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Comment by matsz | Hacker News Reader

Until YouTube starts injecting ads into the video stream (like Twitch), it's not going to be effective at all. There's no way to do a client-side anti-adblock and not have it bypassed.

And TBH: since YouTube is not doing that, I think they might've decided the cost of that solution outweighs the projected revenue so they've chosen a cheaper solution.

In Twitch's case, more of the audience might be techy, so ad injection ended up being the more optimal option.

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This is, in my opinion, shortsighted. It's straightforward to create ads that you can't block on the client so long as you are the server of the ads yourself, as Google is. I'm not going to detail how since I don't want anyone on HN to get any ideas and build a business of it, but I'm sure it will happen eventually. For the time being I suspect it's cheaper to keep the current tech running since it brings in enough revenue, but if that ever stops being the case, I expect things not to end well for people who don't like ads. Google search is a good example of this, ads are literally intertwined into the search results, if you take this a few steps further you have ads that you literally can't block on the client.

I used to work in ads, and I agree this is an arms race that the advertisers could win, at least in cases like YouTube where they control the whole stack. I don't think it would be trivial, but YouTube could do it if they decided to.

Are there any workarounds for smart tv apps (browser, player)? They probably already "won" there and the user experience is horrible.

Maybe a pihole.

If it is Android, try NoRoot Firewall app.

SmartTube for Android TV

I see the future of streaming video ad avoidance being something like an AI-empowered Tivo, possibly as an HDMI dongle.

> Google search is a good example of this, ads are literally intertwined into the search results, if you take this a few steps further you have ads that you literally can't block on the client.

I'm not sure about your "few steps" so this may be moot. Is there no sufficient workaround of this nature?

  document.querySelector('.waste-of-money')?.remove();

Google might detect that the element was removed; ad blockers use CSS shenanigans to hide the element. Google might detect such shenanigans; ad blockers are forced to change. And so on. Is there really a way for Google to end this cat/mouse game in their favor?

> Is there really a way for Google to end this cat/mouse game in their favor?

Yet another "update" to the web extension manifest.

That will affect a large number of users but if word gets out that this weird fork of Firefox[0] will allow them to view YouTube with no ads, Google is suddenly forced to enable browser attestation such that only versions of Chrome will allow people to use YouTube. That will likely affect those in the US but EU authorities sometimes like to curb these antitrust behaviors. I also get the feeling that such a change will cause them to lose American business to competitors. Amazon seems primed to start eating their lunch with Twitch; they would mostly need to start building and promoting more video on demand features.

0: It sends a "this is totally Chrome" user agent and possibly includes other APIs that YouTube will use.

> Amazon seems primed to start eating their lunch with Twitch

That seems extremely unlikely, Twitch has already destroyed a lot of the goodwill they had with creators. Policy changes (or attempts) regarding baked-in ads, revenue splits, forced exclusivity, there's probably more.

All good points and I do agree. What I mean is that they have the compute infrastructure to manage it, assuming Youtube makes some colossal mistake with the goodwill they have with viewers.

I think the issue here is that it might take the adblockers longer to update than it takes google. If google has a team of people doing anti adblock then I suspect it would take them less than a week or maybe even a couple days to update the app to counteract whatever the adblockers come up with. And with each iteration the adblockers have to become more creative.

As someone who doesn't like ads, I just pay for a premium YouTube subscription for my family.

It's not the case with Google search, though, they don't offer me a way to pay. I will rather pay Kagi instead.

Sponsorblock already exists as infrastructure to slice out ads embedded into the video streams themselves. Of course, the sponsor segments weren't put there by youtube, but the same (or similar) solutions would apply if they were.

It's much easier for anything non-live.

The ads don't always have to be injected into the exact same parts of a video, and YT can also choose not to stream any more bits until it thinks something's been "watched".

Sponsorblock would be easy to work around if ad-breaks were randomly selected. Whenever you upload a video YT could process the video and "search" for good ad-break locations, at display time client bits get pushed ads randomly, making time-code blocking useless.

They could even upsell to content creators by giving them the means to dynamically replace sponsors in old videos using the same tech, maybe with some knobs and switches for content creators to select where sponsor breaks occur.

Maybe someone could use train a AI for something useful like skipping advertisement? Switching from time to content id, i.e. like they use for copyright strikes, would work even better than status quo.

Sponsorblock tagged videos would serve as excellent training data for an ad-detecting AI.

I guess something could detect if the frame shown is a frame from the video and if not skip

Sponsorblock only works because YT allows you to skip anywhere in a video.

This. It's why in-stream ads were so straightforward to implement for Twitch too. Can't fast forward a live stream.

If you're willing to buffer a few minutes of video, you can work around this. Tivo is a decent example of how this has been done in the past.

Oh yeah, that works. Cable TV + Tivo is a good analogy for all of this.

Even if they try to prevent that, with a modified client, you can skip anywhere in a video and there's nothing they can do about it.

That requires them to pre-serve you the bits for the part of the video after the ad, which they aren't going to do.

Unless they want to completely break the ability to seek in the video timeline, regardless of ad placements, that's not going to work.

It already behaves this way if you aren't blocking ads. If you seek too far ahead in a video with mid-video ads, it'll show an ad before playing at the timestamp you selected. If they want to prevent ad-blocking, they can do the same thing except not serve the video ahead of time.

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