15 ms·

With linear video, there's a hard limit to what user-loyal ad-blocking can achieve with casual in-the-moment browsing: Google can ensure the ad's clock-time dur

by gojomo 3y ago

With linear video, there's a hard limit to what user-loyal ad-blocking can achieve with casual in-the-moment browsing: Google can ensure the ad's clock-time duration occurs, before they serve the main video. So, even if you're hiding the video, you're still punished by the wait, as your ad-blocker simulates an ad-watch. So, next-gen ad-circumvention will probably help users queue vids for later watching, after a fake agent pretends to have watched the ads. Or, be full-fledged pirate sites that pre-cache all popular videos for ad-free watching.

Shorel 3y ago
> So, even if you're hiding the video, you're still punished by the wait, as your ad-blocker simulates an ad-watch. I would gladly accept a pause instead of an ad. I needed to stop using the android TV device because of how many ads they were pushing on 10-minute videos. It was too distracting. It just made me stop using YouTube completely on that device. No content is worth so many ads. Nothing. Now I am only using the laptop, where some kind of ad blocker still works.
- grardb 3y ago
  Have you tried SmartTube? https://github.com/yuliskov/SmartTube https://github.com/yuliskov/SmartTube I use it, and while it's less polished than the official YouTube app, the ad blocking definitely works.
beenBoutIT 3y ago
YouTube should offer ad-free videos that have the ad fees paid ahead of time by the account that posted the video. Videos could be made to be ad-free for certain areas, demographics, etc. to maximize viewers as needed. In this way the video effectively becomes the ad and the viewer doesn't have any interest in blocking it.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
makeitdouble 3y ago
Youtube will already reinject ad rolls after some time span even if you keep a video paused, so full download of selected videos will probably be the way to go.
ladams 3y ago
This has been my conclusion. I've spent the past few weeks polishing my yt-dlp scripts. Honestly, the experience of being able to watch any video I want offline and buffer-free is way better than the default YouTube experience. Sometimes I miss the comments section, but it is probably better for me that I don't have access to that.
- treyd 3y ago
  It would be interesting to retrofit ActivityPub post feeds around mirrored YouTube videos.
  - archargelod 3y ago
    Grayjay[0] for android does this with their 'Polycentric Id'. All videos from multiple platforms supported by the app have a special comment section only available through grayjay. Functionality is still pretty limited, but it's refreshing to write a comment and know that it won't be picked up by a bot and shadow-banned/deleted without reason. 0 - https://grayjay.app/ https://grayjay.app/
    - ravetcofx 3y ago
      I haven't tried this yet, but it the app's creation process was overseen/managed by Louis Rossmann
- gary_0 3y ago
  Yep, a while back I grabbed yt-dlp and I've been going through my bookmarks and locally archiving useful (or nostalgic) YouTube videos. My 8TB hard drive beats Google's enshittification.
- ehnto 3y ago
  I wonder if there is a market for a youtube downlod only mirror that creators can opt into, for this use case. Concurrent bandwidth requirements could be lower and no need for streaming tech. The service probably couldn't legally download from youtube and re-host, but if you made a desktop app that uploads to YT and the mirror service at the same time and mirrors the YT video ID on the mirror, that could be attractive to users. All that said, how would such a service sustain itself? Probably ads. So really, same boat, different captain. I don't know. Would you pay a subscription to be able to download your YT video queue?
adrianN 3y ago
I doubt that pirate sites that cache video will become popular, as they would have similar cost problems as the original youtube, but without Google's infinite pockets.
- Zekio 3y ago
  that is pretty easily solved with peer to peer
  - ThatPlayer 3y ago
    It doesn't scale to anything mainstream these days when the majority of people are on phones and laptops. Battery-powered devices that don't offer much storage nor constantly reliable internet. Smart TVs generally don't have a lot of storage either. You can't even have it run in the background on iOS because of their background application limitations
- thomastjeffery 3y ago
  A CDN is only expensive because it is inefficient. With bittorrent you can let end users be the infrastructure.
  - ThatPlayer 3y ago
    Which the majority of end users don't want to be. Anyone on a laptop or phone don't want to be draining their battery and eating their bandwidth.
    - thomastjeffery 3y ago
      True, but they don't want to be buying Netflix dinner every month either. End users have not been meaningfully presented the compromise. If they had, they would have more motivation to get mains-powered PCs, or even a seedbox or something. Besides, uploading content isn't a significant hit on battery life unless you are doing it instead of suspend. Most of your battery is going into your backlight. If it wasn't illegal to seed copyrighted content, we wouldn't need users to seed all night. We would just set up a few strategic public seedboxes instead.
jfdbcv 3y ago
The lengths people will go to avoid paying content creators is pretty crazy.
- RHSeeger 3y ago
  I don't mind watching an ad or two for a reasonable length video. But if I click through to a 5 second video and it has a 15 second ad pre-rolled, I get annoyed. And if your site is annoying enough regularly enough, then I stop caring about whether "making things better for myself" is "in your best interest". Hulu is a prime example of "too many ads". I just avoid watching videos on Hulu nowadays unless I have no other choice. A 24 minute video with 6 30 second ads (or whatever it is they play) is just annoying.
  - bad_user 3y ago
    You can always subscribe.
    - pseudalopex 3y ago
      You meant YouTube Premium? Is there an anonymous payment method?
    - stubish 3y ago
      No matter how many times that platitude is repeated, it doesn't help. Because lots of people won't subscribe. The business model conflicts with normal human psychology. 'Pay us to stop annoying you' causes people to go out of their way to not pay you, because you annoyed them and they are now hostile to you. Not being annoying and upselling to premium features works better if you have premium features people are prepared to pay for.
      - thirdsun 3y ago
        I think the ad-free content actually is the premium feature most Youtube subscribers are willing to pay for. I know I do. On the other hand I don't think Youtube cares about users that aren't even considering to pay under any circumstances. There's no point in making the service more attractive to users that will only accept free pricing.
dietr1ch 3y ago
you only need to cache long enough for the ads to play, so you can start playing right away, and still download from youtube save bandwidth
LightHugger 3y ago
No there isn't any such hard limit. People said the same thing about twitch, and now twitch adblockers use proxies for uninterupted live ad free viewing. It just works.
wodenokoto 3y ago
> So, even if you're hiding the video, you're still punished by the wait, as your ad-blocker simulates an ad-watch. This is what happens in the TV app (or at least on my old tv) when the adserver legitimately times out. The solution (from YouTube’s pov) is of course super simple and we all pray the engineers at Google don’t think about it: inject the ad into the video stream.
- tentacleuno 3y ago
  An even "better" solution would be to bake the ads into the video stream at random intervals, to prevent something like SponsorBlock but for ads.
- thejarren 3y ago
  Well, the benefit then is that crowdsourced tools can skip directly over portions of the video. I already use an app called sponsor block that skips in video sponsored sections.
  - zztop44 3y ago
    Not if it’s randomised. However that would make the video stream harder to cache.
    - lamontcg 3y ago
      That just moves the battle into identifying the ads when they play and then skipping over them and updating and maintaining the ad-identifier database. And heuristics/ML can probably be used to identify likely unknown ads.
      - ryandrake 3y ago
        You could probably detect 95% of randomly-inserted ads by just looking at 1. the abrupt change in audio volume and 2. a material change in some visual "fingerprint" of the video scene. If I'm watching Mister Influencer walking around outside talking with their face framed in the middle of the shot, and then all of a sudden, mid-stream, the audio gets 15% louder and the video changes to a meadow to advertise Tide detergent, that can be reliably detected without even ML.
mcpackieh 3y ago
Even a black screen for 30 seconds is better than 30 seconds of an ad. It'll be like watching cable where you mute or start channel surfing during commercial breaks.
TaylorAlexander 3y ago
If I had a program that would mute the ad and automatically skip it while I am listening with bluetooth headphones in the other room, I wouldn't even mind the short wait! I just can't walk away and listen to youtube on my desktop because of the ads, it's super annoying. Does anyone know of something for linux/firefox that would do this? Thanks!
- c0pium 3y ago
  [flagged]
  - PrimeMcFly 3y ago
    Probably shouldn't advocate for giving money to internet bullies.

by gojomo 3y ago

Shorel 3y ago

> So, even if you're hiding the video, you're still punished by the wait, as your ad-blocker simulates an ad-watch. I would gladly accept a pause instead of an ad. I needed to stop using the android TV device because of how many ads they were pushing on 10-minute videos. It was too distracting. It just made me stop using YouTube completely on that device. No content is worth so many ads. Nothing. Now I am only using the laptop, where some kind of ad blocker still works.

grardb 3y ago
Have you tried SmartTube? https://github.com/yuliskov/SmartTube https://github.com/yuliskov/SmartTube I use it, and while it's less polished than the official YouTube app, the ad blocking definitely works.

beenBoutIT 3y ago

YouTube should offer ad-free videos that have the ad fees paid ahead of time by the account that posted the video. Videos could be made to be ad-free for certain areas, demographics, etc. to maximize viewers as needed. In this way the video effectively becomes the ad and the viewer doesn't have any interest in blocking it.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

makeitdouble 3y ago

Youtube will already reinject ad rolls after some time span even if you keep a video paused, so full download of selected videos will probably be the way to go.

ladams 3y ago

This has been my conclusion. I've spent the past few weeks polishing my yt-dlp scripts. Honestly, the experience of being able to watch any video I want offline and buffer-free is way better than the default YouTube experience. Sometimes I miss the comments section, but it is probably better for me that I don't have access to that.

treyd 3y ago
It would be interesting to retrofit ActivityPub post feeds around mirrored YouTube videos.
- archargelod 3y ago
  Grayjay[0] for android does this with their 'Polycentric Id'. All videos from multiple platforms supported by the app have a special comment section only available through grayjay. Functionality is still pretty limited, but it's refreshing to write a comment and know that it won't be picked up by a bot and shadow-banned/deleted without reason. 0 - https://grayjay.app/ https://grayjay.app/
  - ravetcofx 3y ago
    I haven't tried this yet, but it the app's creation process was overseen/managed by Louis Rossmann
gary_0 3y ago
Yep, a while back I grabbed yt-dlp and I've been going through my bookmarks and locally archiving useful (or nostalgic) YouTube videos. My 8TB hard drive beats Google's enshittification.
ehnto 3y ago
I wonder if there is a market for a youtube downlod only mirror that creators can opt into, for this use case. Concurrent bandwidth requirements could be lower and no need for streaming tech. The service probably couldn't legally download from youtube and re-host, but if you made a desktop app that uploads to YT and the mirror service at the same time and mirrors the YT video ID on the mirror, that could be attractive to users. All that said, how would such a service sustain itself? Probably ads. So really, same boat, different captain. I don't know. Would you pay a subscription to be able to download your YT video queue?

adrianN 3y ago

I doubt that pirate sites that cache video will become popular, as they would have similar cost problems as the original youtube, but without Google's infinite pockets.

Zekio 3y ago
that is pretty easily solved with peer to peer
- ThatPlayer 3y ago
  It doesn't scale to anything mainstream these days when the majority of people are on phones and laptops. Battery-powered devices that don't offer much storage nor constantly reliable internet. Smart TVs generally don't have a lot of storage either. You can't even have it run in the background on iOS because of their background application limitations
thomastjeffery 3y ago
A CDN is only expensive because it is inefficient. With bittorrent you can let end users be the infrastructure.
- ThatPlayer 3y ago
  Which the majority of end users don't want to be. Anyone on a laptop or phone don't want to be draining their battery and eating their bandwidth.
  - thomastjeffery 3y ago
    True, but they don't want to be buying Netflix dinner every month either. End users have not been meaningfully presented the compromise. If they had, they would have more motivation to get mains-powered PCs, or even a seedbox or something. Besides, uploading content isn't a significant hit on battery life unless you are doing it instead of suspend. Most of your battery is going into your backlight. If it wasn't illegal to seed copyrighted content, we wouldn't need users to seed all night. We would just set up a few strategic public seedboxes instead.

jfdbcv 3y ago

The lengths people will go to avoid paying content creators is pretty crazy.

RHSeeger 3y ago
I don't mind watching an ad or two for a reasonable length video. But if I click through to a 5 second video and it has a 15 second ad pre-rolled, I get annoyed. And if your site is annoying enough regularly enough, then I stop caring about whether "making things better for myself" is "in your best interest". Hulu is a prime example of "too many ads". I just avoid watching videos on Hulu nowadays unless I have no other choice. A 24 minute video with 6 30 second ads (or whatever it is they play) is just annoying.
- bad_user 3y ago
  You can always subscribe.
  - pseudalopex 3y ago
    You meant YouTube Premium? Is there an anonymous payment method?
  - stubish 3y ago
    No matter how many times that platitude is repeated, it doesn't help. Because lots of people won't subscribe. The business model conflicts with normal human psychology. 'Pay us to stop annoying you' causes people to go out of their way to not pay you, because you annoyed them and they are now hostile to you. Not being annoying and upselling to premium features works better if you have premium features people are prepared to pay for.
    - thirdsun 3y ago
      I think the ad-free content actually is the premium feature most Youtube subscribers are willing to pay for. I know I do. On the other hand I don't think Youtube cares about users that aren't even considering to pay under any circumstances. There's no point in making the service more attractive to users that will only accept free pricing.

dietr1ch 3y ago

you only need to cache long enough for the ads to play, so you can start playing right away, and still download from youtube save bandwidth

LightHugger 3y ago

No there isn't any such hard limit. People said the same thing about twitch, and now twitch adblockers use proxies for uninterupted live ad free viewing. It just works.

wodenokoto 3y ago

> So, even if you're hiding the video, you're still punished by the wait, as your ad-blocker simulates an ad-watch. This is what happens in the TV app (or at least on my old tv) when the adserver legitimately times out. The solution (from YouTube’s pov) is of course super simple and we all pray the engineers at Google don’t think about it: inject the ad into the video stream.

tentacleuno 3y ago
An even "better" solution would be to bake the ads into the video stream at random intervals, to prevent something like SponsorBlock but for ads.
thejarren 3y ago
Well, the benefit then is that crowdsourced tools can skip directly over portions of the video. I already use an app called sponsor block that skips in video sponsored sections.
- zztop44 3y ago
  Not if it’s randomised. However that would make the video stream harder to cache.
  - lamontcg 3y ago
    That just moves the battle into identifying the ads when they play and then skipping over them and updating and maintaining the ad-identifier database. And heuristics/ML can probably be used to identify likely unknown ads.
    - ryandrake 3y ago
      You could probably detect 95% of randomly-inserted ads by just looking at 1. the abrupt change in audio volume and 2. a material change in some visual "fingerprint" of the video scene. If I'm watching Mister Influencer walking around outside talking with their face framed in the middle of the shot, and then all of a sudden, mid-stream, the audio gets 15% louder and the video changes to a meadow to advertise Tide detergent, that can be reliably detected without even ML.

mcpackieh 3y ago

Even a black screen for 30 seconds is better than 30 seconds of an ad. It'll be like watching cable where you mute or start channel surfing during commercial breaks.

TaylorAlexander 3y ago

If I had a program that would mute the ad and automatically skip it while I am listening with bluetooth headphones in the other room, I wouldn't even mind the short wait! I just can't walk away and listen to youtube on my desktop because of the ads, it's super annoying. Does anyone know of something for linux/firefox that would do this? Thanks!

c0pium 3y ago
[flagged]
- PrimeMcFly 3y ago
  Probably shouldn't advocate for giving money to internet bullies.