YouTube tests server-side ads to make your coveted blocker obsolete

www.youtube.com##+js(json-prune-fetch-response, playerAds adPlacements adSlots playerResponse.playerAds playerResponse.adPlacements playerResponse.adSlots, , propsToMatch, /player?)
Click on uBO icon > ⚙ Dashboard button > Add the filter(s) in "My filters" pane > ✓ Apply changes > Open new tab and test again.

from the reddit page idk if it works but most comments say it does

and if it does, that's fucking hilarious

this will have taken a team months of work and one ublock dev just threw it in the toilet within an hour

ok, so i added this code to my ublock origin filter list, then went to youtube, and the injected ads were still showing up in about half the vids. closed firefox, reopened, same. rebooted my win11 machine, now the injected ads are NOT showing up any longer. not sure if youtube switched it off because they're still beta testing this bullshit or if the code is working but it SEEMS to be working. if it stops i'll come back to edit this comment. thanks for the tip man!
The ublock origin guys are wizards, I tell you...
- I am amazed how they didn't spell like others did in that market.
  
  Prolly should donate.
So in theory.. can reVanced come up with something like this,
- NewPipe works, so I'm sure reVanced can/could do it as well. SmartTube (Android TV exclusive) also implemented it weeks ago, I never have seen a single ad.
This worked for me. Thanks!
Thank you!
👑
I stll haven't get any ads with just stock ubo but when it does I'll try this filter, thanks
Do I need to add this filter or are the uBO devs going to update the extension to include it ootb?
- i'd be shocked if they didn't update it but i just timed myself doing it and it took less than 10 seconds

I would rather pay an ad-block company a monthly subscription than give it to YouTube in blackmail. This will just be another salvo in a never ending war.

I used to pay for youtube premium. My logic being that I was using an adblocker anyway, and I wanted the content creators I watched to get some kind of revenue for my watchtime. Youtube stopped taking my money a while back, and I can't be bothered to figure out why. These days, there's so little content that I find interesting that I spend more time scrolling than I do actually watching videos. It's only a matter of time until I just stop regularly going to youtube.
- I paid for it until they basically doubled the price.
- Too Much engagement slop being pumped into the feed and you can't block offenders on teevee app...
  
  WTF I lay for this. If I don't want to see some clown, I should be able to block.
  
  I report them for misconduct and it seems to reduce the spam but they come back in few weeks amyway...
  
  Like no I don't want linus, I don't want brownlee apple whore... Just stop.

All of these issues have reportedly led to an increase in ad block uninstalls, leaving users with the choice of YouTube Premium or sitting still until that "skip ad" button appears.

Oh yes, I totally believe that people are opting to delete their ad blocker, that works on not just YouTube but the entire internet, simply because YouTube has become obstinate and difficult. Who the fuck wrote this article? And how much are they getting paid by Google? Do they really think we're going to buy into this bullshit and follow suit?

it's total bullshit. For example if you use ublock origin every now and again sure you might get ads that pop up, but AT MOST that lasts for a day, generally it'll last a couple hours as the team at ublock update their lists to block ads again. There's no need, literally zero need, to remove it from your extensions. and at worst, like I got yesterday, you'll just see a black screen that buffers for a bit before the video plays. the ad is still blocked.

you can also circumvent most of this if you use freetube. OR if you just want music the youtube-dl script on linux. I also ditched spotify for youtube-dl as I can also download entire playlists with it.
- if I understood it correctly UBlock original would be totally unable to block server side ads right now

New article title. YouTube tests more ways of making their service shit and driving away users.

Edit: TIFO Scott Manley is on Odysee so i will start watching him there instead. One less yt channel is always a good thing

I mean, if you're not paying for it, and they can't advertise to you, what do they need you for?
- To keep claiming they have x billion accounts...
  
  There's a big reason why these companies don't remove the bots and willingly allow them to do whatever. It boosts their numbers to inflate their actual worth.
- at least on my part, what they get from channel memberships (a whopping 30%) I'm sure exceeds the amount in ad revenue they lose from me
- Does YouTube have competition? Your line of inquiry doesn't mean much if the content is only on YouTube.
- I did pay for it but they massively increased the price while the recommendation algorithm was deliberately made worse and they wouldn’t stop pushing short format videos.
- Youtube is google No 1 source of machine learning content. Fuckloads of video, audio and subtitle data they can use to feed and train their systems. Youtube itself doesnt need to make profit, thats just a bonus for them.
YouTube: oh no, the freeloaders costing us money are going away, what will we ever do!?
- FAFO

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.
- 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.
- 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.

I find it fascinating how media companies evolved their usage of ads over time. Used to be that the purpose of showing someone an ad was to get them to buy your product. Now, though, the companies who make the ads are paying to have them put on media networks who use the ads to annoy you into paying for a premium membership so you don't have to see them. It's double dipping.

Not sure how I would feel if I made an ad, and YouTube was saying to their users: "Yeah, you like that fucking ad? Super annoying, isn't it? If you don't pay me more money, I'm going to cram that annoying bullshit down your throat every time you want to watch a video. I'm going to put ads at the beginning of videos. I'm going to sprinkle them throughout the middle. Hell, I'm even going to make you watch ads after the video ends! You like that, you little bitch??"

It’s the evolution of the premium cable model. HBO, Showtime, etc. The upgraded cable tier has ad-free content and exclusives.
- Yup. I'm old enough to remember when the selling point of cable TV was that it was ad-free. Then, of course, they started adding ads. And then they sold us premium channels that didn't have ads. Now those have ads, too. You just can't get away from them.
It's been seven years, and this sketch is just getting more and more fitting each day.

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).

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 that blockers can't easily find.
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.
- Let the games begin.
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!
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.
Oh. I like this. Sponsor block but network wide basically xD

they cracked down on adblockers, adblockers got better.

They're trying to get around adblockers again, adblockers will get better again

I will pay for an adblocker before I pay for an ad provider to stop harassing me
- Chad uBlock Plus dev doesn't even want our money.
- If anything, adblock taught me about pi-hole, which brought me into the raspberry pi world.
  
  And id rather spend money on that.
- adguard for windows, which is also available on CrappleComputers and I think it's also on linux
I'm not so sure. Once they are embedded in the video they become hard to block. Twitch is like this now.
- And yet there are userscripts you can use to block out twitch ads. I haven't seen one for months now despite not being a subscriber.
- I'm holding out some hope, since twitch is live but YouTube is pre-buffered, but they could still block loading past the ad on a timer or a key computed from hashing the decoded frames of the ad, idk

I’ve been a premium user for a while now and the platform has never been shittier than now. I pay for premium but I see integrated ads in videos and nowadays YouTube sneakily includes actual product videos in your home feed as if that’s not an ad. Recommendations have sucked for so long that I don’t remember the last time I watched something good on it. Inclusion of yt music was the thing that kept me on the subscription but shit man

How is this bundling even legal. YouTube ist pretty much a Monopoly and they are using this fact to push YouTube Music. If that's Not anti competitive behaviour what ist?
- How is this bundling even legal.
  
  It's not being prosecuted, so its legal. Everyone's been properly paid off. If push comes to shove, Clarence Thomas will get a new RV and any lawsuits will be dismissed, but for now only the EU seems interested in internet regulation.
- I think the EU should step in and force Google not to bundle Music.
Inclusion of yt music was the thing that kept me on the subscription

Same here. I was struggling to get the ad blockers to work consistently, so I said fuck it and canceled Spotify and subscribed to Youtube. FWIW YT music does a much better job of choosing random music that I like; Spotify just plays the same shit over and over again.
- I feel like YT music plays the same things over and over again, so good to know that switching to Spotify won't be any better.
- I miss GPM. YouTube music is full of community-made playlist that are actually YouTube video playlists, so you'll start one up and have all the music video intros, interrupts, and extra sound effects and shit that get thrown in.
  
  I started a Disney playlist for my nephew in the car, and you could hear all the sound effects from the movie over the actual soundtrack.
On mobile, which is where I primarily use YT, the official app with premium doesn't even have sponsorblock or dearrow or blocking shorts. It's genuinely a worse experience than revanced which is free.

If I was to pay for premium, I'd want the above features at the very least.
Do you use Android? Stop paying for premium, just install ReVanced and "fix" the official YouTube apk. It also works with YouTube Music.
- No, unfortunately I switched to an iPhone to limit Google’s tracking endeavors. I love Android, but Google has ruined it with constant tracking in my eyes.

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

There are already sponsorship-skipping add-ons. YouTube lost before they began.

I’m not sure if a sponsorblock like solution will work. Sponsorblock is entirely reliant on timestamps provided by users.

A similar solution for YouTube’s ads will only work if the ads always happen at the same timestamps and have the same length. This is not necessarily the case, as ads can happen at any point.
- There's already a filter for UBO that blocks it. That was much quicker than I expected. Works and is further down this thread.
- I remember using MythTV in the beforetimes, and you'd record the show off the cable tuner, then it would process the file and remove the commercials based on volume levels and light signatures. It was remarkably good at it and was how I watched all TV until streaming came around.
  
  I would imagine someone could do the same even better today with an AI model that would recognize all the ads and deliver an edited stream. The problem is that the video would have to be downloaded beforehand and then the streams stored elsewhere and referenced by an addon that redirects you.
- if you're downloading the video locally it would be incredibly trivial to remove the segment of the ad. There are various different mechanisms i can think of that would work.
  
  obviously, beginning and end ads are super trivial.
  
  Ideally, youtube won't be natively encoding the ads into the videos, because that would be a nightmare, so presumably they're doing injection instead, that would be pretty obvious from the get go.
  
  If not, they have to have some kind of interface for the advertisement you could very easily use that to track the ad placement itself, though that might be problematic.
  
  There are likely other clever things that can be done, we'll have to see what happens.
- There will have to be designated points where midroll ads can happen, just like the current system has, so the ads aren't inserted mid-sentence or destroy an important sequence in the video. Nobody would accept it otherwise.
  
  It's a matter of detecting those points, mapping them to specific frames in the video, then automatically detecting when an ad is inserted on that basis.
  
  It's slightly harder to do, but not impossible.
- Yeah they just need to range the ad from x->y time into video playback starts.
IIRC the developer of SponsorBlock was asked about this and seemed very unconcerned.

how i wish there was a good alternative for youtube

Support candidates who want to limit the ability for large tech companies to acquire their competitors. Maybe even those that wish to see their acquisitions rolled back. Maybe even those that wish to see them broken up.
P-Peertube?
- Not a great alternative. The second it becomes actually successful it will collapse.
- peertube would be great, if there were more content creators. out of 330 or something channels that i follow on youtube, 4 are on peertube.
- I've tried it. Every server i choose is either slow af, has no videos or the videos just stay at 00:00.
  
  Not a great experience.
Grayjay has been useful for that. I still follow people on YouTube, but if they setup a channel anywhere else I can switch my feed to draw from those sources instead.
- Oh cool! Is there any non-mobile app/service that does something similar?
The alternatives are around now, and we know that many YouTube content creators are exploring other revenue streams, so it'll be interesting to see how exodus works. Clearly YouTube is going to continue to get worse and some people are going to leave. What's next? I'm excited.

It's always interesting to watch companies implode. Apparently Reddit is blocking non-Google search engines from indexing them, and Twitter wants you to be logged in to view people's profiles. Those types of moves guarantee that the platform won't be relevant a decade from now and possibly sooner than that.
Piped. It uses SponsorBlock to also skip ads by the creator in the video, I am very sure they will update it to remove ads injected by YouTube as well. It is also very privacy-friendly.

Just got hit with this for the first time, and at first I was like what the fuck is this happening here, I'm running Firefox latest, and UBlock origin latest, never seen this before. Happening for every video, two injected video ads before the video, seem skippable, but i'm not clicking on them. Hope UBlock catches up to this quick, this sucks.

Mine are getting trapped by pihole. They take 10 seconds to time out and just show a banner ad that won't automatically go away without hitting the skip button. It's really frustrating since I liked letting videos auto play as I fall asleep.
- at least it's not currently spawning an actual video advertisement, so, small blessings, the two injected ads stay static for 10 seconds a piece (makes sense), and if you don't click skip, the first tiers to the second then tiers to the video (was thinking of going pihole but you just confirmed it won't make a difference, if they start injecting autoplay video ads, then it'll be back on my todo list)

YouTube tests server-side ads to make ~~your coveted blocker~~ YouTube obsolete

ftfy

But do you have a viable alternative in your back pocket?
- I’m pretty happy with Nebula. I tried it back when it was still bundled with curiosity stream but now I just subscribe to nebula.
  
  It obviously isn’t anywhere near a full YouTube replacement, but it’s pretty good.
- I have a pile of shows on my media tower to watch instead.

Honestly... How much has Google spent trying to counter people skipping ads?

Is it less than the amount of potential profit if everyone was forced to watch ads?

This seems like that situation recently where NYC paid a million dollars to enforce people to pay for train tickets, which was less than twenty thousand a year in lost revenue.

I think it's mostly about saving face for advertisers. Which is funny because Google never does anything for saving face for their users as they shut down services that literally cost a rounding error for them to run.
The amount of people who:

currently use an ad blocker to watch YouTube, and

would be willing to watch the ads or pay for premium if their ad blocker stopped working

Are not statistically significant to YouTube's viewership or income.
- I figured that. If I was to guess, I would say ~90% use the native app on their phones or TV to watch YouTube.
  
  In total, I have to assume ad blocking viewers make up a single percent or less.
  
  I don't see how this could make financial sense.
I think it probably breaks even and fits with their strategy to abuse everyone until they pay for premium

This must consume a tremendous amount of processing to do since they would have to transcode copies for every ad region/campaign and every resolution on demand. I am interested in how they made this financially viable.

Not necessarily. They could split the video in advance, assuming the ads will always be at the same point. Even if not, they could still use the direct, unaltered source with a range. The big challenge would be keeping it all synced, which I think is safe to say that they will get right.

But even if it did need to be transcoded, YouTube automatically transcodes every single video uploaded, multiple times. They are clearly not afraid of it.
- If you’ve ever used yt-dl, you’ll know that YT vids are all split into multiple files. Presumably, this is where the ads get injected.
Since AI has caused them to complete abandoned any illusions about their carbon zero footprint I think they just stopped caring.
I’d guess its a solution similar to DASH that dynamically streams different content.
They don’t need to do any extra transcoding. It’s not that costly to stitch videos together. If done at specific strategic locations, it’s like copying a text file into another.
If they only do it for very popular videos, the additional cost will be trivial.

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.

It's what happens when you hire MBA grads and they're trying to find relevance.
Maybe... but in the long term advertisers aren't going to be willing to spend as much on a platform if they know that ads are easily blocked.
- except ads are blocked everywhere when you have an adblocker.
  
  and people have adblocking because ads are cancer
  
  Because as are everywhere.
  
  and they carry malware.
  
  and they are obnoxious, if not straight pornographic.
  
  Moderating the advertising would do far more for making adblock useless, than starting a petty dickslapping war they wont win.
I have a personal rule that anything advertised on YouTube I will never buy.
- all I ever see advertised on youtube, during the brief times I have no adblocker (mostly when I'm working on other peoples computers and making sure audio and stuff is working) are either 2 hour long fake documentaries/talk shows/etc pushing some bullshit product
  
  or PragerU pushing racist bullshit.
  
  In fact, the overwhelming majority of it is PragerU pushing racist bullshit.
  
  If you remove all other reasons for adblocking, Not seeing PragerU bullshit and not letting google make money off PragerUs racist bullshit is still an incredibly valid reason for adblocking.

Yea the moment my adblockers don't work I stop using youtube

I suspect they're fine with that.

Watch how quickly I drop your fucking platform lmao. Please give me a reason

Or just one more thing to add to the open seas of piracy. Or start supporting nebula?

Although this would be the case for piracy, as a better means to support artist, because I pirate my music. I do attend more live music venues which gives more revenue directly to the artist
- When the YT apps stopped working a few days ago, I just continued watching on Nebula until the apps were fixed. Only went back onto YT to read discussions in video comments
Yeah they risk making their platform obsolete to many users.
- And where will users go? There are no alternatives. Other platforms don't have as much content, require you to pay, or both.
Have you considered paying for their ad free service?
- YouTube: creates the problem
  
  This guy: have you considered paying them for the solution?
- Yes, and it took less than a minute of googling to find "I'm paying, why do I still see ads?". There's also someone in this thread complaining of the same.
- Premium also has lots of ads in your feed (disguised as product videos) and videos include sponsorships ads.
- The problem with that is they will eventually introduce ads to the paid service as well.

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'm getting them already, which is a bit annoying, but I still prefer the black screen with an adblocker to the wild mix of commercials that range from MLM schemes and "join my telegram group for totally not financial advice" to flat out hate speech that I'd get without an adblocker. So yeah suck it Google.

I give it 5 hours from mass release before ad blockers catch up.

A bit longer if they play their cards right. If we have to move to a detect, buffer and skip model, it'll be quite a while.
- There are already addons to skip in-stream adds for when people do those sponsor segments. It just crowd sources the most consistently skipped parts and does it automatically.

If they make it shitty enough I just wont use it.

That will only be an option if content creators don’t use it either. And they will look where their audience goes, which will mostly be nowhere.
- I mean, there is always the option of putting down YouTube and going outside, or picking up a hobby or something.
  
  Gross, I know, having to live in the stone ages, but there's always another option.
- Rumble/Locals
Way ahead of you
- Any good alternatives you can suggest? I fucking hate what alphabet has done to google and youtube.

Imagine what YouTube could be if they spent all this cash on improving their service instead.

It was going to happen eventually. It sucks since so much good content is still housed on youtube. The bright side is that I'll probably read more when uBlock stops working so well.

I'm in the same boat here. My digital addictions are literally solved by the platforms itself
- Yup, YouTube is my crack. This could be a good thing.

Nothing that can't be blocked by sponsorblock.

And if that doesn't work we'll find something else. Even if we'd have to download the same video multiple times to compare and strip out the differences.

Google may have plenty of nerds, but the world will always have more.

The issue is that Sponsorblock uses timestamps of videos to skip segments. If the ads injected all have different durations, then SponsorBlock is now obsolete.
- It's not even that simple. If you skip ahead during an ad, the YT servers could just keep streaming you the ad content anyway. Their servers can ensure that the next 30s of packet data you receive is an ad no matter what, so the only way you can skip it is to wait it out and close your ears and eyes. Basically the same concept as ads on broadcast TV. Which means we'll have to do a TiVo for YT... Gross.
- I had to drop sponsorblock as it was letting those ads in. Now just use unblock and I don't get those ads anymore.
- What if sponsor block started collecting the durations of videos (if they don't already), then it could skip forward by the difference.

I know there's a significant part of the market that'd just say yeah, fuck it, i'll pay for ~~Redtube~~ ~~Youtube Red~~ Youtube Premium, but there's also a significant part of it, where a lot of people would rather just stop watching stuff entirely.

It's just like Hulu back in the days. You'd have no choice but to pay for a premium tier, just to have 14 unskippable ads forced down your throat, all in a span of a 19 minute long tv episode. I stopped paying after that month and resorted to piracy.

Piracy is always a service issue, except now it's legitimately going to harm individual creators, who have just about everything to lose, rathen that a rotten husk of some corporation, that's going to print free money, no matter what you do

except now it's legitimately going to harm individual creators,

I know it isn't the world we live in anymore, and there's nothing we can do about it...but maybe we shouldn't have treated YouTube like a job and just kept it as a hobby video website between ordinary people. Like what it started out as.
- To be honest, whether we want it or not, art is a necessary aspect of society. The issue here is that we put a lot of trust in a corporate environment, the entire goal of which is to pocket as much as possible, while riding the success of the people creating stuff
I'd 100% pay for it if the pricing made any sense.
- The price is absolutely obscene. No fucking way i’m paying that
- When it was 9 bucks, it was worth it. Certainly isn't now.
Redtube is a porn site, lol.
- Yeah, that's the joke

Server side ads sound more expensive for Google to me. I'll just use some future plugin that blacks out the screen or whatever if it comes to that.

Sounds like a price increase is coming our way!
- They are coming your way for sure. Cause I'm not paying a dime 😉
Wouldn't sponsorblock be enough?
- No, the ad timings will vary
  
  In fact, it's likely that it might fuck over SB in general, if they don't compensate for it

This is where AI would come in handy. Start scrubbing the buffer as it’s coming in to identify the difference and jump past it.

It becomes an AI war. They will use AI to make ads to get around the AI blocking. The ads will end up looking very similar to the content.

Ad: "Hey guys. It's ya boy, NordVPN, here today to tell you about the dangers of using the internet without my VPN...."
- Whatever happened to ad placement lol
- I'd be watching a car accident compilation and a Buick starts trying to tell me to ask my doctor about Cymbalta. You know... I might actually watch that.
- Then you start using ai to put in anti ads that point out all the bad stuff about the usual ad subjects, I'd say get as code to libel/slander as possible without risking a lawsuit
Aren't they legally required to indicate that an ad is playing? Should be almost trivial to detect and I don't know how they'd get around that.
- I'm the US? I think only if the content is targeted at children.

Ad blockers are useful for more than just YouTube. So they are not going anywhere. However it will be a bummer if we can no longer block YouTube ads.

On android I have to endure the ads but on desktop I never see them.

I use revanced:

Revanced manager: https://revanced.app/download

MicroG: https://github.com/revanced/gmscore/releases/tag/v0.3.1.3.240913
- You also get SponsorBlock and Return YouTube Dislike right in the app (+ many other ui and functionality modifications)
What's hilarious about this article is that I'm actually getting YouTube premium for free as some kind of bonus to my phone service yet I'm still using ad blockers on it and everything else. I really don't give a shit. If they want to get better at injecting ads I'm going to place my bets on ad blockers getting better at blocking them. Or just not using YouTube. Cause, quite frankly, most of my favorite creators are on Nebula anyway and I pay for that service.
Use newpipe on Android, no ads
- Or even better Tubular or LibreTube
- I love newpipe except for one very annoying quirk: if you pause a video for more than a few minutes it "breaks" and skips to the end of the video when you hit play again.
  
  For long videos this is very annoying, but I'll gladly pay that "price" if it means I don't have to hear 25261516 insanely annoying advertisements a day.
- For some reason New Pipe just doesn't work on my me device
I use Firefox and just use the web browser. You can even listen to YouTube with the screen off. Plus Firefox add ons/extensions
Try LibreTube. Or Firefox Mobile with Ublock Origin. Or one of many other solutions. You don't need to watch YouTube ads on Android.
If you're on Android, use revanced
You can use the brave browser on android. As of now it blocks youtube ads.

Added bonus it saves on your data plan because wouldn't ya know it, the copious amounts of ads they shove in our faces uses a lot of data... that we already pay for. I'm not paying my cell provider for data just so advertisers can use it to try to get me to pay for more shit I don't need.
- Firefox with ublock origin also works on mobile
  
  Or another alternative is the app grayjay
On iOS I have to use some niche app that lets me circumvent YouTube asking me for my ID but if it doesn’t want ID vinegar extension and wipr works for ads. Vinegar replaces the whole player I wonder if it will work for server side ads

Does the ad restrict play back controls (such as disabling fast forward)? Trivial for an add-on to detect and if nothing else black out the video and mute the audio until playback controls are restored.

If it doesn't restrict fast forward then everyone can skip the ad without an ad-blocker.

Also, now that ads are server side YouTube is more responsible for the content of them as they are hosting them.

I have no problems with this.

Google is getting desprite

Wait until it gets depepsi.
- I prefer decoke

Maybe if they cleared out the scams and served more than 3 ads on repete, I wouldn't feel the need to block them. Yes, no one likes ads, but I get its to pay for the content I'm watching for free.

The moment they fix the search, fix their recommendations, stop wasting money on junk projects like games and allow me to completely disable Shorts, I will resubscribe to YT Premium.

Why do Shorts (and Reels, and Stories, and whatever other catchy names they give short form videos) even exist?
- The number of ads per hour of video is higher. And people get addicted to the dopamine fix. Short videos generally will have to be incredibly stimulating to keep people watching.
  
  Your dopamine goes through the rood for 15 seconds or 30 seconds, after that it drops down again and you need the next video to get it higher again and again. In between the videos you get ads, so in the end they lure you into watching a whole bunch of ads.
  
  They optimize their algoritms so they know what keeps you watching. Could be cute puppies, could also be fake news about how everything is somebody elses fault, but they just want to keep you watching. They don't care about the truth, they need your eyes on the ads.
  
  And that is how generations will be ruined.
- For the same reason Vines did.

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.

I'm so fucking sick of their greedy bullshit

And that’s when I moved to Invidious and haven’t looked back

What makes you think they won't block them or force ads to them as well?

You do know that Invidious is still YouTube, right?
- It’s an open source front end to youtube, yes. So no ads on the sidebar, no bullshit about logging in, no garbage algorithm to be harassed by.
  
  And no commercials yet. If YT streams the ads and invidious doesn’t block them and adblocker doesn’t block them and PiHole doesn’t block them, I will not watch them.
  
  Death to Advertisement.
Considering I can't get Invidious to serve me a video in a higher res than 480p, no thanks.
- Those ads do look good in 1080p!

Commercial detection systems exist already although I couldn't vouch for their efficacy. How they will integrate with streaming however is another question.

I for one am excited for this phase of the cat & mouse game, as solving this challenge means keeping the monkey off our backs for good while longer.

It might even be a bit simpler than that, as YouTube's going to have to mark segments as adverts somehow so you can't just skip past them.

Next article...UBlock has designed AI to detect ads and blackout/mute video until it is done. Even better, it can buffer queued videos ahead of time and just remove ads.

what ai have they designed? I have not heard about this and am skeotical
- It was a /s commentary on the neverending war of ads vs ad blocking. Soon we will have to buy advanced anti advertising AI servers for our houses so we don't get them beamed to our walls from space lasers.

No, I would rather quit watching youtube rather than to watch Japanese style animation porn ads.

Things look much better if I'm on a US VPN. But I don't want to get bothered by those porn ads if it suddenly stops (yeah, it sometimes crashes for some reason) or I forget to turn it on. And yeah, I still don't like Grammarly ads although it's much better than porns.

Aha! So this is how one snuck into a video I downloaded last night. Fuckers. At least with a locally downloaded file I can quickly skip ahead.

Or even trim it.
- Way back in the day when I used SageTV to record live TV there were programs that would automatically identify commercials and skip them for you. Computers are way more powerful now so I doubt it will be long before there's and app that automatically downloads your favorite YouTube channels and prescans the videos to skip the ads.

I'm sure I'll be downvoted to hell, but I just pay for Premium because I use YouTube all the time, don't want to see ads, and acknowledge that YouTube is an incredible service/product.

I don't think that's an unfair thing to say at all.

I want to pay for Premium, but a mixture of oppressive tactics, poor payouts for YouTubers, and constant price hikes has made me reconsider. I watch YouTube more than most streaming providers, and that list continues to shrink because the cost has outpaced the value. A few years ago I couldn't imagine not watching Netflix, but now...eh, cancel it.
- The fact that google also tracks and monetizes/exploits every single thing you do should be more than enough payment. Considering thats how they got to be where they are in the first place.
  
  Besides. If google moderated its fucking ads to begin with, people wouldnt have overwhelmingly adopted adblocking, since google adsense is like the biggest adserver on the internet.
If YouTube were an independent company, I would be much happier to pay like I do for Spotify and even (borderline) Paramount Plus. I have no problem paying artists for their time, and I have spent thousands and thousands on commissions and merchandise from independent people and art businesses. Google already has enough money. I would rather save my money for small(er) companies who actually need it.

If people stopped supporting these ultra-consolidated megacorporations, we might have a healthier economy and better worker's rights overall. But what do I know lol
Hey very valid statement and salute to you.

Personally, I believe this ultimately hurts and affects customers like yourself. Because YT is spending all of this additional effort to effect and crowdout, if looked at a very tiny percentage. Instead of investing into platform improvements for visitors and creators.

YT should of focused on competition which is every other streaming service. If they provided shows still using network ads breaks, instead of these psycho every 4min you 2.5mins of ads unless you pay is just extortion. Plus they aren't really sharing revenue with creators... sigh
I'm in the same boat. There are a lot of parts of the Internet that should be free, but YouTube is not one of them. Video hosting is one of the most resource intensive services around, and if we as consumers aren't paying for it they'll find a worse way to fund it.
And people you're watching are getting money if you're a premium user.
It's just gonna make premium more expensive because they have to recoup their engineering costs somehow and I don't think that the extra ad views from bypassing as blockers will cover it.
That's fair.
Same. My adblockers are still in place, but YouTube premium is by far the best bang for the buck I spend on entertainment. My family uses it every day on multiple devices, and then we get YT music too.
It's a decent price. I use both the original app and the music one. No regrets at all!
- It's not so decent if you only need YouTube though. The package is good, but not everyone needs the full package.
Based on what I've heard from creators, they love us premium subscribers. If I get no ads and the people I like get more money, I call that a win. Having just been to the movies which have about an hour of unskippable ads at the beginning - including ads to show more ads - I'm willing to pay to not have that in my life.
Me too, I've had YouTube premium since it was called YouTube Red and I was still in middle school lol.
- Ah yes, the good 'ol days of RedTube.
I also pay, and share to several family members to help justify the cost.

That just makes us shills though; consumerism is a zero sum game. /s
- It just makes us normal customers of a product. You want something? You pay for it.

Please do this! YouTube will finally be unusable and Google can finally start to die completely :3

Most normies I know watch YouTube with ads already. I sadly don't think this will put much of a dent in YouTube.
- That’s the thing, right? They’re fighting a very small minority of users blocking ads/tracking this hard

Rumble and PeerTube

EDIT: I'm already paying YouTube with personal data and privacy.

Let's develop an AI that can detect where ads in videos start and end. And cut them out client side. Anti corporate advertising AI :D

Sponsor block extension

I'll be the devils advocate: if this lets them stop trying to fucking break all the 3rd party tools, then I'm almost willing to say it's half a win.

I only half use 3rd party tools to block ads, the MORE important half is that the 3rd party apps fucking show me my subscriptions in chronological order and NOTHING FUCKING ELSE.

I'd trade off ads you could skip by hopping forward 30 seconds in a video stream vs. missing things you're actually subscribed to, and having to deal with all the garbage google shovels at you.

Weird, I don't use any add-ons and the subscription page by default works exactly like I think you want.

Fuck youtube

Arse has fallen out of their money printer so they're getting desperate.

There is no way for advertisers to know that their ads are actually shown. That is why an ad is a link to the advertiser's website. If there is one thing I have learned from uploading to YT and watching, it's that YT is terrible at transparency and this kind of logistics. I doubt this will work at all.

A few more years till they measure engagement via your camera

An ad will pause if you look away 👀
- If you look away, you will have to watch another one

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.

~~My local invidious instance is borked too. Not sure if its related and I don't have time to investigate now.~~

~~Guess I need something else for background noise.~~

Edit: Took enough time to get a fresh image and its working again. Looks like I hadn't updated since September.

Sounds good. It’s a waste of time anyway. Maybe I’ll do something else like go outside or create something of my own.

Honestly the shitter they get the more content creators will publish elsewhere.

Honestly idk why more don't post to peertube already. It costs nothing to cross post if you already have the content.

God it sure would suck if there were trojan advertisements threatening to take down Youtube servers.

Since it is server side, will this effect the alternative front ends?

That’s the point. They want to stop people bypassing ads by using alternative front ends. If they succeed with server side ads, then it’s going to be difficult to block ads. Maybe not impossible, but difficult.
- That's what I figured, but I'm not expert on how things work so wanted someone who knows more chime in. Sad times
- It won't, you'll just use an app that pre downloads all your favorite channels and scans them for ads so it can auto skip them.

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.

If only there were hundreds of other sites on the Internet that stream video. If porn sites can make it work, anyone can make it work.

FUCK GOOGLE SO GODDAMN MUCH

Won't this totally break deep linking to time codes?

They can surely work around that... But if the client somehow knows where the ads are, the adblocker can skip them anyways.

But maybe also deep linking is less important than ads to them.
While the overall video would be a different length, video players often don't count the ads towards the media time. So the deep links should be okay
- But isn't that because the ads aren't part of the video? If players can tell when it's an advert, presumably ad blockers could too.
  
  (Although presumably they have to tell the player to disable video scrubbing)

Oh no, Anyway - Invidious/Piped user Hmmm wait, those may not work with it... damn

They then won't need to break those anymore, right? .... Right?

use libretube or grayjay 👍

Using a different client won't help if the ads are injected directly into the video stream.
- ye but alt clients still better than youtube 👍

Ive had no issues with Brave Browser on my Desktop, but NewPipe on Mobile has been all over the place the past few weeks.

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
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.

MFW server-side ads: