12 ms·

YouTube's next move might make it virtually impossible to block ads

39 points by ta8645 2y ago

ftth_finland 2y ago
Next up: Tivo for Youtube
newswasboring 2y ago
I find the point about added complexity for premium user's experience a bit weird. They are saying that the client will have to skip the ad for premium users. But YouTube knows whose making the video request, right? Wouldn't it be easier to just skip the injection on server side?
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- cm2187 2y ago
  Plus my understanding is that most streaming video works with a playlist of video segments, each video segment is independent and self contained, so not sure how an adblocker could tell an ad segment from a content segment, ie you wouldn’t need to reencode anything, just serve different segments dynamically.
  - iforgotpassword 2y ago
    Yep, the video is split up in many tiny chunks, for example so the client can seamlessly change quality during playback in "auto"-mode. 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.
  - rented_mule 2y ago
    If it's done that way, then something like SponsorBlock could upload a hash for every segment that is played by everyone with the extension. After a few hundred views, personalization will make clear which segments are the ads (because they are targeted, each ad segment will appear in far less of the segment playlists). Modify the segment playlist on the fly to only include the segments sent to everyone. 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.
    - joegibbs 2y ago
      But then couldn’t YouTube modify each ad segment very slightly - by a few bytes - so that the hash is different every time?
      - cm2187 2y ago
        I imagine that wouldn’t play well with CDNs
      - rented_mule 2y ago
        That would work against them because you exclude the segments served up the least, and those modified versions would only be served up once. That approach could work better for YouTube if you did it to the segments of the actual video rather than the ads. But then you could get into things like audio fingerprinting of the segments - only show fingerprints that were also shown to YouTube Premium members. I'm no expert at this stuff, but people who build blockers will brainstorm every time they have to sit through a YouTube ad.
- imp0cat 2y ago
  Yes, until all the unofficial clients learn to serve links to videos without ads.
  - newswasboring 2y ago
    How though? At least I find this problem to be kind of irrelevant to how to block ads for premium users. It can be done the same way they serve anything to premium users on server side.
cageface 2y ago
If you don't like ad supported services then vote with your wallet and pay for services that don't show ads. What makes people feel entitled to enjoy ad supported content for free?
- glitchcrab 2y ago
  What are the alternatives to YouTube which have the same level of content? I don't mean the low effort crap either.
  - jhdias 2y ago
    They mean pay for YouTube Premium. There's nothing like YouTube.
  - nickff 2y ago
    Nobody is entitled to some “level of content” of other people’s work. Some creators choose to distribute their content (and often monetize it) via YouTube, and those of us who wish to consume the content can choose whether or not to participate in that system. 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”.
- jimbob45 2y ago
  Because our data is nearly universally stolen to the point of absurdity and most videos already contain in-baked ads in the form of endorsements and placements. YouTube certainly makes more from knowing my viewing preferences than it could from ads.
  - Dalewyn 2y ago
    >most videos already contain in-baked ads in the form of endorsements and placements. To be completely fair here: That is a problem with the creators, not Youtube.
  - cageface 2y ago
malermeister 2y ago
Coming up next: Local AI model to detect and skip ads.
remark5396 2y ago
Will it affect projects like yt-dlp, Invidious, or Piped? It seems like they are going to put ads into actual video streams, so yt-dlp might download a video with ads injected?
- AndrewDavis 2y ago
  Possible. That's not uncommon for podcasts. 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.
  - Boltgolt 2y ago
    Definitely geo ip, if you listen to a lot of podcasts it might be worth it to only download them through a VPN from a very small country: Very few companies advertise there so there are no ads to inject, effectively having adblock
- cuu508 2y ago
  Detecting these in-stream ads is perhaps finally a good use case for AI ;-)
hnarn 2y ago
This is a badly written and hyperbolic article. What does "server side injection" actually mean? The article also touches on SponsorBlock, which in my mind would have no problems skipping whatever "injected" ads show up since this is already what that application does, but it doesn't address this at all, it just mentions that the team behind it "mentioned" that youtube is "experimenting". 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.
- bilekas 2y ago
  Yeah, TouTube would have to rotate the insertion time on the fly, but again as the article mentions it needs to be user context aware before building it into the stream. Possible? Sure, but the cost and potential architecture change could be too much. 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.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- maweki 2y ago
  > which in my mind would have no problems skipping whatever "injected" ads show up since this is already what that application does 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.
  - xigoi 2y ago
    > 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?
the_biot 2y ago
I've always found it a mark of stellar incompetence that YouTube hasn't done ad injection into the video stream, dynamically on the server side. It's to my advantage, so I'm not complaining, but this is a company that ignored adblockers for years, and when it started fighting them, half-assed even that (I see no ads even now).
- fshafique 2y ago
  Shhh! Don't give them ideas.
  - Ylpertnodi 2y ago
    No problem. They plainly don't read the tech sites.
- akerr 2y ago
  If they inject video, I can skip ahead. If they lock playback for that time, I can skip ahead programmatically.
  - joegibbs 2y ago
    Can you? If they track the time the user began watching the video, they can refuse to send you any more of the actual video until the duration of the ad is complete.
    - malermeister 2y ago
      Have the client prebuffer the video, start playback after $TOTAL_AD_LENGTH.
      - noahjk 2y ago
        Buffering seems to have been chunked for a long time now, though. Ten years ago we could buffer an entire video. Now it’s limited to about 5% at a time. I guess that’s how the chunked HLS streams and such work, and YT could probably avoid serving certain chunks without some unique token received from watching the ad.
TheWoodsy 2y ago
So the next generation of Ad-blockers will simply source the video from a proxy, compare, and serve the clean feed. The cat and mouse game perpetuates.
poopsmithe 2y ago
For every engineer creating new and novel ways to serve ads, there are 100 engineers who hate ads and will use their power to block them.
- godelski 2y ago
  Not only this, but the more successful you become at serving ads the more engineers you create that will passionately work against you. There's an old saying: How do you create a terrorist? You kill his brother. I think there's something to learn from that here.
- xnx 2y ago
  For every [highly paid and incentivized] engineer creating new and novel ways to serve ads, there are 100 [part-time volunteer loosely-organized] engineers who hate ads 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.)
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
globular-toast 2y ago
I've been blocking ads for over two decades at this point. In all that time I have not had any ads, apart from very recently when YouTube made some changes. I disabled the ad blocker for YouTube and was absolutely shocked at what I saw. It's like a cesspit with the ads on. I had been seeing a different version this whole time. 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.
- ryandrake 2y ago
  When you successfully block ads for a long time, and acclimatized yourself to an Internet without them, and then suddenly turn off the blocking, it's jarring. Like, my-brain-hurts jarring. It stinks like getting suddenly tossed into a sewer. The first thing that comes to mind when I browse a non-blocked web is "how do people without ad blockers even live like this?" I've kind of lost the ability to concentrate with them all over the page. It's almost headache-inducing.
godelski 2y ago
There's a lot of complexity and effort going into this, but I wounder if anyone has ever stopped to ask why people are blocking ads in the first place. 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.
waldrews 2y ago
Would we even hate the ads so much if they so many of them weren't overtly scammy? Give us quality ads and have a working system for reporting scammy or otherwise inappropriate ads, and the resistance will be much lower. A premium option for people who value their time is an entirely legit business model; taking scammers' money and effectively encouraging them to prey on free users to push users toward becoming paid users - that's not cool.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
jacknews 2y ago
"The move also adds a layer of unnecessary complexity in saving Premium viewers from these ads. If they are added server-side, the YouTube client would have to auto-skip them for Premium members, but that also means ad segment info will be relayed to the client" 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.
glimshe 2y ago
Nobody is entitled to ad-free YouTube. But I wonder how this will end up affecting the bottom line of creators. The more forced ads I see, the less I'll use YouTube, so the less creators will make (even if Google makes the same as I wasn't watching the Ads anyway). 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.
- jsnell 2y ago
  Creators aren't paid some flat fee per view. They're paid a revenue share. By blocking the ads, you're already making sure the creators won't get paid for your views, and they lose nothing when you watch fewer of their videos.
- beardyw 2y ago
  Yes, but surely since the money for creators comes from advertisers who will pay for ads watched, not skipped I assume, it might all work out the same? 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?
- drpossum 2y ago
  I am entitled to ad-free Youtube because I pay them to not see ads.
- no_time 2y ago
  >But I wonder how this will end up affecting the bottom line of creators. The more forced ads I see, the less I'll use YouTube, so the less creators will make (even if Google makes the same as I wasn't watching the Ads anyway). 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.
lauraorchid 2y ago
Hmm, that must've use lots of compute power to reprocess videos for inserting ads, if I understand correctly. They should think of that and other side effects before doing this.
orwin 2y ago
I do think server-side ads are way, way more OK than client-side ads: you don't eat _my_ resources, malware injection is harder, you have to know in advance which ads to serve me (so ads are related to the content i watch and not to whatever shit you think i'm using considering my demographics). 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.
Ylpertnodi 2y ago
I miss proxomitron.
drivingmenuts 2y ago
My personal rule has become: if your ad is unskippable, your business is skippable. I’ll give advertising its five seconds, but if it hasn’t somehow enticed me, I’m going to focus on hitting skip, more than the advertiser or their product. And if the ad is outright annoying, then they are blacklisted in my head. It’s become kind of a game for me.
_nalply 2y ago
This is just the next step in a game of cat and mouse. 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.
- xnx 2y ago
  Accurate. I'm surprised there aren't more adblockers pre-emptively working on layers closer to our senses like the framebuffer or HDMI and aux cord passthroughs
ChrisArchitect 2y ago
[dupe] Some more discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40657933 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40657933

39 points by ta8645 2y ago

Next up: Tivo for Youtube

I find the point about added complexity for premium user's experience a bit weird. They are saying that the client will have to skip the ad for premium users. But YouTube knows whose making the video request, right? Wouldn't it be easier to just skip the injection on server side?

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
cm2187 2y ago
Plus my understanding is that most streaming video works with a playlist of video segments, each video segment is independent and self contained, so not sure how an adblocker could tell an ad segment from a content segment, ie you wouldn’t need to reencode anything, just serve different segments dynamically.
- iforgotpassword 2y ago
  Yep, the video is split up in many tiny chunks, for example so the client can seamlessly change quality during playback in "auto"-mode. 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.
- rented_mule 2y ago
  If it's done that way, then something like SponsorBlock could upload a hash for every segment that is played by everyone with the extension. After a few hundred views, personalization will make clear which segments are the ads (because they are targeted, each ad segment will appear in far less of the segment playlists). Modify the segment playlist on the fly to only include the segments sent to everyone. 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.
  - joegibbs 2y ago
    But then couldn’t YouTube modify each ad segment very slightly - by a few bytes - so that the hash is different every time?
    - cm2187 2y ago
      I imagine that wouldn’t play well with CDNs
    - rented_mule 2y ago
      That would work against them because you exclude the segments served up the least, and those modified versions would only be served up once. That approach could work better for YouTube if you did it to the segments of the actual video rather than the ads. But then you could get into things like audio fingerprinting of the segments - only show fingerprints that were also shown to YouTube Premium members. I'm no expert at this stuff, but people who build blockers will brainstorm every time they have to sit through a YouTube ad.
imp0cat 2y ago
Yes, until all the unofficial clients learn to serve links to videos without ads.
- newswasboring 2y ago
  How though? At least I find this problem to be kind of irrelevant to how to block ads for premium users. It can be done the same way they serve anything to premium users on server side.

cageface 2y ago

If you don't like ad supported services then vote with your wallet and pay for services that don't show ads. What makes people feel entitled to enjoy ad supported content for free?

glitchcrab 2y ago
What are the alternatives to YouTube which have the same level of content? I don't mean the low effort crap either.
- jhdias 2y ago
  They mean pay for YouTube Premium. There's nothing like YouTube.
- nickff 2y ago
  Nobody is entitled to some “level of content” of other people’s work. Some creators choose to distribute their content (and often monetize it) via YouTube, and those of us who wish to consume the content can choose whether or not to participate in that system. 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”.
jimbob45 2y ago
Because our data is nearly universally stolen to the point of absurdity and most videos already contain in-baked ads in the form of endorsements and placements. YouTube certainly makes more from knowing my viewing preferences than it could from ads.
- Dalewyn 2y ago
  >most videos already contain in-baked ads in the form of endorsements and placements. To be completely fair here: That is a problem with the creators, not Youtube.
- cageface 2y ago

malermeister 2y ago

Coming up next: Local AI model to detect and skip ads.

remark5396 2y ago

Will it affect projects like yt-dlp, Invidious, or Piped? It seems like they are going to put ads into actual video streams, so yt-dlp might download a video with ads injected?

AndrewDavis 2y ago
Possible. That's not uncommon for podcasts. 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.
- Boltgolt 2y ago
  Definitely geo ip, if you listen to a lot of podcasts it might be worth it to only download them through a VPN from a very small country: Very few companies advertise there so there are no ads to inject, effectively having adblock
cuu508 2y ago
Detecting these in-stream ads is perhaps finally a good use case for AI ;-)

hnarn 2y ago

This is a badly written and hyperbolic article. What does "server side injection" actually mean? The article also touches on SponsorBlock, which in my mind would have no problems skipping whatever "injected" ads show up since this is already what that application does, but it doesn't address this at all, it just mentions that the team behind it "mentioned" that youtube is "experimenting". 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.

bilekas 2y ago
Yeah, TouTube would have to rotate the insertion time on the fly, but again as the article mentions it needs to be user context aware before building it into the stream. Possible? Sure, but the cost and potential architecture change could be too much. 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.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
maweki 2y ago
> which in my mind would have no problems skipping whatever "injected" ads show up since this is already what that application does 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.
- xigoi 2y ago
  > 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?

the_biot 2y ago

I've always found it a mark of stellar incompetence that YouTube hasn't done ad injection into the video stream, dynamically on the server side. It's to my advantage, so I'm not complaining, but this is a company that ignored adblockers for years, and when it started fighting them, half-assed even that (I see no ads even now).

fshafique 2y ago
Shhh! Don't give them ideas.
- Ylpertnodi 2y ago
  No problem. They plainly don't read the tech sites.
akerr 2y ago
If they inject video, I can skip ahead. If they lock playback for that time, I can skip ahead programmatically.
- joegibbs 2y ago
  Can you? If they track the time the user began watching the video, they can refuse to send you any more of the actual video until the duration of the ad is complete.
  - malermeister 2y ago
    Have the client prebuffer the video, start playback after $TOTAL_AD_LENGTH.
    - noahjk 2y ago
      Buffering seems to have been chunked for a long time now, though. Ten years ago we could buffer an entire video. Now it’s limited to about 5% at a time. I guess that’s how the chunked HLS streams and such work, and YT could probably avoid serving certain chunks without some unique token received from watching the ad.

TheWoodsy 2y ago

So the next generation of Ad-blockers will simply source the video from a proxy, compare, and serve the clean feed. The cat and mouse game perpetuates.

poopsmithe 2y ago

For every engineer creating new and novel ways to serve ads, there are 100 engineers who hate ads and will use their power to block them.

godelski 2y ago
Not only this, but the more successful you become at serving ads the more engineers you create that will passionately work against you. There's an old saying: How do you create a terrorist? You kill his brother. I think there's something to learn from that here.
xnx 2y ago
For every [highly paid and incentivized] engineer creating new and novel ways to serve ads, there are 100 [part-time volunteer loosely-organized] engineers who hate ads 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.)

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

globular-toast 2y ago

I've been blocking ads for over two decades at this point. In all that time I have not had any ads, apart from very recently when YouTube made some changes. I disabled the ad blocker for YouTube and was absolutely shocked at what I saw. It's like a cesspit with the ads on. I had been seeing a different version this whole time. 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.

ryandrake 2y ago
When you successfully block ads for a long time, and acclimatized yourself to an Internet without them, and then suddenly turn off the blocking, it's jarring. Like, my-brain-hurts jarring. It stinks like getting suddenly tossed into a sewer. The first thing that comes to mind when I browse a non-blocked web is "how do people without ad blockers even live like this?" I've kind of lost the ability to concentrate with them all over the page. It's almost headache-inducing.

godelski 2y ago

There's a lot of complexity and effort going into this, but I wounder if anyone has ever stopped to ask why people are blocking ads in the first place. 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.

waldrews 2y ago

Would we even hate the ads so much if they so many of them weren't overtly scammy? Give us quality ads and have a working system for reporting scammy or otherwise inappropriate ads, and the resistance will be much lower. A premium option for people who value their time is an entirely legit business model; taking scammers' money and effectively encouraging them to prey on free users to push users toward becoming paid users - that's not cool.

deleted 2y ago

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jacknews 2y ago

"The move also adds a layer of unnecessary complexity in saving Premium viewers from these ads. If they are added server-side, the YouTube client would have to auto-skip them for Premium members, but that also means ad segment info will be relayed to the client" 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.

glimshe 2y ago

Nobody is entitled to ad-free YouTube. But I wonder how this will end up affecting the bottom line of creators. The more forced ads I see, the less I'll use YouTube, so the less creators will make (even if Google makes the same as I wasn't watching the Ads anyway). 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.

jsnell 2y ago
Creators aren't paid some flat fee per view. They're paid a revenue share. By blocking the ads, you're already making sure the creators won't get paid for your views, and they lose nothing when you watch fewer of their videos.
beardyw 2y ago
Yes, but surely since the money for creators comes from advertisers who will pay for ads watched, not skipped I assume, it might all work out the same? 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?
drpossum 2y ago
I am entitled to ad-free Youtube because I pay them to not see ads.
no_time 2y ago
>But I wonder how this will end up affecting the bottom line of creators. The more forced ads I see, the less I'll use YouTube, so the less creators will make (even if Google makes the same as I wasn't watching the Ads anyway). 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.

lauraorchid 2y ago

Hmm, that must've use lots of compute power to reprocess videos for inserting ads, if I understand correctly. They should think of that and other side effects before doing this.

orwin 2y ago

I do think server-side ads are way, way more OK than client-side ads: you don't eat _my_ resources, malware injection is harder, you have to know in advance which ads to serve me (so ads are related to the content i watch and not to whatever shit you think i'm using considering my demographics). 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.

Ylpertnodi 2y ago

I miss proxomitron.

drivingmenuts 2y ago

My personal rule has become: if your ad is unskippable, your business is skippable. I’ll give advertising its five seconds, but if it hasn’t somehow enticed me, I’m going to focus on hitting skip, more than the advertiser or their product. And if the ad is outright annoying, then they are blacklisted in my head. It’s become kind of a game for me.

_nalply 2y ago

This is just the next step in a game of cat and mouse. 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.

xnx 2y ago
Accurate. I'm surprised there aren't more adblockers pre-emptively working on layers closer to our senses like the framebuffer or HDMI and aux cord passthroughs

ChrisArchitect 2y ago

[dupe] Some more discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40657933 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40657933