed by a label and could drill down and refine it.
Youtube and the like are basically the first time that “the everyperson” could make art for a living. Unfortunately… that means they need to get paid. Ads are of very questionable use. Youtube Premium is almost universally praised by any creator who is willing to talk about it. But we need some way of paying those mid tier creators who are popular enough to do it for a living but not popular enough to get 120 bucks a year from their fans to upload MAYBE one video (looking at you Michael Reeves).
The problem is that user generated content still takes time. Which means money. Also, people don’t want vlogs with a drywall background anymore and the number of creators who can get away with simple prop free skits are double digit, at best. So making the videos also cost money.
That’s why I don’t use Sponsorblock: it hurts the wrong people.
But I’ll still block the ads because to hell with Google and their monopoly. I’m only interested in supporting the artists directly, Google can get fucked.
Early youtube with the drywall backgrounds in skits or just random bits of life were what made it fun. The fact that the majority of the content now means it is just another streaming service with an expected income for someone instead of being something they did in their spare time. The switch from amateur to professional content ruined youtube.
I think Google created a model that is unsustainable from the get go, because they have infinite money glitches and used this to monopolize the market and lure in creators.
It could be sustainable for non-premium users if the amount of ads was similar to what it was, idk, 10 years ago, 14 years ago. However back then they were not making nearly enough to cover their costs and pay creators handsomely.
I like to support creators but I also liked youtube better when it was mostly common people doing their thing however the fuck they wanted, instead of this hyper-profissionalized tv-wannabe corporate channels that grow to be mammoths.
Problem is, we accepted the weird assumption that successful content creators on the internet are entitled to be millionaires, or to make a lot more money per month than say, a successful person in a common profession. If content creators got into youtube with the mindset that at best they’d live a life that is middle class instead of trying to become rich, then youtube would need a lot less money than it needs today, and content would go back to being more relaxed not mega professional and extremely polished videos from channels that employ dozens of people.
But alas, I guess successful video creators on youtube are supposed to be rich and deserve to earn more money than a doctor, and youtube is supposed to be a viable source of income for mega corporations that used to be mainly TV and other traditional media but then freaked out about losing people to the internet.
That’s what I thought at first but who am I kidding, if content creators got paid less youtube would still be very popular and google would still do whatever the fuck they want and shove more ads in it anyways. And also, paying top creators so much money is another way to prevent competition, creators won’t choose another platform if they can’t match the pay.
I used to whitelist yt on my ad block because a I know portion of it goes to the creators. Then yt took advantage of me by adding more and more intrusive ads. Now I support creators directly whenever I can.
That’s a fair point, I do pay for subs in some smaller sites. A lot of the time I still watch the Youtube version because… well, that way the creators get paid twice and I’m probably already on YT, but still.
The problem is that the patreon model inherently only supports the big creators. Many of whom only BECAME big because they had alternative funding sources for so long.
For example: Giant Bomb more or less imploded a few years back. Nextlander (Alex, Brad, and Vinny), Remap (Formerly Waypoint but Patrick Klepek, Rob Zachny, Cado Contreras) , and Jeff Gerstmann (hmmm? I wonder who that could be) and even Giant Bomb (Fandom) are doing great. But people like Abby Russel or Renata Price very much immediately fell into that “Well, I like her but she is one person and I am already blowing 20 or 30 bucks a month on patreons…” hole.
And we see that on youtube/twitch. Creators will mostly not care and then suddenly do a year long subathon because they understand… they are in that threshold where they make just enough off of ad and sponsor revenue that they can just keep their resume updated but are fucked if Youtube/twitch change ANYTHING. They need to get to that threshold where people will subscribe to a patreon.
And the “Well, I will just subscribe to the creators I think are worth it” inherently fucks them over.
I’ll add on that, for all his many flaws, Ludwig Ahlgren (?) has done a lot of good discussion on this topic. Because as twitch and youtube stop giving streamers giant signing bonuses, it gets harder and harder for the next crop of big streamers to come into existence. Because if there isn’t money to get people out of that O(100) concurrents mid-tier… yeah.
100% agree. I follow a few content creators who include a Cash App or Paypal information in the description box. They don’t demand cash** because they do it for the love of what they do, and don’t demand subscriptions or anything else. If I have an extra dollar, I send it. I’m guessing this either isn’t their only revenue stream or do well enough that it is. If everyone who is appreciative would do a dollar or few donations, maybe it is a livble wage, with or without youtube’s payment?
I pay for YouTube Premium. I get a lot of value from it, and streaming video isn’t cheap. I don’t think it’s reasonable for anyone to think they should provide it for free.
I don’t give a shit if it’s reasonable anymore.
Google has done enough shit over the years, ruined enough services, some of them paid services, and continually harmed content creators with their trash algorithm, all the while hosting hate on their platform, that I don’t give a damn what’s fair to them anymore.
They won’t get a penny from me ever again. I’ll continue to find every way of accessing any content on that platform that I choose, without ads, and without paying them, and it has absolutely nothing to do with ethics or reason. It is entirely, 100%, because fuck Google.
If needed, I would spend 40 times the time and effort to watch one of their videos without a single ad than it would take to just watch their ads with the video I want to see sprinkled in.
And if this attitude spreads, which arguably it should, the service will simply be shut down. Unfortunately I think this may end up being a great loss for humanity as a whole if that happens. Elsewhere in this thread I compared it to the Library of Alexandria for its sheer content of 20-odd years worth of nearly all of humanity’s culture, news, and technical information.
I don’t know what to do with this. The dragon must be slain but the hoard must be preserved, and I’m not sure how we accomplish that. The contents of YouTube should be backed up and made available to a public data store outside of Google’s grasp, ideally as a public utility probably maintained by tax money, and youtube can remain as a front-end to that service. But actually getting that done in the modern day seems… we’ll say, slim. For one thing the total youtube data package is about a fucktillion gigabytes and the only people able to host it are the ones who already have it. For another, Google will argue in court that videos uploaded to their service are their property, and they’ll win that argument.
So we can start again anew, but we must mourn what we lose, because it may be significant. Like it or not, YouTube is a significant percentage of the recorded data output of the human race. Just pray, once we kill the beast, that you never have to replace any parts on a car model year 2004-2018 - because you won’t find good repair manuals anywhere and all the good tutorials are buried in the belly of YouTube.
If you’re not actively blocking connections to their servers (by any number of means) it doesn’t matter whether you consciously give them money or not.
There is so much third party tracking in apps and websites that it’s really got to be at the network level. They make bank by tracking you and selling that data for profit.
I’ve been Google-free for months now and so far the only inconvenience has been ReCAPTCHAs not loading, but that’s limited to just a handful of websites that I don’t care enough to use in the first place.
Yeeeah, but my issue with that is they generated the expectation that it’d be free by using their investment money to muscle out smaller competitors. There was a time where Youtube was the biggest of a set of UGC video sites and some of the others were competitive. Now it’s the only real alternative.
So from that perspective they made their bed, now they sleep in it.
Yeeeah, but my issue with that is they generated the expectation that it’d be free by using their investment money to muscle out smaller competitors.
All of YouTube’s competitors were doing the same thing, use ads to subsidize free video hosting. It just happened to be that YouTube was the survivor. If there was competition, it would likely have the same business model that YouTube has. Spotify may be building a YouTube competitor based on the same model.
Yep, that’s also fair. Google is the leftovers from the “let them fight” approach to venture capital. Now we have a monopoly on many areas and nobody’s left to do anything when Godzilla comes to visit.
Oh sure servers do cost money but Google wants to have their cake and eat it to with the creators that make people actually want to use the site despite all their bullshit. Changing standards of what is and isn’t not acceptable coming from the top has made every creator dance and squirm to escape the very real eventuality of having weeks of work mean nothing. Google doesn’t respect the people making the product they are selling so I refuse to respect the bill they try to send me
I feel really bad for smaller creators because they spend so much of their time on the algorithm treadmill just trying to get more views. There’s a channel size threshold where you really have to work more than you get out and I see a lot of people getting burned out trying to make a living from yt.
Then clearly it’s not a smart choice to make videos and have them uploaded to a scummy place like YouTube.
Their issues are not my problem. I have my own stresses at work, you don’t see me bitching about it to strangers online.
Don’t like your job or the terms your forced to adhere too, quit.
That’s why we should kill it
So… because you had a bad they should not even attempt to pursue their dreams and make art/“art”?
Also… I really hope your job is a perfect wonderland with no ethical or moral complications. Otherwise, it is your fault for working there instead of somewhere else, obviously.
We live in a late stage capitalistic hellscape and still snipe each other constantly. Everybody would rather fuck over everyone else than show any degree of solidarity.
deleted by creator
Not once did I say they shouldn’t persue anything…if I’m presented with a contract from work which I don’t agree with,I’m looking for a new job…
Also… I really hope your job is a perfect wonderland with no ethical or moral complications. Otherwise, it is your fault for working there instead of somewhere else, obviously.
It would be my fault for staying somewhere that is objectively bad for me…yes…it’s not your problem, it’s mine…
Why is it the customers responsibility to fix the companies problem for the employees…explain.
The deciding factor for me is how little of the money goes to creators, and how arbitrarily Google twiddles the content guidelines. If I’m going to pay a subscription for the category of content on YouTube, I’ll pay for Nebula and Dropout so that I know my money is actually making it to the people I like.
It’s worth paying for but not if it includes DRM, proprietary software and preferably not giving money to Don’t Be Evil company.
I will say, I don’t know what they’ve done but it’s been fucking up my casual circumvention nicely. Now I just get forced into almost 10 minutes of ads every time, and the ad bars shows up underneath videos, the end cards at the wrong time…
I wouldn’t mind sitting through an ad or possibly another one mid-video.
Small issue with that for me is that their ads are privacy nightmare but what isn’t these days…
Biggest issue is that their ads are ridiculously annoying and so inappropriate. They just don’t even try. They are sexist, fraudulent, and often times plain illegal.
So unless they change these issues, I won’t watch them without ads blocked.
I agree and I also wouldn’t mind so much if the ads were in proportion to the length of the video and at natural breaks. I don’t want to watch a 30 second ad to see a 15 second video.
As much as I hate that prime added ads to a paid service (absolute horse shit), the way they’ve implemented it so far is one of the better methods. They’ll do a single ad at the beginning that’s like “this show is brought to you uninterrupted by Samsung”. Then no more ads until the next episode.
YouTube is trash with it.
You’re ok with paying to watch ads? Hard pass for me.
For now. That’s how YouTube was originally too, and ad free before that.
Seriously. YouTube is at its current place because it actually didn’t suck ass.
As is, I can’t make it through a 30 sec ad. I will peace out 100% of the time.
I honestly wondered why they haven’t done this yet for years
It’s quite likely that the cost actually outweighs the gains. Adblocking really isn’t all that prevalent across Internet users as a whole. I think the stats are something like 10% or lower.
And yet Google is investing all this time and money into trying to block the blockers. It’s really quite stupid.
Well, most of their efforts have been relatively low cost on their end. Stuff like manifest v3 isn’t actually particularly expensive to do. Just requires you to have near total capture of the web browser market.
Stuff like manifest v3 isn’t actually particularly expensive to do.
Oh yes, a complete overhaul of the way their browser engine works is absolute child’s play and doesn’t cost a thing. 🙄😒
But it’s always been their server. It’s not like Geico provided that video snippet
Yes, but server-side injection, if I understand it correctly, means you have to actually remux the videos into a single stream. That’s additional processing load, which is basically their main cost of business.
It’s costly; either you prepare encodes ahead of time with different ads and serve that appropriately, or you splice ads live for each request, which is also costly in resources. You can’t get away with just a few variation; ads are usually targeted. It also come with other issues, like, it is mandatory in a lot of place to clearly identify ads, so there should be an obvious marker somewhere. If it’s in the UI, it can be detected and replaced live by a video of kittens for the duration of the ad, so I suppose they also have to handle any signal in the video… (It’s speculation, I didn’t get any of these yet).
I’m curious to see if this will hold, and how we will run around it in the long run.
So much effort, dev time and resources just to fight users to make the experience worse and push them to alternatives to squeeze out the tiniest margin of extra ad money. Plus I’m sure this’ll be countered almost immediately. I’d be shocked if ad blockers took more than a few days to find a way to detect and neuter these ads.
This is some accelerated enshittification.
Other ramifications aside, it wouldn’t be that costly to splice real time.
YouTube has standard profiles of video and audio quality levels. As long as the video stream is the same quality, the stream can basically be concatenated one after another without any meaningful over head. Try it:
ffmpeg -f concat -i files.list -c copy output.mp4for two files with same codec (audio and video) was processed at over 900x speed for me with just CPU.So all YouTube would need to do is transcode the ads they’d intend to splice in into the standard formats they’d offer the stream at (which they’d already have the video transcoded into), and splice the ads they’d want to show in realtime at request time.
I don’t get why so many people begrudge YouTube for trying make money. They serve up 5TB of video data every second. Somebody’s got to pay for all of that. They know ads suck, that’s why they sell no ad subscriptions.
Google used investor funding to create youtube at a loss for years to crush any competition, so we should be mad that there isn’t an easy option to just switch to a comparable alternative.
Ok, but equally any competition would need to be profitable earlier, you can’t complain you got a service operating at a loss which is now operating at a profit when that’s exactly what any alternative you’d feasibly switch to would do
Google used investor funding to create youtube at a loss for years to crush any competition
There is a difference between needing to operate at a loss when first starting a business because it is necessary and using funding to prop yourself up so much that is undermines all of the competition. Like the difference between being a very successful business and abusing a monopoly.
YouTube makes 8 billion per quarter selling ads. I think they will be able to eat tonight.
Out of curiosity, I looked up the numbers. This is correct, they make 9.2 billion per quarter from ads and 10.7 billion from subscriptions. I can’t find expenses per-segment, but in 2023 their total “Cost of revenues” was 37 billion. I doubt everything other than youtube costs less than 17 billion, so they’re definitely making a profit.
Source: https://abc.xyz/assets/95/eb/9cef90184e09bac553796896c633/2023q4-alphabet-earnings-release.pdf
Their ads not just suck. They are oftentimes sexist, fraudulent, disgusting and a huge privacy concern.
New ad-free meta: DVR
YouTivo
How likely we can defeat it with something similar to YT’s own ContentID system? We download a tons of ads, process it with feature extraction, and match it on the fly to carve out those ads. A similar system to SB can be used to let people mark where the ads is, process, and share.
Ads should be properly labeled in most market, so it should be trivial to detect what segment is ad and what isn’t. The real question is, what to do, and if the server refuses to serve the remainder of the video before the ads duration, what will it be replaced with.
I doubt if they will refuse to serve as the stream still need to buffer. That’s the fundemental of streaming.
Or I missed something?
Streaming allow caching a bit ahead, yes. But the “a bit ahead” part does not mean you can get everything; a server could very well decide to not send more than a few seconds of buffer compared to the realtime play. So, if you’re at 00:00:20 in your video and an 30 second ad is present in the video stream, the server could decide to not send anything beyond the 00:00:55 tag until 30 seconds have elapsed, for example.
It would be very annoying to code server side, and very annoying for people with spotty internet, but it’s very doable.
Just catch everything in the background, play the full ad on mute, and when the ad segment is coming up in the stream you are actually watching, switch to the cached copy. Shouldn’t be too hard to program.
How about replacing them with something nicer, like just showing “Take a moment to pause…” screen with audio muted/relaxing music background?
Sure, I’d take that over ads anytime.
Now here’s a thought - what if the real workaround Google are using here is targeting only non manifest V3 users?
That would reduce the cost of doing this, since chrome users are already forced to swallow ads and could just be served as normal.
Firefox also implements manifest v3, just without the user-hostile restrictions.
Good to know.
In theory this could be beaten by using a link to a timestamp at 1 second in. If it starts at 0, it’s an ad.
That would work for ads before the content, but not if they are spliced into the running video.
