YouTube's next move might make it virtually impossible to block ads
androidpolice.com
androidpolice.com
But here's the thing: I've never seen ads. Yet it's these companies, the richest in the world, that want me to. It's not about being unsustainable for them. It's about making even more money. Stuff I read and watch on the internet should be free. I don't want to pay for it. It's as simple as that.
Things I do pay for is quality long-form works. I have shelves full of books. I've bought video tutorials in the past and I would do it again. But I won't engage with DRM. All of my ebooks are DRM free. This is what I'm prepared to do. But the "town square"? Blogs, YouTube videos etc? No, that should be free. It's just sharing and being a part of a community. I will not pay any Google tax for the public town square.
At the end of the day ruining adblock is impossible, the only question is whether all engineering hours and extra infrastructure/complexity put into making it more difficult will actually render a net benefit in the end. I'm skeptical.
I have premium because I use YouTube quite a lot, but for non premium users YouTube pushed the ads too far. Unskippable, some reports of 70 min + adds, multiple ad segments in a < 10 min video.
Ad to that the content creators adds, I think it’s understandable more and more people are frustrated.
SponsorBlock contributors tag certain parts of the video where the video creators talk about sponsored products, or self-advertise. These timestamps are fixed, as the video creator uploads a single video for distribution.
If YouTube dynamically injects additional ads on a user-by-user or region-by-region basis, not only will these ads all have different lengths and timestamps, making SponsorBlock ineffective, but will also render existing tagged segments obsolete, as they are now offset by the length of any preceeding injected ads.
By the same mechanic, it would also invalidate all the timestamps that people put in video descriptions and comments. Are you sure YouTube would do that?
It's a cat and mouse game.
I wouldn't call it a cat and mouse game because there is nothing from a technical point of view that prevents adblockers to use this information to skip ads. Unless YouTube gets completely rid of the concept of timestamps for their videos, they will always lose this battle.
If that information is available, it can be gathered by adblockers to guesstimate how the video has been offset, and then you're back to square one.
If "clean" videos are still available (which they likely will be via youtube premium), you still have a reference of how the video should look, so you can start tagging suspicious sections as soon as they are categorically avoided by the youtube "timestamp fixer".
Sure, it will become harder as the frequency of mangled videos increase, worst case every single user will get their unique rendered video, but I think the performance hit on youtube would be immense, because AFAIK you cannot simply cut together separate video streams, even if they are aligned in encoding, resolution and everything beforehand, because it will break keyframes and create artifacts unless transcoded.
If the frequency is relatively low (say, one video per nation or US state) then adblock efforts can just adapt, the existing sponsorblock implementation could probably still work with some modifications.
For one thing, this approach seems to inherently conflict with the fact that you can link directly to a particular timestamp in a YouTube video, either in an external link using the `&t=...` URL parameter, or by just including a timestamp in a YouTube comment.
So unless YouTube is willing to break all those links or drop timestamp linking entirely, then it seems to me that they'll have to give clients a way to convert "original" video timestamps into corresponding offsets into the delivered video stream. And if you have that, you have enough information to locate the ad segments, at least to the nearest second.
Or, another option: Presumably the server is just muxing together pre-encoded video segments corresponding to either the original video or the ads. So one could create a database of segment hashes, look for identical segments that appear in multiple videos, and add them to a crowdsourced database of known ad content.
It might be difficult to use these strategies to block ads interactively in a browser, by patching the behavior of YouTube's player, but they ought to still be usable in non-interactive tools like yt-dlp.
The more I think about this, the more I belive that this is literally the only reason that ad blocking cannot be meaningfully defeated for video on emand. Because of the concept of referencing a fixed point in the video by a time stamp, there will always need to be a mechanism to offset the time stamp with respect to the injected ads, which, in turn, gives ad blockers the ability to find out where the ads are exactly.
The way ads usually work is that they are separate video files that are fetched by the YouTube client (e.g., the browser) and then displayed to the user. Ad blockers modify the content of the web site such that the URLs to those ads (usually embedded in some JSON object from an API endpoint or something like that) get removed so that no ads are displayed.
Server side injection in this context means that the server renders a video file on demand that contains the original clean video plus a few ads here or there. Blocking the ads now is much harder because you cannot simply manipulate API responses containing refrences to those ads because there is only this one video file. Instead you would need to implement a mechanism that skips those ads in the player.
AFAIK server sie injection is already done on twitch for live streams where blocking ads is really basically impossible because you cannot skip anything in a live stream. I think the best solution for twitch to get rid of ads is to use a VPN/Proxy in a country where no ads are delivered for contractual reasons.
They just need to not send the part of the stream past the ads until it’s the right time to do so. You may not watch the ads, but you’ll still wait for them to finish.
I think doing this would be a positive thing for some consumers. It’s a good blank space to reflect on whether our time spent watching the video is actually worth it.
I’ve done my best to move away from real-time YT viewing and instead download set channels into Plex for on-demand viewing. This somewhat helps binging, as it is not infinite and does not suggest the next video via algorithm. This method wouldn’t affect my viewing to any meaningful degree.
There's an old saying:
How do you create a terrorist?
You kill his brother.
I wish the ad/adblocking balance were as lopsided as you describe, but there are a lot of things working in ads favor (encryption, locked hardware, force of law, etc.)
So they'd just have to find a good spot between those chunks and start injecting different chunks (i.e. the ad) there before continuing with the actual video. This doesn't require any re-encode or other shenanigans on the server side.
If SponsorBlock is still used by YouTube Premium users (to avoid content creator ads), this is even easier, as those users will have the "golden" set of segments.
I don't see a world where people who use ad blockers will suddenly feel fine with a ton of ads instead of picking another activity.
Like you I hate to watch ads now. I have a box for live TV which allows a 30 minute pause, so when I want to watch something "live" I tend to start it, pause, and then come back later so I can skip past the ads. Perhaps people will try something like that?
You underestimate the cultural hold youtube has over large parts of the entire population. They could overlay goatse at 50% opacity on every single video and people would still watch it.
Subscribe to an RSS feed and when you download the file the server based on some heuristic (I'm guessing most geo ip) sends you a file with ads targeted for you.
Ad delivering and ad blocking entities (aka Corporate and Consumers) are in a co-evolutionary state, similar to predators and prey. They will evolve to be more and more skilful.
One state in future might be that ad blocking uses a combination of crowd sourcing and AI to detect advertisement. To thwart bot detection the client will behave similar to a non-adblock client, this means, download everything. To thwart time-based ad blocking blocking (deliver the good stream only after the ad time has passed), buffer everything.
The downside is loss of spontaneity but some adblock users already have accepted this.
One way to overcome this loss is having crowd-sourced lists of good material and then automatically download the good stuff and watch this selection.
I wouldn't worry too much.
EDIT: A thought struck me. This is exactly like in nature. There are pests and life has learnt to arrange with pests and non-food stuff. Some will suffer and even die, but that's life. Content consumers will arrange with ads like life arrage with pests and non-food.
And now I understand why pests and non-food exist at all.
Just like nobody is entitled to “use” your work without abiding by your terms, whether that work is source code or some physical good, nobody should come along and take it just because it’s not “low level crap”.
To be completely fair here: That is a problem with the creators, not Youtube.
Note, it didn't go blank when I turned off history. History has always been turned off. Only a year or so ago it went blank and nags me to enable history on every device every time.
I partially caved and subscribed to 20 or 30 channels, and still have a blank home. On some interfaces it does show new videos strictly from the subscription list, but nothing else related, and it includes 50% fucking shorts mixed right in, and no way to filter those out.
And of course yt phrases the nag like an error that needs to be fixed, and pre-loading the focus on that button on launch, every time, every device. Now every single time I turn on the tv it's a several click sequence on the roku or tv or google remote to navigate off of that to the subscriptions item half way down the left menu. It's such a slick futuristic life I'm paying for. I wish I could make my money work as shitty for them as this service does for me.
Here is the "value" of paying for youtube:
It's having only 8 of your fingernails pulled out instead of all 10.
Unfortunately for users, advertisers will keep throwing money at the problem until the provider finds it attractive enough to add ads, or the provider builds up the user base to make it attractive for ad revenue. Same result.
Then you got fleeced I guess. But it doesn't have to happen this way. Existence of Nebula is a good example. Fortunately it also has some of my favorite YouTubers. I pay for premium but if YouTube ever pisses me off, it will take 5 mins for me to cancel and move to nebula.
Nebula is nice and all but it is not an actual answer to the problem of current youtube.
I also object to the creation of a stasi-style file on my viewing habits. I don’t use google for anything else.
No, it’s effected by their personal choice and Google. They don’t have to work as content creators, but they choose to. Google doesn’t have to enshitify YouTube, but they do. I’d gladly pay creator directly if they would host their videos on a better platform.
Anyone can perform in public, including you and me. But you kinda need to already be Taylor Swift or whatever to perform in private.
Private platforms are aplenty. When you go to the cinema you know what you're paying for is from a proven studio or director or at the very least has been reviewed by critics.
There are private platforms online too, like Netflix and the New York Times.
But YouTube is public. It attracts a vast amount of authors by making itself public. It simply would not have all that content if it were private.
So here's the problem: I will not have ads, but I also will not pay for the public square. YouTube wants to have it's cake and eat it too. It needs to be public to attract the authors (the only people providing value). But it also wants to gouge anyone just wandering through. You can't have both.
If authors of known quality started to make private videos on YouTube then I would absolutely consider buying them. However, I won't "subscribe" and continue to pay for the service as I want to own those videos and can store them myself and play them with free software.
But there is a notable reluctance to go private. Why? Perhaps because ads made Google as rich as it is today..? They don't want you to pay for anything, they went you to see ads. That's the proven business model. I won't see ads.
What I really want is the public square back. I want the ad hoc instructional videos etc. I know people will do this stuff for free, because that's just what people are like and everyone has a camera these days. I don't need or want super high res "4K" or whatever. I watch YouTube in 720p and always have. What I'd love is a P2P distributed media platform with curated communities. One can dream, right?
Technology sometimes tips the balance a little bit towards the individual and away from the megacorp. I don't see how that is a bad thing.
Stealing comes with a lot of potential annoyance - as it should. Skipping ads does not.
Corpos will try to shift the deal in their favor all the time, take as much as they can take away with.
I intend to do the same. If you just want to take it, that's your prerogative.
As for entitlement, no one can force you to watch an ad, ergo I can block them. If monetizing is such a dilemma they have a dozen other methods that are much more reliable. I can't imagine this is anything other than corporate greed, and shaming users for circumventing commercials is just shifting the blame.
I don't think this is the case, they could just put ads into the stream at random places for the free tier, and not do so, or redirect to a specific ad-free stream for premium users.
Some more discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40657933
I could block server-side ads on a specific website that use the same div classname for every ads (all server-side). I do not do it: those ads are silent and relatively OK (some are animated shit, but not all, and even then, it's tame), and actually recommend me product i do buy (books in this case). a few years ago, a similar website (on music and not books) did the same thing, and it was really OK.
I'm not sure what server-side ads would look like on youtube tbh, but it cannot be worse than client-side injection (i'm a premium user anyway).
[edit] Also with server-side ads, it might let YT be directly liable in case of scam, so hopefully they will curate their list more.
As an avid ad blocker, I'll tell you, it is not because I hate ads in all forms. It is because they are invasive, they carry malware, they slow systems and sites down, they are glaring, obnoxious, and loud (visually and auditorily).
As an easy to understand example, think about when you watch TV (when people used to do that) and your show/movie would come to a break and then an ad would come on and blow out your speakers and ear drums because its volume was not normalized to the volume of the content you were previously watching (this is still a thing I've seen on YouTube and even a thing I see when going from one YouTube video to the next!). Sure, the ad became recognized, but you can sure bet that no one is associating that ad with any good feelings or anything else it is trying to accomplish.
The same is true for just ads in general. They are quite loud in many other senses of the word. That Google login that takes up a fifth of my screen on many websites I never intend to have an account on? Gets added to the block list. The half page Medium overlay that asks me to create an account? Blocked. That StackOverflow and other GDPR style cookie message boxes that take up large potions of the screen? Also blocked. How are these any different than the pop-ups of old that every browser, including Chrome, now blocks and will show a little message asking if you actually want to open a new window?
You can serve ads and people will be fine with it. But it you are trying to shove it in a person's face, yeah, people are going to say "fuck you." And guess what, the more you try to shove it down our throats, the more pissed off we will be. Google is missing the big picture, and not realizing that they are the ones actively creating those who are passionate about blocking ads. Because no one wants every fucking website on the internet to be the information overload of walking into a Vegas Casino. You are worse than that dude on the street corner who is trying to hand you cards, you're him if he chased you around and was throwing cards at you and trying to stuff them into your pockets, bags, wallets, etc. Back the fuck off.
Until they understand this, they will always fail. Because guess what, I'd rather watch a blank muted screen for 60 seconds than your ads if this is what you're to do. So how about instead of trying to make the internet worse, you try to make the internet better. And a better internet isn't necessarily an internet void of ads. And guess what, if you do back the fuck off, I'm sure those ads will be far more effective too.