YouTube's next move might make it virtually impossible to block ads
YouTube's next move might make it virtually impossible to block ads
some people still recommend using a VPN and IP address from a country where YouTube ads are prohibited, such as Myanmar, Albania, or Uzbekistan.
Wait, you can just prohibit YouTube ads at a national level? That's somehow awesome and terrifying at the same time.
What would be terrifying about it?
'oh no youtube cant make advertisers money while putting kids in a far right conspiracy rabbit hole how scary'
That's somehow awesome and terrifying at the same time.
The people of this country would find it just the normal thing.
Are these countries even safe to host a VPN server in?
Edit: Just checked my VPN (Proton) and it has options to connect to Myanmar and Albania. Nifty.
Good to know. I'd rather pay for a vpn than YouTube premium.
This must cost YouTube a fortune doing additional processing and reduced flexibility. They are going to hurt themselves and blockers will find a way.
There's already extensions that somehow skip sponsorship sections, so it won't even take that long.
That's actually hurt by this because it uses timestamps supplied by users to work. But now they are off because the ads are of variable length. We can just hope that YouTube keeps the ability to link to a specific timestamp because then it has to calculate the difference and that can be used by Sponsorblock and adblockers alike.
The problem is those blocking extensions are based on timestamps. Those timestamps are added by the users, it's a crowdsourced thing. But the ads a single user will see differ from what another user will see. It's likely the length of the ads is different, which makes the whole timestamp thing a no go.
Along with the timestamp, there needs to be a way to detect where the actual video begins. That way at least an offset can be applied and timestamps maintained, but it would introduce a certain level of error.
The next issue would be to then advance the video to the place where the actual video begins. This can be very hard, as it would need to include some way of recognizing the right frame in the buffer. One requirement is that the starting frame is actually in the buffer (with ads more than a few seconds, this isn't guaranteed). The add-on has access to this buffer (depending on the platform, this isn't guaranteed). And there's a reliable way to recognize the right frame, given the different encoding en quality setups.
And this needs to be done cheap, so with as little as infrastructure as possible. A database of timestamps is very small and crowdsourcing those timestamps is relatively easy. But recognizing frames requires more data to be stored and crowdsourcing the right frame is a lot harder than a timestamp. If the infrastructure ends up being complex and big, someone needs to pay for that. I don't know if donations alone would cut it. So you would need to play ads, which is exactly what you intend on not doing.
I'm sure the very smart and creative people working on these things will find a way. But it won't be easy, so I don't expect a solution very soon.
Not really. They can precompute those and inject it in an MP4 file so long as the settings match and it's inserted right before an i-frame so that it doesn't corrupt b-frames. They already reencode everything with their preferred settings, so they only need to encode the ads for those same settings they already do. Just needs to be spliced seamlessly.
But YouTube uses DASH anyway, it's like HLS, the stream is served in individual small chunks so it's even easier because they just need to add chunks of ads where they can add mismatched video formats, for the same reason it's able to seamlessly adjust the quality without any audio glitches.
Ad blockers will find a way.
Re-encoding is one thing, but ads are more or less supposed to be dynamic based on user location and likely some other data to target them.
Offloading that to the client made a lot of sense but now they have to do this server-side, they have very smart people working on making this as efficient as possible using tricks you've mentioned and more but it is still more effort than before. All for something that will likely be circumvented eventually.
You can check the SponsorBlock FAQ about this. They do not need to do additional reprocessing
Every bit of effort and resourcing they spend on this returns revenue directly. Which is more than they can probably say for a lot of things they do. And they’re smart enough to know that they can’t eliminate blocking, just make it harder and harder so that fewer and fewer people do it.
YouTube's next move might make it virtually impossible to watch YouTube
Google uses tax avoidance schemes and I use ad avoidance schemes.
you're actually helping by lowering the amount of revenue they have to shuffle offshore and hide from the feds.
How it works is that once you start getting these Server Side Ads (SSA), Youtube will create a sort of queue of videos in place of your usual video, with the first few being ads that can't be skipped and have a red bar (not yellow) and in the end you'll get your video. They are not literally part of the original video stream, they are separate streams that get injected as if they were the original video. It's called SSAP, and I've been experiencing it from the last weekend. In the meantime, they've pretty much broken their player to implement this.
Ublock Origin has released a temporary fix yesterday here
Alternatively, you can use this extension to redirect from YouTube videos to piped.video I used it, it works very well, can't guarantee for much more.
edit: fixed wording
Anything that makes it distinct gives a blocking opportunity, I assume?
Yeah, there's ways around this. It's just that most of the ublock origin blocking specific code, isn't reusable here and the team will need to start over to deal with this new tactic/approach from Google.
The cure might eventually be worse than the disease though. If not now, or tomorrow, then the next day.
You could also use something like GrayJay, I've been using it for a while now and haven't had any issues with it.
People are taking the piss out of you everyday. They butt into your life, take a cheap shot at you and then disappear. They leer at you from tall buildings and make you feel small. They make flippant comments from buses that imply you’re not sexy enough and that all the fun is happening somewhere else. They are on TV making your girlfriend feel inadequate. They have access to the most sophisticated technology the world has ever seen and they bully you with it. They are The Advertisers and they are laughing at you.
You, however, are forbidden to touch them. Trademarks, intellectual property rights and copyright law mean advertisers can say what they like wherever they like with total impunity.
Fuck that. Any advert in a public space that gives you no choice whether you see it or not is yours. It’s yours to take, re-arrange and re-use. You can do whatever you like with it. Asking for permission is like asking to keep a rock someone just threw at your head.
You owe the companies nothing. Less than nothing, you especially don’t owe them any courtesy. They owe you. They have re-arranged the world to put themselves in front of you. They never asked for your permission, don’t even start asking for theirs.
– Banksy
Wow this was great... No idea Banksy had published any written work
"Art should disturb the comfortable and comfort the disturbed."
Worse case scenario, we gotta make an extension that detects the ad UI and blanks the screen and mutes the audio until its over
And fast forwards to the end of the ad, if possible
I just found a userscript that mutes, skips, and lets you black out the ads. Worked during my brief test of it. I'll probably use this if adblock or other clients are bricked.
https://greasyfork.org/en/scripts/9165-auto-close-youtube-ads
And once everybody is watching ads and nobody is skipping them, YouTube will start making the commercials shorter and less invasive, right Anakin?
Doubt. Never underestimate the hate and motivation against ads.
I accidentally watched YouTube the other night without adblock, OMFG what an experience.
If I can't watch with adblock I'll just stop using it, it's only a rabit hole to waste time for me anyway.
Same, just like when reddit killed 3rd party apps
Yup, and I'm not willing to pay for Youtube Premium because the app kinda sucks and I don't like Google keeping track of what I watch. I'm willing to pay, but I'd really like to keep using the 3rd party apps I prefer (Grayjay and NewPipe).
So like Reddit, I'll drop Youtube if my 3rd party apps stop working. That's my line in the sand. If Youtube wants to get money from me, it needs to be through an API disassociated from my identity.
Good. This is how YouTube dies. This is how Google dies. This is how competitors/alternatives are born. Stop fighting to make Google services useable against every effort of theirs. Let them drive people away to make (or discover) alternatives.
Do you have any idea how many billions with a B it would take to even start a viable, proper competitor to youtube? and how quickly that capital B could end up becoming a Capital T?
I hate people who keep screaming about let youtube die and alternatives will be born.
Youtube has been shit for years. No ones made an alternative that is viable.
Any an all alternatives are subscription based services, and tiny. Like Floatplane, Utreon and whatever the gunfocused one is that I cant remember off the top of my head, if it even still exists.
Anyone that has that kinda money are probably already in bed with googles capitalistic hellscape ideals for hte internet and not interested in going against them.
Creating competitors for things like Reddit and Facebook are relatively easy. Creating a competitor for something that probably accumulates hundreds of terabytes, if not more, per hour? That takes insane amounts of storage, and bandwidth, and overhead, and everything else that costs more than any regular person could ever have a hope of even having a wet dream over.
If you tried to create a centralized one? Yeah, it would take a lot. Would a decentralized one be as expensive? I'm not sure.
I think the best goal would be to try to create a platform for creators that has a low barrier to entry - both in terms of cost and skill - that gives them the ability to easily and quickly set up a "channel" to "broadcast" from and earn some revenue somehow.
Why build one competitor to YouTube when we could build a billion of them?
It has been THE viteo platform for literally decades. There is so much content there; it would be a tremendous effort to direct that elsewhere.
And that other site would quickly succumb to storage and bandwidth costs. What options could exist?
I fail to follow how a competitor can pop up if the main users it's attracting are ones that don't want to view ads or pay for subscriptions.
The alternative should be libraries hosting the peoples internet.
You may balk at the idea, much like you would have at the idea of free public libraries when originally conceived.
I like this idea so much. Do the public libraries not have some kind of video service already? Seems like a network of library-powered PeerTube instances would serve that niche really well.
How can a competitor that is courting people that aren’t revenue sources compete
I like youtube, i use it quite a lot. I wouldn't use it at all without ad and sponsor block. I don't know how so many people do it, it's crazy to me.
My gut reaction is that this won't work long-term. Users on youtube often point to specific timestamps in a video in comments or link to specific timestamps when sharing videos, meaning there needs to be some way to identify the timestamp excluding ads. And if there's a way to do that there's a way to detect ads.
Of course, there's always the chance they just scrap these features despite how useful they are and how commonly they're used; they've done similar before.
Feedback across the Firefox and YouTube subreddits highlighted that it could break timestamped video links and chapter markers. However, YouTube knows the length of the ads it would inject, and can offset subsequent timestamps suitably.
The move also adds a layer of unnecessary complexity in saving Premium viewers from these ads. If they are added server-side, the YouTube client would have to auto-skip them for Premium members, but that also means ad segment info will be relayed to the client, opening up a window of opportunity for ad blockers to use the same information meant for Premium subscribers and skip injected ads automatically.
It sounds like there's a silver lining after all.
The ads won’t be baked in beforehand, they’ll be injected into the stream in real time. Videos are broken into chunks and sent over HTTP, they’ll just put ad chunks in during playback. There is no need to re-encode anything. If you deep link to a timestamp, the video just starts from that timestamp as normal. If you are a Premium user, the server just never injects the ads.
But you are correct that the client needs to be aware that ads are happening, so they can be indicated on screen, and so click-throughs are activated.
This is why Chrome went to Manifest v3 - so you can’t have any code looking for ad signals running on the page to try to counter it.
Surely at the server side it knows the premium status of the user it is supplying the video to, so just wouldn't insert the ads? I don't see why that would need to be client side.
I'm prette sure they have to send the metadata to the client where an ad starts and ends. Just to make the ad clickable.
Timestamps can be calculated on the server, but maybe there will be an api endpoint that can be abused to search for the ads.
I don't see any technical specification in the article, but if they inject the ad at the start of the video, making it part of the video itself, would make possible to just skip it using video controls. To avoid user skippin ad thru video controls there should be client-side script blocking it, so an ad-blocker can use this to tell apart an ad from the video itself.
Can anyone correct me on this?
Also, would this affect piped and invidious too?
I believe this describes them altering the ad host at load time for the page. DNS blocking of ad serving hosts only work if the hostname stays predictable, so just having dynamically named hosts that change in the loading of the page would make blocking more difficult.
Example: 1234.youtube-ads.com is blocked by AdBlockerX. 5678.youtube-ads-xyz.com is not on the blocklist, so is let through. All they have to do is cycle host or domain names to beat DNS blocking for the most part.
Previously, injecting hostnames live for EACH page load had two big issues:
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DNS propagation is SLOW. Creating a new host or domain and having it live globally on multiple root servers can take hours, sometimes days.
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Live form injection of something like this takes compute, and is normally set as part of a static template.
They're just banking on making more money from increased ad revenue to offset the technical challenges of doing this, and offsetting the extra cost of compute. They're also betting that the free adblocking tools will not spend the extra effort to constantly update and ship blocklist changes with updated hosts. I guarantee some simple logic will be able to beat this with client-side blocklist updating though (ie: tool to read the page code and block ad hosts). It'll be tricky, probably have some false positives here and there, but effective.
As long as the naming pattern is distinct from important domains you can still block it based on pattern matching. They need to obfuscate ad domains and other hosting domains the same way.
Creating subdomains is quite fast because the request goes right through when it's unknown to caches, it's updates when you reuse existing ones that causes trouble with lag.
I've tested making new subdomains, it's literally minutes in real life. Sure, in some pathological case it might be hours, but it's not actually going to happen realistically.
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It's not literally part of the video, exactly because of what you describe. They are separate streams that get injected into the player before the normal video. You can't skip them or interact with them in any way (pretty sure it also breaks any purchase links etc). Piped or Invidious don't have them, ytdl also doesn't download them.
As of now, afaik, you won't see them if your account wasn't selected for the experiment, if you are in incognito mode (with uBO on) or if you have uBlock Origin (and other adblockers) off (you'll see the normal ads and then the video).
How does this actually works? Can you point me to technical documentation about this?
I've only found info about SSAI, not about SSAP. Is it the same?
That sounds correct for me. It is possible for them to switch to a system where everyone can manually skip past the ad in the video stream but adblockers are useless (by not sending and indication of the ad to the client), but I don’t see that happening since most people don’t use adblockers and letting all of them easily skip past every ad is probably bad for profits.
There's already addons that can recognize in-video sponsored content and skip, if youtube splices in ads into the video stream these addons will still work (although depending on how strict server side logic is, they may have to pause when the buffer runs out until the time of the ad length has passed)
Honestly it would be trivial for them to make the video controls server side too and simply not accept fast forward commands from the client during the ad.
We might be in a "Download and edit to watch ad-free" world with this change.
Seems too much, really. Even if they do such a terrible thing, would they not expose a "report ad" or "see the product" buttons? Video buffer is still locally downloaded.
I accept having to wait until the video downloads past the ad. Certainly not going to watch the ad.
I'll be curious to see where this ends up going, as I doubt the community will take this lying down.
The few times I've had to go without an Ad blocker, I've seen just how bad the Ads have gotten - they're almost the same as regular TV Ad breaks now! ... And then YouTube Premium is just not a good deal in my eyes, £12.99 a month is an awful lot to pay just to not see Ads.
The majority of of people using it will most definitely take it lying down as they're most likely not tech savvy enough to install a browser extension on a laptop if the only thing on the page was a large red install button.
That's why I specified the community, as in the more tech savy folks that would care about this, because I know that the wider public is surprisingly tech illiterate
And then YouTube Premium is just not a good deal in my eyes, £12.99 a month is an awful lot to pay just to not see Ads.
I think this includes YouTube music (at least in my market it does) which makes it fairly good value for money if you already subscribe to a music streaming app.
I am excited. This will break my YouTube addiction.
It'll only affect me when I need to fix something I'm unfamiliar with, and it'llead creators to using other platforms for that kind of material, and lower the barrier to entry.
I don't know why Google is shooting themselves in the foot like this. I mean, it'll be profitable in the short run, yes, but this will almost certainly be devastating to their bottom line in the long run if it works as planned.
The day I'm forced to watch YouTube ads is the day I'll stop using it.
devastating to their bottom line in the long run if it works as planned.
Google knows their service is addictive and is banking on people being willing to eat an unlimited amount of shit in order to watch a bald man from Vancouver spend 12 minutes talking about his Peloton ride that morning. Realistically, they are probably right. There is no competition to YouTube. Hasn't been for years. And there probably never will be ever again. Capitalism trends towards natural monopolies as infrastructure and complexity of operations makes startup costs prohibitive.
i would rather have video go black for the duration of ad than watch that filth
Used to put up with this back when Hulu was free. Adblockers weren't as sophisticated then, so I had to watch 2 minutes of a black screen every commercial break. Still better than watching ads.
They just escalated the arms race between ad and ad blocker. All this could have been avoided if they actually did something about the scam ads.
No, it could not have been avoided. I don't watch ads. Ads don't need to be "scam ads" for me to not watch them. I just don't. Full stop.
It could've been. You and me probably would've blocked ads regardless of their content for various reasons, but I'd imagine that Google wouldn't have reached this critical mass prompting this scheme if their ads were properly vetted.
The technologically literate capable of installing ad blockers are the minority, and those who'd do it out of principle are a smaller subset of those
Bingo
So, how will content creators be reimbursed for the long hours they put into creating YouTube videos? There are honest people out there who made content creation their job. I say that to express I'm not talking about content farms, clickbait creators or "Mr. Beast" types - those are all media companies, although they also have bills to pay.
Did you get a premium account?
Not scam ads, intrusive ads. A decade ago i read cracked and the only ads were non intrusive sidebar ads or a banner at the top. They didn't play music, they didn't interrupt what i was doing, they just existed. Google, being the near complete monopoly it is, could easily force the standard to return to that and many people would never even go looking for adblockers.
I was using that as an umbrella term though I should have specified both scam ads and intrusive ads that are a vector for malware.
I already barely watch YouTube. It's mostly for music videos. Google can fuck itself to death.
I sort of spent a decade uploading and streaming to it, started before it was even bought by Google, so I've really dug myself a pit at this point.
What do you propose Google do instead? Run YouTube at a loss?
First, individually targeted advertisement should be illegal. Instead of trying to figure out who I am and serving me ads based on that, they should only be able to look at server side facts. What is the video? This is how television and radio ads have worked for ages. You have a video about SomePopBand, you advertise concert tickets. You have a video about bikes, you advertise bike stuff. You don't know who I am. Suddenly, the motivation for most of the privacy invading, stalking, nonsense is gutted.
Some people would still block those static ads. If they showed some restraint, I think more people would accept them. But that's a sad joke- no profit driven org is going to show restraint.
Secondly, if they can't ethically run the business at a profit, the business probably doesn't deserve to exist. That or it's a loss leader to get people into the ecosystem.
Youtube doesn't pay attention to what ads get approved, or where they get served. Ive heard stories of people getting served two hours full amateur movies as ads, Ive heard of people getting soft core porn served as an ad, to actual scams and crypto pitches. It's like Facebooks new AI enabled algorithm. There is actual danger, considering children and the elderly get sucked in to youtubes black hole?
It's too late now, but only if they didn't put so many ads in the first place, less people would be blocking them. They could also make YouTube premium affordable by removing all the features except "no ads".
Some time ago I would've bought YouTube premium, but it had so many features I didn't want driving up the price that I just didn't. I instead switched to Firefox and ads were gone again. Good job google, drove me off YouTube premium and Google chrome at the same time.
Make a fair payment model. No classic subscription. But pay per watched minute, and when you hit a certain amount of minutes, every additional minute is free.
Yes. Google bought YouTube. Alphabet is worth $2 trillion. The social control and data mining is value to Google enough.
Let me buy an API token anonymously, similar to how Mullvad works. I'm happy to pay for what I watch, but I don't want to be tracked at all, and I don't trust their internal settings.
Until that's a thing, I'll watch without an account using an ad-blocker. Give me that experience with the apps I use (Grayjay and NewPipe), and I'll pay.
They could use their monopolies to force advertisers to pay a fair amount for a decent ad instead of taking pennies to ruin the Internet. I never even considered using an ad blocker back when it was just banner ads. Or maybe they could stop being a full decade behind the times and add donations to YouTubers for a cut. If they add value to premium instead of trying to remove value from the base experience they could even triple dip on these ideas.
Over the past years I've been reducing my youtube and twitch viewership anyways. Its literally the lowest form of entertainment and its not worth a single moment of ad watching. I'll just do something else. Most youtube content sucks anyways. I don't even remember most of the channels I used to watch.
They're just going to increase their own server costs chasing some tiny fraction of viewers who will do anything to avoid ads. they should be grateful for the adviewers they have.
Its literally the lowest form of entertainment and its not worth a single moment of ad watching.
I'm just curious, but what type of content would you be watching on YouTube?
I think the platform has come a long ways when it comes to content. Sure, if you're just watching gaming content I'd say you'd be disappointed. It's been like that for a decade now at least. There's a lot of decent content on there though with a lot of it even being somewhat educational.
My viewership has changed so much over the years. I used to watch stuff like diyperks, primitive technology, this guy kris harbour who built a house with natural materials. When I was coding lots of edu stuff.
Im sure there is a lot of good shit, but I just have less energy to wade through the crap. And the continued attacks on ad blockers makes me less willing to want to find channels and communities I would probably enjoy.
I actually can't stand gaming content cause its just spoilers and gfuel marketing as far as im concerned
I'm just curious, but what type of content would you be watching on YouTube?
I literally use it almost exclusively for how-to styles of videos. I had to replace the throttle cable on my riding lawnmower last year. I found an awesome step-by-step video. Stuff like that…
Man, you're definitely spot on with this. For me, it's a fast, easy source of superficial distraction that I can put on for background noise and don't have to pay attention to. It's ultimately what cable TV used to be for me. I'll even leave on a streamer playing a game in the background on low volume if I'm going to sleep just for white noise. At this point, the behavior and desire for that kind of content is so ingrained in me that it's sort of like an addiction. I wish there were alternatives to youtube, but that era of video content might just be straight up dying for some of us. I guess if anything I'll start fleshing out my plex server with old t.v. shows and just put Gilligan's Island or something on in the background.
I guess there is a lot of crap on the platform.
But I follow many really really good content creators that put out very high quality content week after week.
I still want to watch their content and I can't subscribe to all of them.
Nebula
Yeah you're right, YouTube just isn't what it used to be. I miss when people made videos for free because they wanted to share something with the world. Now it's a full time job
People will find a way to get around it, I could see buffering a video for 5 mins or even downloading the entire video ala locally playing podcasts, then using AI or some type of frame analyzation technique t to skip ads. Or just skip them like good old fashion Tivo from your player.
TBH I don't expect AI to be able to solve this.
Sponsorblock does this through crowdsourcing
The more that use it the better it works!
If the YouTube interface restricts you skipping during certain parts of the video, an ad blocker can detect that and skip over it anyway. Otherwise, I myself will just skip over the ad.
Or at the very least detect when you can't skip and mute the tab and put a black box over top of the video.
Finally a use case where AI/Machine learning would absolutely make sense. If we can have AI that can generate text or images, imitate people's voices or write code, we can also have a lightweight model that can detect ads and skip them during playback. There's a model trained on SponsorBlock data for detecting sponsored segments https://github.com/xenova/sponsorblock-ml
I'm sure that we can have something similar but for embedded ads.It already exists. Although it's not AI, and mostly works best when using channel logos to work out the ad breaks.
It's hard to run AI on phones and low-end hardware though. It's not that easy.
Give it 5 more years in hardware performance improvements and software/model optimization and I don't see a problem. The important part is that improvements are made public for everyone to use and improve upon instead of letting openai and microsoft take the whole cake
then i won’t be using it much, if at all.
fuck google.
Right? I already don't use youtube as much as possible. Piped helps, but if that stops working, I just won't watch movies on youtube.
I understand why people are upset anytime a company fucks their customers for money, but the solution is always to walk away.
this is all bullshit btw, it won't do anything for thirdparty clients and yt-dlp for example.
This is because blocking is entirely client side now, with no way of youtube determining whether or not its happened at all.
They’re testing to embed the ads in the stream and not the usual switch to a different video
It definitely affects third party client if now they get a file of a video that now has 30 seconds of ad content at the beginning
it won't though, because you can just remove that 30 seconds at the beginning, which is almost definitely going to be very different than the rest of the video in a number of ways. Notably, there are likely going to be UI differences during and after ads play, as well as video playback alterations. Ad's aren't going to be the same quality as video itself.
It's possible that they're transcoding them into the video itself, but doing that would be catastrophically bad and have such a massive cost that it simply would not be worthwhile.
We'll just copy the video and recast without ads I guess? I do watch several videos many times over for diy, so it would be relatively painless to just download and modify.
I pay for premium.. but also like my sponsorblock.. and 3rd party clients. Let me have it all momma Google.
Begun the arms race have .
Just wait until someone trains an AI to recognize and skip ads.
That poor AI.
This particular arms race began a couple of decades ago at least...
When I have to wade through sixteen different "Would you like to join YouTube Plus!?!?!?!" pop-ups every time I whisper the words "online video" in the direction of my phone, I'm rarely inclined to use YouTube to begin with. Its a bad fucking service.
My TV doesn't pull this shit on me. I get Show -> Ads -> Show -> Ads in regularly spaced intervals, like I'm a civilized human being. I don't get WOULD YOU LIKE TO GET SLIGHTLY FEWER ADS!!!!! GIVE ME
$8$12$15$20!!!!! every time the fucking thing turns on.Oh well. Youtube is useful as a podcast/streamer host now; no ads with sponsor block/ublock. Once that isn't the case they (Google) will get network blocked.
No real loss to me. I tend to prefer local download/host for convenience. Most channels are chaff anyway.
100% The only reason I even allow google on the network is for YouTube.
The demise of Youtube begins
I think it is time to bring back The Wadsworth Constant!
Meaning they can bury that toxic ad placement bidding now?
No need to answer, i know they wont.
there is a plugin I bought, it's community driven where you can tag sections of the video as ad, sponsored, etc, and auto skip it. it's really nice, was like $5. will post when I find the link, but even if ads are server side, this plugin will skip. someone has to bite the bullet though and tag time stamps unfortunately.
found it, called dearrow, also changed clikcbait thumbnails and titles are editable by community.
That assumes every ad is exactly the same (or at least the same length) and at the same spot for every user.
yeah, I realized it after posting. I don't see ads, I use it to block sponsored stuff and forgot about injected ads. still a great plugin.
Pre roll and post roll ads would be pretty easy to detect since the length of the actual video is fixed. Mid roll ads though will need something more clever.
dearrow sponsorblock will not work anymore
I know, I realized after I posted. but still a cool plugin.
We used to just get up and do the dishes while whatever injected nonsense interupted what we were watching on TV. And when it became too much we turned to DVDs or piracy. Then streaming was the "savior" until whoever funded it realized that more users do not equal more money. And now we are almost back to square one. This is just played out at this point. Google/Yt/TIktok etc are just betting on the addictive nature of instant gratification to survive.
At some point, I think, all the effords of adblocking (grayjay, newpipe, sponsorblock, ublock) will seem impractical when a download (and maybe now scan to cut out ads and sponsor segments) will achive the same. And then peer to peer is the most practical way to share that instead of redoing all the work.
Until downloading is hindered too much and someone somewhere just has OBS with some adhoc script on top running 24/7 to capture youtube videos. The conversation of when is adblocking piracy etc seems to me to be coming to a natural end (at least as far as legalilties go).
One saving grace the internet has bestowed on media is that it is easier to follow creators and fund their work (if you can afford it).
I already barely watch YouTube but for a couple people I subscribe to, and I already pay membership for their content so I get no ads. YouTube has already whittled me down to the minimum thanks to their overbearing ad content.
Fuckin bring it, we'll adapt
Grayjay!! 🙌🏻
I saw someone say Twitch does this, but there are many Twitch ad blockers that work
May I ask which ones? I have ''TTV LOL PRO'' but it does not always block the ads. It's 50/50.
So... whats stopping something like sponsorblock from nixing this potentially bankrupting choice?
Very little most likely. I was reading some of what the sponsorblock dev had to say about this and the tone seemed to be “meh, there will be a way around this”.
Time.
The whole point of having ads be separate from the video is for youtube to easily distance itself from malicious ads. If an ad is malicious it can easily be reported and taken out of commission. But if ads are now part of the video, what stops an ad from being an ISIS beheading clip in the middle of a video made for children? If there is still a way to still report it, then there is a way to recognize the ad.
Also how will this interfere with creators? Editing a video and giving it a proper pace is already a huge challenge. But now ads can just be automaticaly cut into it without the creators control? That's gonna fuck up so many quality channels. That's already a big problem with the current system, bit at least you can skip or block them.The ads are not part of the stored video file, they are sent in as chunks of the stream in place of the actual video. When the ad is done, the regular video starts playing again. They are not “editing in” anything to be permanently stored as part of an uploaded video.
Yes. The way it works now is:
- Play video until ad timestamp
- Pause video and fetch ad from ad server
- Play ad
- Resume video
But presumably with the new system, your computer will just receive a continuous bitstream with ads embedded in them. What was previously happening on your machine through HTML or JavaScript and was detectable by ad blockers, will now happen on YouTube servers beholind the scenes.
Finding and innovating new ways to fuck people with ads.
YouTubes past moves have been to make it impossible to block adds. What else is new in the world?
Is water still wet?
Youtube is aware that serving ads to people who hate ads is going to reduce these brands' value, right? I thought that was the reason they were ok with adblockers before...
They have decided that the damage is worth less than the cost of serving videos to users with add blocks. Only time will tell if they are right.
If the amount of people that just put up with ads currently instead of switching to Firefox is anything to go by, I think the number of people who truly care is less that you might think. Especially when YouTube is such a monopoly.
The people that hate YT ads hate Google already anyways.
Oh man, I wonder why no one ever thought of randomly injecting ads into content before? What geniuses they must have working at YouTube. I can’t even comprehend the big-brainedness. I’m sure people will love it.
I'm surprised at this point that people are still trying to circumvent Terrible. Just stop using YT altogether.
This is such a weird take. There is 20 years of content on youtube and not just like, unboxing videos or AI generated kid stuff or whatever. Theres family recordings and DIY vids for literally everything, to college courses from like, Yale and Harvard, to vocational videos I use for my job. All of the videos that radicalized me into an Ancom on are youtube. Every song ever recorded, including rare songs like second hand accounts of slave field hymns. Old, obscure movies, especially where the copyright holder doesnt give a fuck, are available for free. Small indie projects, like small groups producing shorts, and small bands making their own music, are on youtube. And yes, millions of hours of people playing video games, or sports high lights, or wrestling high lights, or video essays or whatever, are all on youtube.
The world is the way it is. Do I wish the web was more diversified? I do. Do I wish Alphabet didnt have us over a barrel like this? Of course. But youtube is almost a utility at this point; its like saying dont use the roads bro, eventually they will listen to us and put in light rail tracks. I would love for that to happen but you gotta get to work in the mean time.
Just stop using YT altogether
YT spent the last 15 years stomping out all competition, so now that they have accomplished that, they jack up the rates... (or in this case jack up the ads)
classic capitaism
Just stop using YT altogether.
They should but easy to say than done. In the end they will return back to it if no better or at least equal alternatives are out there to fill the vacuum.
Yup, I'm investigating alternatives like Nebula and generally reducing my YouTube use, but that's not going to work for a lot of people. The Grayjay app helps a lot.
Just stop using YT altogether.
And use what? I'm not on YouTube for YouTube. I'm on YouTube for the content that is often unavailable elsewhere.
I get it, no one likes ads on youtube. But, you realize that they have to pay the people that are producing content as well as pay for the storage space to gold all of this content. Why does everyone think that can just be free?
Nobody expects it to be free. But it used to operate with far less intrusive ads. Also, people didn't use ad blockers until they got worse.
Will someone think off the multi billion dollar company? Anyone? They need to make the bottom line.
It does, two on the barrel and on on the top. for me currently it acts as a mouse in Gnome and in krita it acts like a stylus with pressure and everything. My model number is the Dell Active Pen PN579X. it can switch between wacom and Microsoft protocols so it will also work on my Surface.
What's the street address of Google again? I'm already homicidally insane, I'll start by burning them TO THE FUCKING GROUND.
1600 Amphitheatre Pkwy, Mountain View, CA 94043
You'd become a homicidal maniac if youtube makes you pay to remove ads?
Calm down Ms, Aghdam.
“Virtually impossible?” I haven’t had ads on YT in over 6 years, and I don’t even use a blocker or alt client.
Don't understand why you didn't just mention that you pay for premium in this comment.
It's what they always should have done anyway. I'm not so entitled that I think I should get content delivered absolutely free, but I am entitled enough to sandbox and restrict how many discrete domains my browser windows will talk to.
Your data is much more valuable than the 13/currency per month. Which btw, if you pay, the do not stop collecting sharing and monetizing on your data.
