YouTube experimenting with server-side ad injection
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Many YouTube ads truly feel adversarial and it is hard to not mind that.
Given how bad the output of ad targeting infrastructure is, I wonder who the “real customer” of it is.
Logistics? Intelligence agencies?
I think the post is saying the ads would be burned into the regular video stream such that even offline downloaders such as youtube-dl would also get the ads.
The current common behavior is the actual video and the ads videos are 2 different streams. The javascript in the web browser switches back & forth between the streams for dynamic ads insertion as it gets the next media fragment(s). The new behavior is to have just one indistinguishable stream that's more tightly embedded into the video media fragments.
If the above paragraph doesn't make sense, one can just load up a Youtube video while monitoring the "Network" tab in F12 Developer Tools to see the various media fragments being downloaded while it switches between the normal video and the ads.
“Love, friendship and respect do not unite men as much as a common hatred for something.”
I might click on a video I find elsewhere, but I’ve basically given up on using the YouTube interface for finding videos.
Not just you, youtube has as well.
That said, the predictable next step would just be for Google to turn on DRM on Youtube videos.
If you're used to dipping in & out of vids to find something interesting it is fundamentally unusable without working adblock. You end up watching more ads than video
They present the ad in the most intrusive and annoying way possible. It ensures that I will either ignore it, or never purchase that item or service out of spite. If you do this almost every time I play a quick video, it generates a very negative user experience.
If they focused on how to have ads coexist with the user experience and mesh better with the media being watched, they might not irritate every user by trying to make them impossible to avoid - and they wouldn't have to play this cat and mouse bullshit that eventually leads to their platform being irrelevant.
They'll have to re-encode videos at all permutations across countries, regions and locales. They'll also have to somehow account for ads that have been pulled down after the fact... then they'll need to cache this stuff everywhere so that the latencies are reasonable and the experience is good, whilst serving you different version of the same clip if you refresh or rewatch the clip... they'll have to do all of this continuously, since ads change with the times - despite the clips themselves being stale and static?
I can imagine they will have to limit this "feature" to a very small subset of videos with high view count/interest/revenue potential... maybe just to live feeds... otherwise, the costs to do this for every video on the platform would shoot through the roof.
Nope. Just inject them right before a full keyframe, that can be done pretty much on the fly.
~There's already a tool called SponsorBlock which in conjunction with FreeTube or Invidious can automatically skip portions of videos tagged as sponsorships or ads.~ I don't see server injected ads being a long-term problem for people who use blockers or third-party players. It just shifts the problem to the "analog hole".
I wish video distribution would move to self hosting or some other decentralized model though.
I don't feel that way about current YouTube ads!
Money of which only a small part goes to the creators.
If you actually want to support the creators, do it via a more direct method than paying Google to send a few pennies their way.
Oh and some memes.
Do I see it correctly, that half of the worlds' population (the ones without ad blockers) is paying the web for the other half (the ones with ad blockers)?
The amount of ads these days is so crazy that I think we might all be better off if there was a way to easily do micropayments instead.
At least you avoid the psychological manipulation though, which hopefully means you don't spend as much for things you don't need.
This doesn't work out to be micro for someone who only watches YouTube rarely, but if you watch a reasonable amount it does.
The agent will download a copy, detect the ads, and clip them out.
So it can insert its own targeted ads, I believe.
Makes you wonder if Google devs could intentionally make the app eat more battery or do other EVIL shit since they prove they are OK with this tactics. 2
Twitch seems to do a good job of staying ahead of extensions.
A lot of ad tech is defeated simply because it is provided by a third party, outside the original request, and executed in the browser. So make it first party, use the main request, and build it on the server. It's not as easy, but Google can do it. Make it fast (requires compute + infra) and charge a premium for the placement - after all, it's going to be more "effective". Again, definitely something Google can do.
> This breaks sponsorblock since now all timestamps are offset by the ad times.
Sounds like either YouTube doesn't care about timestamp stability or they missed this in testing
Edit: clarify that I usually go through Bing or DDG to play YT videos