- YouTube is testing server-side ad injection to counter ad blockers, integrating ads directly into videos to make them indistinguishable from the main content.
- This new method complicates ad blocking, including tools like SponsorBlock, which now face challenges in accurately identifying and skipping sponsored segments.
- The feature is currently in testing and not widely rolled out, with YouTube encouraging users to subscribe to YouTube Premium for an ad-free experience.
I’ll just write a greasemonkey script that detects unskippable time and mute audio. Let’s play this game google, fuckin I dare ya.
this one? https://gist.github.com/BrockA/2625891
what a time to be alive…
Ha, nope. But i see I’m not alone. There is hope dear people.
Youtube 2026: you are no longer allowed to skip ahead in videos in order to blend the video and ad “experience” together.
Can you have it replace the video screen portion with cat videos from another source during the unskippable part?
Sure, popover video of cute cats and turtles eating strawberries
Instant millions of installs
Only other thing I need is a button to click to pause the video once the ad is over because I’m going to the bathroom.
At this point you can just replace the video with the same video using a timestamped link from just before the ad started. Under IPv4 they can’t tell if it is the same person/device requesting the same video. So unless they put the ad at exactly the same timestamp (which they won’t) you can just blank out the video when an ad starts and replace the stream with the same video using the timestamp to start the video where you left off.
But think of the cats!!!
I’m pretty sure ads will likely be different audio level or light level that would be detectable. If there is no option to detect the ad via API that would be one way to know when the ads begin and end.
The idea here is that ads will be unskippable, aka, you skip ahead 10-20 seconds but can’t. They’re will be controls that appear to catch this. If they incorporate ads and I can just fast forward, then who cares. This is google, they want to watch ads.
Even if it becomes impossible to block the ads out I will cover my ears, close my eyes and shout ‘lalala’ to avoid them.
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An appropriate response to this nonsense.
Or use it to implement a script that just downloads the video and cuts the ads out entirely for later watching.
Or, failing any of those, a script that pops up a reminder that YouTube has unskippable ads so you can back out and just do something else with your time.
Enjoying YouTube is quickly becoming a case of the juice not being worth the squeeze
Drink the Kool-aid instead and join Premium. It’s great. YouTube is my primary source of video entertainment. No ads on any device and countless thousands of hours of math and science videos, SNL clips, educational videos, game reviews, and on and on.
For the cost of two beers a month, I get access to the best video library in the world with no ads, plus saved video progress so you can resume videos later, and YouTube Music to boot.
Why everyone on Lemmy thinks everything in the world should be free when it costs money to run the servers and pay content creators is beyond me. Makes no sense.
You sound like an ad. It triggered my uncanny valley response. Please never do that again.
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Edgy
I will never pay Google a dime. They make enough off of us. It’s really easy to download the video you want to watch and watch it on a stand alone player with you guessed it, NO FUCKING ADS.
I also don’t trust them that they won’t sell my data if I pay them
You know they’ll still sell it.
For now. If Google succeeds at doing this it won’t be.
as an occasional creator of internet videos,I would much rather host my own videos, because bandwidth is actually very cheap. but YouTube has a complete monopoly on internet video, so I have to host my video on their website, subject to their weird and arbitrary conditions, their trigger happy copyright system, and their general terrible treatment of their creators. they pay an absolute pittance for impressions, which is why most professional YouTubers use other revenue streams
the company, Google, that you are paying, didn’t make the videos, doesn’t fairly compensate the people who did, and they are effectively holding them and the very concept of internet video hostage
people on Lemmy mostly support a free, non-corpo, decentralised internet instead of the parasites at Google because Lemmy is free and decentralised and non corporate
get real
I use premium and even I cringed at this. The first two thirds of this are written like an AI generated ad.
What you don’t understand is that if YouTube manages to get enough people by the balls with their anti-adblocking efforts, the next step is to start jacking up the subscription price year after year to see how much people are willing to pay.
I signed up for a family plan a couple years ago and it’s honestly one of the last subscriptions I would cancel. I can justify it by the literally hundreds of hours of watching ads me and my family would have been subjected to otherwise.
I think you missed a “not” in your last sentence
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I prefer subscription models. That way I’m paying with my money and not my content. Of course with Google you’re doing both… but in principle I support it. I pay for a family plan and have some friends/ family on it.
It hate ads and to me it’s easily worth the monthly fee. I looked up a YouTube video on a TV that wasn’t signed in and there was like 60 seconds of ads! I’ve had YouTube premium / red for years I didn’t realize it was getting so bad.
But yeah, I support subscription model. More sustainable and honest way for a website to make a profit. In a subscription you are the buyer and the website is the product. In a free model ad companies are the buyer and you are the product.
They have more incentive under the subscription model to create a better experience for the user. In a free they have incentive to squeeze user as much as possible. I think it’s one of the main drivers of enshittification
I pay for YouTube. It is without a doubt the best subscription I pay for, that I get major use out of. I know people are hardcore anti-ad and Google is like Ad Satan, but if you can afford it, YouTube is unironically worth it.
The monthly payment for my family subscription is less than 2 tickets to the movies, not including gas, popcorn, kids, etc.
Easily the most bang for the buck entertainment we get, we watch hours of YouTube every day. News, tech reviews, travel, kids songs, tutorials…
I canceled Disney+ and Netflix, but YouTube premium is not going anywhere.
Hey Googoo, I ain’t gonna watch YouTube if it got ads
(I think that’s their goal, either ads or no watch)
Shhh. It is a huge “fuck you” to google to not use their bandwidth or servers for free. Not the actual goal of this.
They don’t want you if you’re not watching ads or paying money. They don’t want to give you bandwidth for free.
Damn, this could stop Invidious, Piped and Newpipe from being able to block ads.
Lol this would mean that every website running a looped video in the bg will now haved ads play. Nice.
Once several different instances have downloaded the same video, they could share information on which segments are the same?
Ads would change for each download based on all the factors used in the automated ad auctions.
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It will if the ads are different lengths for different viewers
How nice of them trying to make ad blocker better
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I agree and I also wouldn’t mind so much if the ads were in proportion to the length of the video and at natural breaks. I don’t want to watch a 30 second ad to see a 15 second video.
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You’re ok with paying to watch ads? Hard pass for me.
For now. That’s how YouTube was originally too, and ad free before that.
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That’s ok, I don’t need to visit YouTube at all!
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And I’m testing no longer using YouTube.
Cable was gone years ago, followed by all streaming. Soon all I’ll have left are games and hobbies.
EA, Ubisoft, and Activision are all on my do not buy list. Their games aren’t even worth pirating.
EA has been on the boycott list since mass effect 3
Can’t inject shitty ads in my mountain of board games.
I dunno… Hasbro kind of has a monopoly.
I honestly wondered why they haven’t done this yet for years
It’s quite likely that the cost actually outweighs the gains. Adblocking really isn’t all that prevalent across Internet users as a whole. I think the stats are something like 10% or lower.
And yet Google is investing all this time and money into trying to block the blockers. It’s really quite stupid.
Well, most of their efforts have been relatively low cost on their end. Stuff like manifest v3 isn’t actually particularly expensive to do. Just requires you to have near total capture of the web browser market.
Stuff like manifest v3 isn’t actually particularly expensive to do.
Oh yes, a complete overhaul of the way their browser engine works is absolute child’s play and doesn’t cost a thing. 🙄😒
But it’s always been their server. It’s not like Geico provided that video snippet
Yes, but server-side injection, if I understand it correctly, means you have to actually remux the videos into a single stream. That’s additional processing load, which is basically their main cost of business.
It’s costly; either you prepare encodes ahead of time with different ads and serve that appropriately, or you splice ads live for each request, which is also costly in resources. You can’t get away with just a few variation; ads are usually targeted. It also come with other issues, like, it is mandatory in a lot of place to clearly identify ads, so there should be an obvious marker somewhere. If it’s in the UI, it can be detected and replaced live by a video of kittens for the duration of the ad, so I suppose they also have to handle any signal in the video… (It’s speculation, I didn’t get any of these yet).
I’m curious to see if this will hold, and how we will run around it in the long run.
So much effort, dev time and resources just to fight users to make the experience worse and push them to alternatives to squeeze out the tiniest margin of extra ad money. Plus I’m sure this’ll be countered almost immediately. I’d be shocked if ad blockers took more than a few days to find a way to detect and neuter these ads.
This is some accelerated enshittification.
Why should I pay or watch ads to listen to someone tell me I need to • like and subscribe • who’s sponsoring them • a life story
… before getting to the small percentage of possible useful information therein?
I’ve taken to using Ai to summarize video content just to be able to review if the video even contains an answer or information which is relevant.
I know I’m just one use case, that I don’t watch a ton of other content. It’s usually how to do something or fix something or configuration of something. I’ve sat through countless ads and videos which just wasted my time and left me frustrated trying to find information.
Panning for gold through endless kaka.
I’ve taken to using Ai to summarize video content just to be able to review if the video even contains an answer or information which is relevant.
That sounds interesting. Could you tell me how? Using OpenAI api to summarize transcripts or something?
I’ll probably get hammered for this, but then again, you’ll have to pay for API access anyway. I’ve been testing out notegpt.io (not affiliated). Exactly because of my reasons listed, and because I often have to research or do trainings, I needed ways to save time and ‘sift’ through lots of information. I used to just play videos in say 1.5 speed, but even then it’s sometimes hard to stay focused or you might miss something and have to stop and go back. Sometimes language is a barrier too. Not to mention the ads. So for my own sanity, I’ve been testing that out. It’s been pretty damn good actually. I can get by on the lowest tier and you can try it free too. Again it’s not for everyone, but I’d rather give them money than Google for their Anti-customer behavior.
If it’s built into the video I watch in mpv can’t I just skip?
Yep, can I play it at 2x speed or skip ahead? If not, then it’s the ad. At the very least blank the video and mute the sound. I’ll enjoy a moment to breath and consider if there’s something better I should be doing.
Forced quite breaks of nothing instead of adpocalyps Is such an unironic wholesome idea. Our brains really need that more.
Good idea. 1.2x speed is how I save time on videos I expect to be long
This wouldn’t be a problem IF content creators were paid a fair share. I wouldn’t actually mind ads nearly as much knowing that the channels I enjoy watching were getting paid reasonably for every ad that I watched. Google has the technology to make it possible.
Also if the ads were actually curated and we didn’t have crypto scams running amok
As is, I can’t make it through a 30 sec ad. I will peace out 100% of the time.
If only I had a client with support for fast forward… Oh right. I do. Neat.
Some people said that skipping is blocked during the ad. But if that is the case I am sure either the timestamp is predictable or somewhere on the client side you could find the information about the timestamp.
My client pre-downloads videos, so I can fast forward and rewind at will.
That’s neat, it’d be identifiable in a fashion similar to missile logic. You know where ads are based on where they aren’t. Actually skipping it would be difficult but muting and doing something else for a predetermined period has been a workaround since radio.
Google’s own Shaka sdk (video playback with ads) gives ad markers in the initial video manifest so that they can be marked on the timeline, so hopefully it’ll be trivial. Usually (but not always) with SSAI, the ads are spliced into the stream just before being sent to the client. That way if a user has just recently watched an ad pod, the server can choose to ignore that marker for a better UX in hopes that they don’t bounce if ads are too frequent.
I doubt it… They couldn’t even manage to block FFWD on their own website for the longest time. I switched to using alternative front ends long ago, but back when I just used YT directly from my phone’s browser, spam tapping +5s a few times would bypass the ad.
If skipping is blocked in the ad, the client must know it’s playing an ad somehow?
It sounds like this would be easy for tools like SponsorBlock to label and skip segments as ads. However, it would be tough on smaller channels where people might not be labeling them as such.
