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In the same vein: I've never seen a video site that tried to defeat adblockers by inserting ads directly into the video stream. It seems like an obvious tactic;
by ar-nelson 7y ago
In the same vein: I've never seen a video site that tried to defeat adblockers by inserting ads directly into the video stream. It seems like an obvious tactic; it could even use JS to prevent fast-forwarding the ads, and that would be a difficult thing for adblockers to detect and remove.
The main problem I can see is that you would have to choose between CDN caching and targeted ads. If the video was uniquely generated for each user with new targeted ads, it couldn't be cached.
I know that some podcasts use a technique like this, modifying the audio stream at download time to insert recent ads, even if the podcast being downloaded is old.
- kgwxd 7y agoIf I'm not mistaken, the reason the YouTube app ads can't be blocked even with something like Pi-hole, is that they do exactly what you're talking about.
- CraneWorm 7y agoI have never seen an ad on YouTube that was not put there by the channel owner "this video is sponsored by PushStuff".
- Nextgrid 7y agoThat does exist, it’s called server-side ad injection (more like cancer injection).
- comex 7y agoTwitch recently started doing something like that, albeit by manipulating the HLS playlist rather than the video files themselves: https://github.com/streamlink/streamlink/issues/2357 https://github.com/streamlink/streamlink/issues/2357