11mo ago

YouTube is experimenting with server-side ads

https://fosstodon.org/@sponsorblock/112603139898164385

363 comments

What took them so long?
Anyway. I'm sure the adblocking Industry will adapt.
- Adapt to what?
  If they're mixing the content with the ads server side, it's going to be like trying to extract the flour from the bread loaf.
  I've never understood why they haven't just provided a method of doing this for all their customers. Like a Google Ad service that meshes together everything on the page with the ads server side, so it's harder to target them client side.
  I mean, the dream is to make the Internet like cable television, isn't it? Where it's all one signal/stream. When ads could never be targeted and blocked or skipped unless you recorded and played back later with fast forward. Feels like we'll get there eventually, with Chromium effectively calling the shots now.
  
  If they're predictable with the timing and length then sponsorblock will still work.
  
  And if they're not, the client can download the video twice and diff the copies.
  The most pernicious thing they could do is randomize the ads across users, but serve each user the same ads each time. In that case, you'd need a peer-to-peer client to compare hashes of chunks with other users to detect the ad segments.
  
  Dear Satan,
  Your application for the Alphabet engineering position has been acce--[your message will continue after a word from our sponsors]
  
  Honestly, I'd be happy to take the job and sabotage them from the inside.
  
  We could use audio fingerprinting to detect ads in the buffer
  
  Yeah that could work... What about creating some sort of *arr for YouTube videos that downloads them and processes them with some sort of AI audio/video processing to remove the ads and recombine the video.
  Youtubarr it could be called. If we really want we can also remove the ads from the creator in the video too. It would still count as a view to the video too so creator won't lose out on money.
  Anyone with objections to this?
  
  It's a neat idea, but computer vision stuff can get quite computationally expensive when done locally and is prone to input poisoning attacks (especially if the models used are open source).
  Not saying it wouldn't be possible, but I think some of the other ideas posed here would be better starting places.
  
  Or get the video once with a YouTube premium account and cut out anything that doesn't match from the free version.
  
  Oh, the diffing thing is clever!
  
  There's no such thing as "download the video". It's a stream of small chunks, which can be re-arranged by back-end in any way, shape and form.
  
  I think it's more like extracting raisins? ad contents are still separate from the dough. finding the boundary conditions or ads hashes is guaranteed to work. whether it is feasible for adblockers is a different matter yet.
  
  Not really. Because there are no boundary conditions. Videos are not streamed as a one big file, they're streamed as small chucks, like 5-10 seconds short chunks. Replace one chunk content randomly on the back-end with an ad and no ad blocker will be able to spot it.
  
  the lengths required to defeat youtube automatic copyright detection even for short segments of videos suggests that it can be done. if it can be done with the resources of consumer devices that's the question.
  
  Their copyright detection doesn't work in real time on consumer browsers during video playback.
  
  Not comparing feasibility though? Only the flour/bread analogy. Injected ads however it is done will always not be a part of the original video.
  
  That's why I said "What took them so long?"
  Adapt to what?
  I don't know, man. I hope they succeed. If they don't, then I will never visit YouTube again.
  Some other frontend that would allow me to fast-forward them would be fine, though.
  
  Even if adblockers aren't able to remove the ads, I'm sure they can still make it so you can skip over them with the arrow keys or video timeline.
  
  It's not that simple. Right now it's still separate video streams but presented as if they were the actual video, put in a queue of sorts.
  Ublock Origin released a script to block them yesterday btw
  
  Google is required by EU law to show what is an ad and what isn't. Adblockers could somehow detect that and skip forward.
  
  I’ve never understood why they haven’t just provided a method of doing this for all their customers. Like a Google Ad service that meshes together everything on the page with the ads server side, so it’s harder to target them client side.
  The value that Google has always provided as an ad platform is that they're targeted ads. You can target estimated age, geographic location, gender, estimated income. You can target your ads so narrowly that only a single person ever gets them even.
  To bake ads into the actual content stream they have to expend compute editing and re-rendering the video for as many times as they have ads that they intend to run on those videos. They can do it once with once batch of ads but then it's only as targeted as who clicks on that video. Realistically they'll want to do it 5x, 10x or more per video (and store every copie of the video, unless there's some tech to store it as segments and seamlessly stitch then together as a single stream) to continue targeting the ads which gets very expensive fast
- Ya I'm actually surprised they hadn't done that sooner.
  
  You need to kill the market first, if you make ad riddled shit first, no one uses your system. Now there is no real competition, which means they will monetize their position. It is what corporations do. We need alternatives, and I know Fediverse has some.
- They absolutely will. There are far more people (and probably smarter people to boot) working on blocking their shit than there are people at Google working on making it unblockable.
  This is an arms race where they will win the occasional battle, but always lose the war.
  
  Introducing our new surveillance-based, dynamically generated, native sponsored video ads with mandatory interactive minigame engagement.
  Careful - if we ever detect evasion, that's a lifetime IP ban.
  
  Careful - if we ever detect evasion, that's a lifetime IP ban.
  And lose out on any potential future profits? Probably not. Especially if the IP is dynamic.
  
  Dissidence detected. Terminating.
- It's technically complicated, and requires more compute to do it server side.
  
  I didn't say it would be easy. But yup.
  
  It doesn't require any compute on the server at all.
- What possible response is there from adblockers to this?
  
  Index the content of the ads, identify it, and drop that data from the served video file? There may be a more clever solution, but that'd definitely work. It should be possible to checksum or just straight up store the data for the first couple of kilobytes of video data that would uniquely identify each ad.
  Youtube obviously must have a rota of however many ads which they can display, so eventually they'd all get identified although you'd be playing whack-a-mole forever as they release new ones. Isn't Sponsorblock partially crowdsourced anyway?
  This would be challenging and fairly expensive, but worth it if you were motivated by sufficient spite.
  
  They say the ad is being integrated straight into the video stream on the server side though. It won't be its own identifiable piece of data on the client side anymore.
  
  Yes it will? The video stream is handed from the server to your browser or device. Once it arrives, your machine can do whatever it likes with it. Up to and including deliberately ignoring part of the data, and since Youtube videos are buffered your client can skip to whatever part of the video is past the ad provided it's been buffered that far.
  
  But how? Unless I'm misunderstanding how video encoding is done, you shouldn't be able to reliably identify what's an ad vs what's actual video once it starts getting mixed together. The ad will be encoded differently for every video it's inserted into.
  I could be completely wrong about this, but the same ad clip's data should end up looking completely different depending on any number of things.
  
  Most encoding formats are deterministic, including the VP8/VP9 codec that Youtube uses. I imagine they could deliberately insert some manner of randomization in there if they really wanted to, and if they intend to carry through with this plan they may have to. But the same input with the same encoder (and settings) should produce the same output every time, at least if you begin counting from a keyframe.
  Even if it can't be identified on a binary level with clever tactics, which I think it will be unless they do some kind of picture-in-picture thing, it should be trivial with current hardware identify it even with a fairly crude optical recognition system and a database. I.e., sample N number of points on the output and gauge the average RGB data for each for a couple of frames, and if that matches our entry for the ad in our crowdsourced database, skip ahead X seconds based on the database. Even better if you did it on the keyframes.
  Doing it based off of the audio of the ad should be even easier, since acoustic fingerprinting is a pretty cheap technology to implement these days.
  The other question will be if Youtube is dumb enough to always insert the same type of ads in the same place in each video, which they may be at least to start with, so a very simple table of "skip X amount of time at Y timecode on Z video" would be feasible. Or even better, if they hard insert the ads into the video to save on processing time, such that they never change. Are they going to try to insert ads and encode video to serve to individual users in realtime? Doubt it. That'd be bonkers. Youtube already chews on uploaded videos for sometimes upwards of an hour before having them ready to serve... I don't think they're ready to commit to and pay for the compute power to try to pull a stunt like this in realtime.
  All of this is going to require some manner of crowdsourcing, unless we get really good at using AI against them or something (which'd be immensely satisfying, come to think of it).
  
  If a song can ne fingerprinted (e.g. Shazam), so can ads. Even when they're part of a larger video.
  
  Twitch does the same thing but you can still circumvent it. Worst case users may need a VPN to a country that doesn't have many ads.
  
  What part of the data?
  The whole point of this is they want to meld the ad data with the content in such a way that there are no identifiers anymore.
  If what you're suggesting were possible, they wouldn't be bothering with this.
  
  Define "meld."
  If they're encoding the ads and the content into the same video stream, which appears to be the proposal, your client still has access to the entire video stream and in fact must do so in order to play it.
  Even if you're not going to be able to identify an ad on the raw binary level, and my proposal to do that was just spitballing anyway, the world is just absolutely chock-a-block full of audio and video content identification technologies that could be co-opted to identify specific ads, at which point your client could simply not play the section of the video stream containing them.
  
  If what you're suggesting were possible, they wouldn't be bothering with this.
  You're giving Google waaaay too much credit.
  They tried other methods prior to this, and failed. So they thought those methods were effective, and they totally bothered implementing them.
  
  Except with AI what’s to stop the advertisers from dynamically generating ads on the fly that are just ever so different from the original so as to throw off this kind of blocking.
  
  Probably nothing, so don't give them any ideas.
  
  This is not feasible.
  
  Explain.
  
  Don't ads need to be legally highlighted as being ads in many countries?
  Would make detection easy.
  
  Do you really want your ad blocker to do a resource intense image detection over a video stream in real time? Your PC will start fucking fuming.
  
  Better than watching an ad.
  
  Would love to see AI ad recognition thrown back in their faces.
  
  Perhaps the ads could be fingerprinted the same way Shazam fingerprints songs
  
  This is exactly what will happen.
  Diff the same video a few times and you'll be able to figure out which is injected content and which isn't.
  Separate out the injected content and you can fingerprint that content like how Plex or Emby fingerprints intros to TV shows (i.e. it's a solved and known problem).
  Then you can reliably identify the injected and content, you know how long it is and can just tell the client to skip it.
  This won't be easy, it'll require more than folks indexing ad content but it's feasible.
  
  How does sponsorblock does it, then?
  
  Users can mark videos and submit that content. Users can vote on other users’ marking of content. It won’t work if YT streams the ads in if they randomly change the timestamp at which the ad(s) start.
  
  Yup! Oh, I know how sponsorblock does it, but the question was more about highlighting that it's theoretically possible. Unless they do what you describe.

363 comments