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At a technical level, what prevents Google from deploying unblockable ads on YouTube? I’m honestly surprised adblockers are able to block YouTube at all. The e

by cj 3y ago

At a technical level, what prevents Google from deploying unblockable ads on YouTube? I’m honestly surprised adblockers are able to block YouTube at all. The easiest way to prevent an adblocker from blocking is to make ads and real content indistinguishable in frontend code and network requests. Tie ads and real content together in a way that if you block ads, the video also doesn’t load. Or in the case of video ads, you could stream the ad as part of the video itself instead of a separate pre roll. If I had a billion dollars of revenue on the line, I’m pretty sure I’d be able to make the YouTube player serve ads in a way that evades adblockers. The fact that they haven’t been able to do this makes me think I’m underestimating the difficulty of the problem.

hotnfresh 3y ago
> The easiest way to prevent an adblocker from blocking is to make ads and real content indistinguishable in frontend code and network requests. Tie ads and real content together in a way that if you block ads, the video also doesn’t load. Ads that the creators themselves put in their videos are exactly what you're suggesting. Yet there exist fairly-effective (if not perfect) ad blockers for those, too.
- chii 3y ago
  If it's statically spliced, yes. but if it is dynamically spliced in, it'd be harder to do the same to block it. You'd have to detect the ad itself, and YouTube may not allow the video to be timeseeked, which might make the viewing experience suck with a black screen for the duration the ad.
userbinator 3y ago
Or in the case of video ads, you could stream the ad as part of the video itself instead of a separate pre roll. Back when people watched an actual "tube", ads were indeed like that. Yet VCRs could easily detect and skip over them when recording. Remember that this was before AI too, so the technology exists to counter it already. I suspect YouTube keeps the ads separate from the content because the sort of "splicing" that would be required is not trivial to do at the scale YouTube handles video. Also, perhaps they'd rather users who are adblocking not waste their bandwidth downloading ad videos which are going to be ignored anyway.
- satvikpendem 3y ago
  > Yet VCRs could easily detect and skip over them when recording How did they do that? Is there any more information on this topic?
  - marapuru 3y ago
    In the Netherlands I remember typing in a code to record something. That code corresponded to a specific start and end timestamp. So in that case it ‘skipped’ the commercials.
    - satvikpendem 3y ago
      Seems to be similar to the SponsorBlock extension for YouTube then, where start and end timestamps are crowdsourced for various types of filler, such as intros and end credits, sponsor segments, calls to subscribe, etc.
  - briHass 3y ago
    I think this may be referring to DVRs of the early 2000s. They used basic logic to look for a blip (dropout) in the video signal that usually happened when a commercial break was inserted. It worked surprisingly well. The parallels here are uncanny, because there were tons of lawsuits from networks unhappy about this, as well as lawsuits from consumers making similar arguments as seen in this thread about how advertisements are awful and they don't have any responsibility to watch them.
  - userbinator 3y ago
    Here's a thread from 2 decades ago with some more information: https://www.hometheaterforum.com/community/threads/vcrs-and-commercial-skip-do-they-work.42956/ https://www.hometheaterforum.com/community/threads/vcrs-and-... In particular this interesting tidbit: Also there are tones in the audio and/or material in scan lines 484-525 whose purpose is to tell the sponsors' automatic monitoring and auditing devices that the commercials were aired at the proper times and that VCR's can also use for commercial advance ...and apparently this was available in the mid 90s: https://www.orlandosentinel.com/1995/09/20/with-this-vcr-commercials-automatically-bite-the-dust/ https://www.orlandosentinel.com/1995/09/20/with-this-vcr-com...
matrix_overload 3y ago
Different users are shown different ads, so you would need to dynamically edit the video and audio stream, injecting additional content into it. It would raise the server-side costs by an order of magnitude, because instead of just serving prerecorded content from storage, you would need to do non-trivial GPU-intensive stream processing.
- userbinator 3y ago
  It's not that hard to splice the stream, as this is clearly being done for DTV already, but as you pointed out, needing to splice in different content for each user in the same connection is not easy, especially when the segments probably reside on different servers.
dotnet00 3y ago
I think all that would do is lead to alternate frontends that just "play" the video, remove the ads and serve up the video. The only issue would be discovery, but at this point most of what I watch is either from people I already follow or from their "network".
w4yai 3y ago
Sure, then I'll code some extension that prevent from playing the N first seconds of your video based on my database of known ads. There is no such thing as "unblockable" ads. Advent of AI makes it even harder, as AI get better and better at discerning Ads from actual content. Ads providers just need to accept that being forced to watch ads will become a thing of the past soon.
Buttons840 3y ago
If ads are indistinguishable from the regular video, can't people just skip past them? Afterall, regular video can be fast-forwarded / skipped. I will tell my computer to automatically skip video that was originally marked as unskippable. If things really escalate, I will tell my computer to blank the screen and mute the audio when an ad is playing. I will do this with a keybinding, or maybe with an AI. This will be undetectable to the server.
- amadvance 3y ago
  > I will tell my computer to blank the screen and mute the audio when an ad is playing. Indeed, but you'll still have to wait for the ad to play. YouTube can definitively win this race if they decide so.
  - Buttons840 3y ago
    I agree this form of blocking will be less appealing to many, but personally, I wouldn't mind a few moments to just breathe, especially when I'm doing ad heavy things. Instead of blanking the screen I might instead show a screen that says "Is there something better you should be doing?".
  - jackdh 3y ago
    At that point I would auto download any videos from my subscriptions so they are controllable locally. Then an AI or integration with an Sponsorblock could skip the adverts. Host this all in a system similar to plex and it would be quite transparent.
- the_omegist 3y ago
  I did not see your comment & posted something pretty similar : Not sure this is the best topic to ask this. This is not a domain I am knowledgeable about but : if Youtube detects (somehow) when an ad is blocked , why don't adblockers become "adfastworwarders" ? I am using a bookmarklet to play Youtube videos faster & I noticed the videos are also played at the same speed. Couldn't "adfastworwarders" detect the start of an ad & like play it at x10 or x20? It would still create a tiny "cut" in the watching experience but perhaps a way to skip ads ? Any reason this cannot be a path for adblockers?

by cj 3y ago

hotnfresh 3y ago

> The easiest way to prevent an adblocker from blocking is to make ads and real content indistinguishable in frontend code and network requests. Tie ads and real content together in a way that if you block ads, the video also doesn’t load. Ads that the creators themselves put in their videos are exactly what you're suggesting. Yet there exist fairly-effective (if not perfect) ad blockers for those, too.

chii 3y ago
If it's statically spliced, yes. but if it is dynamically spliced in, it'd be harder to do the same to block it. You'd have to detect the ad itself, and YouTube may not allow the video to be timeseeked, which might make the viewing experience suck with a black screen for the duration the ad.

userbinator 3y ago

Or in the case of video ads, you could stream the ad as part of the video itself instead of a separate pre roll. Back when people watched an actual "tube", ads were indeed like that. Yet VCRs could easily detect and skip over them when recording. Remember that this was before AI too, so the technology exists to counter it already. I suspect YouTube keeps the ads separate from the content because the sort of "splicing" that would be required is not trivial to do at the scale YouTube handles video. Also, perhaps they'd rather users who are adblocking not waste their bandwidth downloading ad videos which are going to be ignored anyway.

satvikpendem 3y ago
> Yet VCRs could easily detect and skip over them when recording How did they do that? Is there any more information on this topic?
- marapuru 3y ago
  In the Netherlands I remember typing in a code to record something. That code corresponded to a specific start and end timestamp. So in that case it ‘skipped’ the commercials.
  - satvikpendem 3y ago
    Seems to be similar to the SponsorBlock extension for YouTube then, where start and end timestamps are crowdsourced for various types of filler, such as intros and end credits, sponsor segments, calls to subscribe, etc.
- briHass 3y ago
  I think this may be referring to DVRs of the early 2000s. They used basic logic to look for a blip (dropout) in the video signal that usually happened when a commercial break was inserted. It worked surprisingly well. The parallels here are uncanny, because there were tons of lawsuits from networks unhappy about this, as well as lawsuits from consumers making similar arguments as seen in this thread about how advertisements are awful and they don't have any responsibility to watch them.
- userbinator 3y ago
  Here's a thread from 2 decades ago with some more information: https://www.hometheaterforum.com/community/threads/vcrs-and-commercial-skip-do-they-work.42956/ https://www.hometheaterforum.com/community/threads/vcrs-and-... In particular this interesting tidbit: Also there are tones in the audio and/or material in scan lines 484-525 whose purpose is to tell the sponsors' automatic monitoring and auditing devices that the commercials were aired at the proper times and that VCR's can also use for commercial advance ...and apparently this was available in the mid 90s: https://www.orlandosentinel.com/1995/09/20/with-this-vcr-commercials-automatically-bite-the-dust/ https://www.orlandosentinel.com/1995/09/20/with-this-vcr-com...

matrix_overload 3y ago

Different users are shown different ads, so you would need to dynamically edit the video and audio stream, injecting additional content into it. It would raise the server-side costs by an order of magnitude, because instead of just serving prerecorded content from storage, you would need to do non-trivial GPU-intensive stream processing.

userbinator 3y ago
It's not that hard to splice the stream, as this is clearly being done for DTV already, but as you pointed out, needing to splice in different content for each user in the same connection is not easy, especially when the segments probably reside on different servers.

dotnet00 3y ago

I think all that would do is lead to alternate frontends that just "play" the video, remove the ads and serve up the video. The only issue would be discovery, but at this point most of what I watch is either from people I already follow or from their "network".

w4yai 3y ago

Sure, then I'll code some extension that prevent from playing the N first seconds of your video based on my database of known ads. There is no such thing as "unblockable" ads. Advent of AI makes it even harder, as AI get better and better at discerning Ads from actual content. Ads providers just need to accept that being forced to watch ads will become a thing of the past soon.

Buttons840 3y ago

If ads are indistinguishable from the regular video, can't people just skip past them? Afterall, regular video can be fast-forwarded / skipped. I will tell my computer to automatically skip video that was originally marked as unskippable. If things really escalate, I will tell my computer to blank the screen and mute the audio when an ad is playing. I will do this with a keybinding, or maybe with an AI. This will be undetectable to the server.

amadvance 3y ago
> I will tell my computer to blank the screen and mute the audio when an ad is playing. Indeed, but you'll still have to wait for the ad to play. YouTube can definitively win this race if they decide so.
- Buttons840 3y ago
  I agree this form of blocking will be less appealing to many, but personally, I wouldn't mind a few moments to just breathe, especially when I'm doing ad heavy things. Instead of blanking the screen I might instead show a screen that says "Is there something better you should be doing?".
- jackdh 3y ago
  At that point I would auto download any videos from my subscriptions so they are controllable locally. Then an AI or integration with an Sponsorblock could skip the adverts. Host this all in a system similar to plex and it would be quite transparent.
the_omegist 3y ago
I did not see your comment & posted something pretty similar : Not sure this is the best topic to ask this. This is not a domain I am knowledgeable about but : if Youtube detects (somehow) when an ad is blocked , why don't adblockers become "adfastworwarders" ? I am using a bookmarklet to play Youtube videos faster & I noticed the videos are also played at the same speed. Couldn't "adfastworwarders" detect the start of an ad & like play it at x10 or x20? It would still create a tiny "cut" in the watching experience but perhaps a way to skip ads ? Any reason this cannot be a path for adblockers?