YouTube is experimenting with server-side ads

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.
  
  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.
  
  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
  
  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
  
  Google is required by EU law to show what is an ad and what isn't. Adblockers could somehow detect that and skip forward.
- 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.
- 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.
  
  Don't ads need to be legally highlighted as being ads in many countries?
  Would make detection easy.
  
  Would love to see AI ad recognition thrown back in their faces.

Even if it comes down to a browser addon placing a black rectangle over the video and muting browser audio when an ad plays, I'll be choosing that over watching ads.
- I've done something similar by mixing two extensions together in times where unlock origin wasn't keeping up with YT changes (ad muting extension plus auto skip extension). It worked really well for when you had the video in the background of a game or work, and if I were solely watching the video it was just a trigger for a phone break during the video
- If they do it properly, you won't be able to do it.
  
  There will always be a way
  
  Image Recognition could attatch the first frame of an ad to the length of time the ad plays for, then add it to an online DB a la sponserblock.
  They might try to block seeking during these sections, but YouTube usually has raw mp4 streams available under the hood. You can even pull them using invidious or newpipe. Take that out and we might be fucked.
  
  Train an AI to detect ads and voila
  
  In the extremely rare event that I watch a youtube video on a my phone, and an ad comes on, I mute sound and literally turn my head away. Advertisers can't do shit about that lol.

I wouldn't even mind the ads if they just played maybe one per three or four videos. That would still bring in a massive amount of money without pissing everyone off.
Instead we get up to two ads every couple of minutes.
It's all about blatant greed.
- 4s cat vid, 40s of ads.
  
  Two ads before the video starts, which was a movie trailer.
  "To watch this ad you first must watch two ads!"
- If it wasn't the same 3 ads over and over too

Honestly, I am surprised it took them this long. This technology has existed for a while, there is even a standard for it (see: SCTE-35).
The harsh truth of the matter is that YouTube is a victim of its own success. The sheer scale of what is needed to keep the platform running at its current level of activity is something that I think most people don't give a second thought to. It requires a truly astonishing amount of technical expertise, infrastructure, monitoring, throughput capacity, not to mention sheer compute and storage, to keep it running. And that is considering the technical side alone, never mind the business that has evolved around it
All of the above costs money. A lot of money. So much money that only a shitty mega corporation with no moral scruples would ever be able to afford to run the platform, let alone turn a profit. And so here we are.
There are niche alternatives like PeerTube, but in practice it is currently in no state to be a drop in replacement. If the fediverse had to deal with the amount of traffic and content from YouTube in its current state, it would collapse immediately. This won't change until the user base begins to increase, but to do so requires an incentive for people to jump over. And sadly, far too many people just don't care enough about avoiding ads to do so.
I think in the long term there will be a reckoning; no matter the size of your platform you are not invulnerable to change. Nobody back in the early 2010s could foresee Twitter falling from grace, and look how that turned out. YouTube will eventually die, the only question is who will be footing the bill for what replaces it.
In the meantime, if you're unable or unwilling to deal with YouTube's ads, or pay to skip them, then just don't engage with the platform at all. Read a book. Touch some grass. They haven't found a way to monetize that (yet).
- If the fediverse had to deal with the amount of traffic and content from YouTube in its current state, it would collapse immediately.
  The Fediverse would be a very different place if it was hosting anything remotely close to YouTube tier traffic. FFS, how much of the Fediverse is even outside English speaking countries? None of our systems are getting bombarded with hundreds of gigabytes of Good Morning messages like Whatsapp is dealing with in India, for instance.
  So much of the content on these big services is both trivial in terms of audience and enormous in terms of relative file size. My sister-in-law sent me a thirty minute compilation video from their latest summer vacation, which she hosted to YouTube. That video is going to get maybe five views, unless one of us goes back to watch it a second time. How much is it costing YouTube to host and stream? Obviously far more than what they make from any of us.
  Now scale that up to millions.
  The Fediverse isn't trying to do anything remotely like that.
  
  This specific example is one thing that self hosting is arguably better for. I’ve made a few shitposting memes and the like that are five seconds long and uploaded unlisted just to share with friends that get immediately flagged and banned for DMCA that I’ve taken to just self hosting them. They’re getting like three views anyway because the world was never meant to see them.
  People sharing videos with friends and family seems like a problem that’s already solved, if you really don’t want to use YouTube. Big channels that get millions of views are the real issue.
  
  It's not just file size either. Video basically has several different things going on, where improving on one aspect tends to require compromise on the others:
  Resolution
  Frame rate
  Quality
  Bit rate (file size)
  Encoding complexity
  Decoding complexity (which affects battery life of mobile devices viewing the content)
  Robustness for dropped or corrupted data
  Over time, the standards improve, but generally benefit from specialized hardware for decoding (thus making decoding complexity a bit more complicated when serving a lot of people with different hardware).
  Netflix, for example, serves a small number of very large files to many, many people on demand. That means they benefit from high encoding complexity, even if it shaves off a tiny bit of file size, because spending a few extra hours on encoding a movie that's 10mb smaller is worth it if 10 million people watch that movie, as that's 100 terabytes of traffic saved.
  But YouTube/Facebook and the others with a lot of user-submitted video, they're ingesting hundreds of hours of content every minute, chopping it up into like 5 different resolutions/quality levels.
  Then YouTube has a shitload of processes for determining which video gets which treatment. A random upload of a kid's birthday party might get a few hundred views at most, so YouTube cares less about file size and more about saving that computational complexity up front. But if a video hits 1000 views in a few minutes, that means it's on the cusp of going viral, and it might be worth re-encoding with the high cost encodings that save space/bandwidth.
  If a service doesn't scale, it won't be necessary to have that kind of complexity in the service. But those videos will load a bit slower, use a little more battery and bandwidth to watch, be more prone to skipping/distortion, etc.
  Video is hard. User submitted video is harder. Especially at scale.
- All of the above costs money. A lot of money. So much money that only a shitty mega corporation with no moral scruples would ever be able to afford to run the platform, let alone turn a profit.
  It's cheaper than you think.
  Some estimates put the total number of YouTube Videos around 500 million, and I'll say each video takes 200MB to store every version. That's only an extra $24 million a year. With back-end processing and other stuff I'll bump that total up to $2.0 billion a year for hosting fees, if you were to run YouTube on AWS.
- It requires a truly astonishing amount of technical expertise, infrastructure, monitoring, throughput capacity, not to mention sheer compute and storage, to keep it running.
  Indeed. Yet they still add stupid features like 8K video and high-bitrate 1080p. What the heck are they doing? Who needs more then 720p anyways?
  
  An engineer who needs a line item on their CV to get promoted.
  Seriously though, 1080p is not a lot if you're on a big monitor or TV. At 720p you can start pixel counting on some displays
- How about people just host videos on their own infrastructure or rented VPS? Honestly the idea that creators should get paid by YouTube/Twitch/etc confuses me. Those services if anything should be charging creators money as they are providing them computing resources.
- All of the above costs money. A lot of money. So much money that only a shitty mega corporation with no moral scruples would ever be able to afford to run the platform, let alone turn a profit. And so here we are.
  Or that’s what we’re led to believe. Someone could say the same for an OS, but we have many open source alternatives. We need an open source alternative to YouTube, and perhaps with some innovation that may be possible. You don’t need storage, for example, if content is just streamed in a p2p manner, even with a time delay so people can watch something whenever
  Edit: some context https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/P2PTV
  For the idiots downvoting explain why, or I’ll just believe you’re YouTube shills
  
  Your equating the software development with the running costs.
  People have made OS and people have made YouTube alternatives. But that's nothing compared to the quantity of servers, networking infrastructure, storage, power usage, and labor to maintain and update it.
  P2p isn't a valid alternative because that's just shifting costs onto your users. Just because a central entity isn't taking on the burden of cost doesn't mean the cost isn't there.
  Pictures and text are rather low usage, both in storage and networking but video isn't. Especially when millions are watching videos at the same time.
  
  Not downvoting, but I just think you're way too optimistic. It's like believing we, humans, could stop fighting wars. Sure, theoretically. But the difference between theory and the practical is that in theory there's no difference.
  
  For the idiots downvoting explain why, or I’ll just believe you’re YouTube shills
  Fuck you.
  
  Storage and maintenance. OSes are miniscule in comparison to the data YouTube stores, we're in the multiple exabyte range here. Someone's got to pay for it somewhere. Floatplane might be a decent comparison as to what a FOSS YouTube might look like - they have a dedicated dev team and charge per channel to view, following more than a couple of creators would become cost prohibitive for me personally.
  You absolutely need storage in a P2P network, the data doesn't just magic into existence, not only that but if there are insufficient peers in the network then you're not watching the video, smaller creators and older content would likely suffer as a result.
  
  peertube uses webtorrents. it's viable. it works. owncast is fully self-hosted. it works. all the people downvoting are repeating a talking point, and have never implemented these projects.
  
  We can barely keep Mastodon / Lemmy instnaces floating that host text, gifs and pictures.
  That doesn't include paying the content creators.
  Just because you're getting shit for free, doesn't mean that other people will want to do it for you for free.
  Fuck you.
  
  Someone could say the same for an OS, but we have many open source alternatives.
  An OS requires significantly less resources. The only online features you need for an OS is a website to market the OS and host ISO's. Then you need a server to distribute packages to users. Packages which are significantly smaller then HD or 4K videos
  
  Considering I remember some project in the past tried something like that in the past and found that because you can't control when people log off you can't guarantee files will transfer in one piece not to mention how expensive it was having everyone's computer constantly using Internet and computing stuff. For that reason I think the main problem here is that we are trying to centralize video sharing onto one platform. I instead propose we encourage people to make their own platforms. Like if you want to watch idk PewDiePie you go to PewDiePie.com and encourage people to explore the Internet instead of just sitting on one site. I suppose as a step in the right direction I propose that we get people to make online data bases using laptops/desktops that have nothing but xzamp and the videos you wish to upload to the web. Then we all collectively promote a sort of aggregation site that promotes everyones videos that way the aggregation site only has to store a bunch of hyperlinks and handle all the traffic while you the content creator just have to handle the traffic your content generates now the only challenge is making this idea profitable because if content creators can't profit few if any will make content and if the aggregation platform can't break eaven then we are back to square one of no one knowing where to look for content.
  
  a) I downvoted you b) I am a YouTube shill c) Fuck you
  that means I get money from them, right? I'm still waiting for my check. YouTube is the best.

All this enshittification might be good for me. I think i might start reading more books instead of watching youtube. Fuck you google, I'll never buy yt premium nor watch you ads.
- Yeah that's what I did when reddit shit the bed. I'm spending the free time with books and getting back into gaming. It's an improvement really.
  
  I can't point to any one hobby that truly picked up my reddit time, but I do feel like everything I'm doing in its place is more productive
- They'll put ads in books too.
  
  You do know physical books exist, dont you? :) I did not say ebook.
- Genuinely asking, why won’t you ever buy yt premium?
  
  Not OP, but I would definitely pay for premium if they offered a lower cost version that was only ad-free YouTube. But I won't pay when they justify the higher cost with forced bundling of other services I am not interested in and have no use for, e.g., YouTube Music.
  
  $13.99/mo is pretty steep, and realistically I'd have to get it for my wife too which effectively doubles the price and would make it the most expensive streaming service I've ever subscribed to (behind SeriusXM which at least has to finance literal satellites in space and delivers me radio when I'm in dead zones with no cell towers). More than my budget right now will allow for sure (I just cancelled every subscription after rechecking my budget)

If they do that and Adblock doesn’t work anymore, the solution is quite simple - stop watching YouTube. Sure, there will be some content creators that I will miss. Maybe it will be time to move to Nebula.
- Nebula is paid, you can also pay YouTube and remove ads.
  Nebula is cheaper but it also has a very small fraction of the content that YouTube has. So I really don’t see why moving to another paid service with less content is a solution for anyone.
  
  Nebula has most of the content creators I would pay money to support, and more of that money would be going back to them.
  
  Similar reason as people moving from Spotify to Tidal. The creators get paid more per view on Nebula than on YouTube.
  Besides, I imagine there's quite an overlap of people that watch the type of content that goes up on Nebula and the people that are willing to pay for the content.
  
  Nebula is only cheaper if your currency is the USD
  
  Nebula isn't supported by ads AFAIK though
- It's not like I'm running out of new content from a lot of different directions. I previously said that when YT ads become unavoidable, I'll just stop going to that site. Someone accused me of trying to dunk on them by saying they'd lose me, but the real answer is that I have too much content to fit in to get to all of it already. If watching content becomes frustrating, there's other content that won't frustrate me as much. At least for now. It'll all turn to shit on a long enough timeline.
  And, you know, as someone else mentioned, there're books. I like to read and currently do my reading at a park or on days when I'm asked to be in the office. If I run out of brain-rotting content to watch at home, maybe I'll start reading at home more. Though I'll probably find other ways to fuck off because I'm good at getting distracted, hence why I read away from home anyway.
- If ad block breaks I no longer consider YouTube videos to be content. They're just ads.

- PeerTube. Except nobody's going to use it until everybody uses it.
  
  Kind of bootstrap paradox
  
  I just went and looked to see if peertube is remotely viable.. technically seems working. I found an app on f-droid, got on a bigger instance (1k users seems about the biggest). Videos load and play. There isn't much content at all. A real shame. So yeah we don't have an option
  
  I upload my videos there. Started off because professor wanted us to record ourselves then I just uploaded whatever. It's not much but it's honest work.
  
  PeerTube doesn't have the allure given by the chance of getting paid for what you upload
- ...PeerTube!

it hurts so much that it is VERY hard to replicate youtube given the insane upkeep costs. I would leave in a fucking heartbeat but so many good creators only post there
- Yeah, I keep hearing that Youtube has probably never made a net profit.
  
  Not because they couldn't but because they willfully operated at a loss to quench potential competition. The reason there is no replacement on YT is that all the content is on YT and creators won't shift to other platforms because their whole audience is on YT as well.
  YT is not a video sharing platform anymore, it's a market. And that's why it sucks so bad.
  
  There's no way to know, Google doesn't report YouTube profit separately in their financial statements. The closest department is "Google services" which does have a 34% profit margin.
  
  And this will be more expensive to implement than regular ads, thus margins will be even thinner...
- it's hard to replicate, has high upkeep, big authors' community. it seems YouTube deserves to be paid despite all the negativity towards it.
  
  I could sit here and throw out all the bad shit YouTube's done but quite honestly the fact that its owned by google is enough justification to not give them money lmao.
- Self hosting.

This is where we need to start harnessing AI for our advantage rather than corporations. Have it scan the videos as it buffers and automatically remove the ads.
- This seems like it ought to be possible? Seems that way to me as a lay person anyway.
  
  comskip.exe does it well on free to air TV, but I suspect the methods it uses might not work so well for Sponsorblock etc. That said, maybe a hash can be made of the video every ten seconds, and when the playback hash differs, skip that ten second block. Computationally intensive I suspect, but might work for embedded ads.
- And then Google sues the AI provider to stop them from doing that.
  AI is not our tool, it is a corporate tool, for corporate profits, that they deign to let us dabble with, but only when it suits them.
  
  There are plenty of open source ai, especially these single purpose one.
  
  You could probably train something like that on semi-reasonable consumer hardware. Ads often have a very distinctive style and tone, and you need only a single output - the probability of it being any given second being an ad. It would probably take a lot to run though, you better hope the people who install the extension have good PCs. And, it would probably never get 100% accurate, you'd have to put up with still seeing some ads and having to rewind when it skips over valid video.

I've decided I'm going to do freelance ads for free for exposure on a comment by comment basis while I drink this refreshing iced cold Coca Cola.
- That sounds like the perfect beverage to keep my reactions razor sharp while I enjoy the split-second thrills of playing League of Legends with my attractive, ethnically diverse friends.

When I see an ad on the internet, I purposefully look away to not look at it.
It is deeply ingrained in my brain to never let ads win.
I don't know how my parents are doing it with cable TV.
- You should start using an adblocker then, like uBlock Origin.
  BTW I do that too
  
  Of course, I use uBlock Origin.
  But sometimes, I'm on a fresh install or on a friend's computer and I forget that I don't have an ad blocker.

It was about time, was always strange that Twitch did it first, and just like over there I'm hopeful some clever people will still make scripts capable of blocking ads.
- there's scripts to block twitch ads?
  and nobody told me???
  
  Mostly just hide video and mute audio until it's over. Alternate player for twitch is the name of the extension.
  
  I use video swap new from the GitHub the other commenter posted.

Oh well.
This sucks but they need to keep turning up the dial so more people jump over to peertube.
- is there a way to experience peertube that comes even close to youtube? i took a look at some instances and they're always like here's a page that looks like it was made in 1993 and only had videos of one dude.
  
  Not that I've really found.
  It's like lemmy before may last year - just weird
  
  there are alternative apps to access peer tube instances, like for lemmy. even newpipe has support for one of the bigger ones
- As much as I want something like that to happen I don't see it happening for video platforms. Since most people wouldn't switch platforms from YouTube since the creators they like are on YouTube and those creators won't switch platforms cause they won't be able to make a living on another platform unless it's another big one like TikTok. The only alternatives to YouTube that have really worked are more niche subscription platforms like Nebula and Floatplane. Which only work as an additional platform to YouTube as a way to get some extra stable income that isn't ad dependent.
  
  I agree in that its probably not the right time in 2024.
  I also don't think bittorrent is the right tech.
  That said, as yt becomes more toxic there's more demand for alternatives.

Sorry.
They could have fucking paid me...
- Next up: ad block detect ad videos and just skips over that.
  
  It's certainly possible (e.g. take a hash of the first few frames of the ad and you can detect it pretty much anywhere and cut the right amount out of the stream).
  But it's a lot more involved than just hiding an element on a webpage or blocking the same bit of JS every time.
  And while I can see ways to automate it (take two streams for different users, compare differences, etc), it will likely end up being quite intensive on resources.
  The only long term solution is "stop using Youtube". We need some fediverse style P2P replacement, where we pay for the videos with our outgoing bandwidth, and we're not there yet. Being a trillion dollar corporation sure does give you a lot more options in how you host things.
- Twitch did it already, it’s not impossible
  
  and twitch is still adblockable. it does look harder though, it bugs out sometimes. i'm sure there will be a great solution, there always is.
  and fuck google while i'm at it, adblocking is only growing because of how egregious ads are getting.

Creation of a derivative work without author's consent solely for the purpose of monetisation - sounds legally dubious to me as you couldn't claim fair use.
- You think Google didn't already think of that? From Youtube's ToS:
  Right to Monetize
  You grant to YouTube the right to monetize your Content on the Service (and such monetization may include displaying ads on or within Content or charging users a fee for access). This Agreement does not entitle you to any payments. Starting November 18, 2020, any payments you may be entitled to receive from YouTube under any other agreement between you and YouTube (including for example payments under the YouTube Partner Program, Channel memberships or Super Chat) will be treated as royalties. If required by law, Google will withhold taxes from such payments.
  
  Displaying ads on or within - definitely
  Modifying content and distributing the modified content? That's a trickier one.
- Nice thought, but precedence has been around 80 plus years with TV ads...
  :(
  
  Not technically true - the movie reel itself wasn't altered.
  It was swapped out for ads, and the same is true for digital formats. Here, they'd be actively modifying and distributing a modified file.
- From the average viewer's perspective, it hasn't changed from before, unless you're using an adblocker. And as youtube wasn't sued before, I doubt they will be now.

Damn! I wonder if yt-dlp will get a workaround for this.
- It might be doable automatically. If they inject the ads at the time of viewing and not before storing the video, then it's possible that two downloads just a few sconds apart will have different ads. So if yt-dlp downloads twice and compares the two files, theoretically it can get a pretty good idea with high confidence of what content is ad and what content is... well... content.
  That technique of course would require multiple downloads of the same file, but yeah. I suppose yt-dlp could also keep a backlog of "fingerprints"/"signatures" of ads its seen in the past that can be used to remove ads from later downloads with the same ads without having to download twice.
  Also, even absent such a technique as what I just described, programs like NewPipe and such will still probably allow for manually skipping ads where I'm sure the official YouTube app or the web interface would deny/prevent skipping.
  Edit: Actually, it also occurs to me that in order to make ads not skippable, the server will have to send messages to the *official clients saying "and here's the portion of the video you can't skip." In which case yt-dlp or NewPipe or whatever could just be like "oh, cool, that's the bits I need to skip atuomatically." And if the server doesn't send that metadata, then all ads will be skipable on the official clients. (Though I guess I'm assuming that they'll move exclusively to these injected-into-the-video-stream ads and away from the ads as they work now.)
- I doubt it. You'll have to edit your videos after download. Learn ffmpeg and you can probably pipe the content in there and cut it out in one line.
  
  With Avidemux, cutting videos is super easy

A funny thing. I used the "Ad Nauseam" adblocker for a time. This adblocker's gimmick is that it clicks the ad while hiding it from the user to cause monetary damage to the advertiser. It also collects the ads and displays them in an "add vault". I did browse the add vault from time to time.
- Also. We have ai now. I don't see it being so difficult to train a model that can recognize ads.
  
  Yes. What I'm also wondering though, why hasn't Youtube started injecting ads directly into the video feed earlier?

If it’s part of the video, and one can always skip in videos, couldn’t people skip this as well?
If they use some blocking, then ad blockers will just become skip enablers.
Having to fast forward a bit when you click on the video seems doable. But what if they put it at random spots in the vid?
- I guess it depends. Theoretically yes it's possible. But when they do this basically on the fly something like sponsorblock will be difficult, as it's User-maintained, and all the timestamps added from them can be invalidated when the video stream changes...
  But I'm almost sure people find a way, especially ad blocking is done by a lot of technically affine people.
- The video UI is independent of this, they can show an ad-specific timeline or even disable playback controls while the ad is visible.
  
  they can show an ad-specific timeline or even disable playback controls while the ad is visible.
  Which adblockers could detect (at least in browsers not infected with manifest v3) and use to skip the ads. 🤷‍♂️

So if the ad is injected directly into the stream does that mean users don't need an ad blocker and can just fast forward through the ads? I'm fine with that.
- I wish....
  
  If it's impossible to fast forward the ads, that means the timestamps of the ads have to be send to the browser, so adblock should be able to use that data.

I'm curious how this will affect creators. Now it is very obvious when YouTube is displaying an ad vs the content creator doing an ad read. If it becomes less obvious where the ad is coming from by injecting it into the stream, I wonder if they're hoping to shift some of the perception of excessive ads off of them.
- This isn't really representative of how server side ad injection works, it doesn't imply anything being different about the UI when it comes to ads. Many of your favorite streaming apps use SSAI, you still get the ad indicators.
  It's just that the content and the ads are both coming from the same source, so that makes it challenging to block ads by deny-listing ad serving domains, the same infrastructure is serving both.

YouTube's also been experimenting with built-in sponsorblock for Premium subscribers, which I find weird.
- That's one of my issues with premium, I expect no ads with it but you would still get all the sponsorship stuff which are ads.
- That would be pretty outrageous given that those sponsorships are direct income for the content creators, and Google has no say in it. That feature would be Google directly harming every single content creator to increase their own profits, while the creators get absolutely nothing.
  
  Not necessarily true. Premium subscribers are worth a ton more to content creators because they get a cut of the premium price for every premium view. And it's not insignificant compared to a non-premium viewer.
  For a non-premium viewers to provide value to a sponsorship they need to either use an affiliate link and purchase, or at least look. Creators often don't get paid for viewers that don't click the link. And only a small percent of the users is going to do that. And even non-premium viewers already use ad and sponsor block.
  Don't be confused - content creators would likely benefit greatly from a higher percentage of premium subscribers on their videos. They are guaranteed income, and sponsors are often a lot more volatile.

Wow, thanks youtube that's so cool.

Youtube trying not to show ads for 2 seconds(impossible).

Honest question: why isn't video distributed like podcasts?
- Youtube became big before hosting video became in any way approachable for a small operation, it was a VC-funded project to corner a market incurring massive operational losses and then they got bought up by google who funded further massive losses and now they're trying to cash in.
  I mean it's not like we didn't torrent back in the days but noone thought about building a creator platform out of it.
- Where you download an episode and then listen to it? Likely due to bandwidth restrictions, early file formats, and hardware limitations.
  The first issue, bandwidth limitations, results in the download taking a very long time. Video takes up more storage and therefore takes more time to transfer the data. People may become bored, run out of time, or need to pause the download and restart it later. Faster connections help, but...
  Many early video formats did not handle partial files well. You needed to wait to download the entire thing to watch it. Some formats can break the file into smaller pieces and reduce how many you need to download at once, but then you need hardware to piece the final thing back together seamlessly.
  And the limit on hardware that can piece together the video files in real time limits the accessibility of playback. You also need more pre-processing to get the videos into the right format.
  Better hardware just pushes the issue to bandwidth. Bandwidth improvements push the issue to the storage hardware. Better formats improve things for hardware and storage, but usually at the cost of quality.
  
  This is a great point, not sure why you're downvoted. Something else I thought of is the fact that YouTube is very good adjusting streaming quality on the fly, meaning unless everything is pre-cached it would be difficult to stream the way most podcast apps can "stream" audio by essentially downloading it faster than it can be listened to.
- Is there an equivalent of a torrent site like nyaa.si but for videos of youtube channels?

Okay, so what we now need is a browser plugin that skips ahead 15 or 30 seconds, mapped to a hotkey.
- On mobile.
  Because on desktop, you can just tap your arrow keys a couple of times. Skipping around a video on a mobile device with nothing but a touch screen -- which is where the vast majority of users are viewing -- is a pain in the ass.
  So yeah. Just put a Big Red Button in the corner for people to press. Skip.
  
  You can skip on mobile. Just double tap on right or left.
  Although I assume YouTube will disable that for ads.

Imagine if we all just dropped YouTube on the spot and YouTube bit the dust. They wouldn't be giving away all their ad pushing software to a competitor, so the competitor would just be better for not having it.
- We'd lose a super valuable resource and nobody can really compete with them for free.
  
  Yeah, it took many years, of huge losses, to get youtube to be profitable. Losses only another megacorp could absorb.

So is it over? 😭

I wonder if this is related to youtube being completely useless with firefox and ublock origin, sponsor block. It plays the ads just fine (and some of these ads are an hour long) but when it gets to the end it just stops.
- It's directly related to YouTube getting a new CEO. According to some of the content creators I've watched they noticed an extreme change with ads essentially the moment he took over.
  Same old story. New CEO needs to ~~make shitty changes that will affect profits down the line after he uses his golden parachute~~ prove himself worthy of a gigantic salary/bonus.

oh so that’s why i was seeing ads flash by last night

This actually sounds like a perfect use case for AI/ML, similar to https://github.com/xenova/sponsorblock-ml

i pay for everything in cash to avoid being tracked.
i use a multi-hop VPN and privacy browser
i use a private email services
i am terrified of being tracked and use linux
The last consumer product i bought was a probably-stolen bottle of head and shoulders that was illegally being re-sold by a poor vendor who lacked a permit. At the time, i did not have a cell phone with me and my wallet has RFID blocking build into it. I paid for it in cash. I kept it in a bag and showed it to no one until I used it in secret.
I finally saw an ad on YouTube after YEARS of not seeing that bullshit.
Those mother-fuckers showed me a head and shoulders ad. How the fuck did they know?
Fuck YouTube, fuck head and shoulders. I've decided to never wash my hair again, shave my head, and get as much dandruff as possible. I am just done.
- This could be a copy-pasta if it isn't already one
  
  what is a copy-pasta?

I wonder if there's any recourse for content creators having ads directly added into their video. If an ad shows something illegal, is it the Ad creator, Google or the video creator who are responsible? It seems like moving the ads from a third party site to being inside the video file itself changes who is responsible for it, but IANAL.

Fedierse admins get your PeerTube instances ready, they're coming to move

holding the gate with freetube for now i wonder if and how they are gonna solve that problem its not a matter of if its get solved, its a matter of when

Maybe we could use some kind of AI filter to remove ads from the videostream? Like, analyzing the audio spectrum and blocking segments with very sudden changes audio-embedding vectors?

I wonder if these will hit freetube. seems likely

Dude needs to say less. Don’t do YT work for them ffs 🤦‍♂️

Nobody should be going on any of Google's data mining sites in the first place. Fuck YouTube and if that means we have to stop watching shitty "content creator" videos and random "funny" bullshit, good.
- YouTube is unmatched for some music content and a lot of other stuff.
  
  For now- and they known it. Which is exactly why they know they can do whatever the fuck they want and everyone will eat their shit up.
  Everyone bailed on Twitter when it went to shit and fucked everyone over.
  I guess the line is drawn over good music videos…
- Yeah. I don’t really get it. People constantly bitch and complain about YouRube, but the moment you suggest they just stop using it, they freak the fuck out and lose their minds.
  Got downvoted into the dirt for suggesting a while ago in another one of the million posts about how YouRube is fucking everyone over.
  It’s Stockholm syndrome. They’d prefer to whine and bitch to anyone that will listen, but they’re not willing to do what’s necessary to stop it from happening.

You don't have to watch YouTube.
- Ohhh nooo someone forced you to watch a minute long ad. How could you ever endure life after that
- Are there any good alternatives for YouTube? I seriously don't know.
  
  You could read a book. That's a good alternative
- Who needs video on the internet? Could've saved the star wars kid a lot of pain of we'd realized that from the start

How is this enshitification?
You're using third-party tools to circumvent the thing that the platform is held together by.
And the platform is now circumventing the third-party tool.
Pay for premium if you don't want ads. The servers aren't free.
Or, yknow, use an alternative. But you won't, because Mr. Beast and ASMR ear lickers aren't there.
- If your youtube experience has been all about ignoring ad blocking, your experience has still been thoroughly enshitified.
  Once upon a time you might get a single ad before the video, and be able to skip it if it went over 5 seconds.
  Over time, we have gotten multiple commercial breaks, skip button being per-ad instead of per-break, the delay before skip extending to 30 seconds or no skip being allowed at all. Ads slipped into the stream sounds like ad skipping would be totally gone and I bet there's no "ads capped at a reasonable length" either.
  Of course, as this has gone on, the content is increasingly just not worth it. So many titles that I know could be answered in like 10 seconds show a length of 40 minutes or so, and it's generally not "oh just a segue into a more engaging broader topic", it's stupid meandering and padding because long videos are somehow better for the creator. So if I see a youtube title that intrigues me, I google to find the wikipedia article they are probably sourcing instead.
  
  Yes, overtime you'll get more ads, as the server cost increases. But you're not watching 360p content on a 1024*1024 monitor any more.
  There are more and more content creators, creating 4K content every day. Server costs goes up.
  IF you don't like ads, you have the option to buy premium, to pay the server costs / content creators / staff.
  It's not enshitification, since you get more, high-quality (figuratively and literally) entertainment / whatever.

Stop this tantrum throwing and just buy premium.
Hosting/streaming videos is not free.
If you watch yt at least 10 hours a month then it's good deal.
- Stop this tantrum throwing and just buy premium.
  No. I don’t think I will.
- Please watch this ad or pay to remove the ad, in order to submit your useful response.
- YouTube used to host and stream videos for free, without ads, for years.
  
  They operated at a loss just for this reason. Years of loss revenue to trick people into using the service and building a user base only to pull the rug out from under us and go ad crazy. They did this to themselves, we got used to being ad free so now they think we will just roll over and accept the ads. Too bad there wasn't a way to sue companies for operating at a loss on purpose to artificially create a market then fundamentally change the product after the fact but as it was a "free" service there is only one stakeholder.
  
  And? You have no idea what their costs are that much video storage and bandwidth. Do they ever delete videos or just keep adding more and more.
  
  I received this thing which costs money for free for years and I am entitled to continue receiving it for free.
  (If yt was publicly funded or essential service I would agree. It is not.)
- I wouldn't piss on Google if it was on fire. They will never get another cent from me. They are a charter member of the Tech Axis of Evil.
- Took me less than a minute of googling to find "hey, I'm paying for premium, why am I seeing adverts?" and it turns out there are a whole pile of exceptions that means YT can show you ads even when you're paying them not to.
  
  I personally have had premium for ~3 years and I’ve never seen an ad. Sounds like FUD to me. I can’t believe I’m defending Google of all companies, I no longer use any of their products including Gmail, Search & Maps.
  But nothing comes close to YouTube, it’s just them and a bunch of also-rans, and it’s literally the only streaming service I pay for because it simply cannot be replicated in any other way.
- They're not getting a penny from me while they host hate on their platform, for one.
  Second, fuck em. Am I supposed to care about Google? The company that routinely ruins everything good in every product they've ever had? Am I to assume their bullshit ends once they get my credit card?
  I paid good money for Google Play Music for years only for them to destroy it. I paid for Google Drive for years only for them to break the desktop syncing functions. I've been paying for Android since it started, and they have routinely broken my ability to use my own phone the way I please, and now they actively punish me for it.
  And you want me to keep paying them?
  Nah. I'm not helping them. If they can't afford to host it for free, fine. Let it burn.
- Apparently this was a compromise with music publishers, which is why YouTube Music is force bundled with it. They insisted that if YouTube was going to have a premium service it had to pay out music licensing because so much music is already on YouTube.
- Thing is, ads are fine, ads that are mandatory and break the experience are antithetical to the very notion of user centric media. This is not a linear broadcast medium.
- Youtube is already being paid in my data and I support the creators I watch already. So no thanks.
- it is not about the money. i refuse to watch youtube while logged in, because google is a company that doesn't respect people's privacy
- If google was taking like ten or twenty percent off the top after creators collected their money, I would do this in a heartbeat. The simple fact is I don’t want to give every cent of my money to google while legitimate artists don’t get paid. Especially when they do everything they can to NOT pay those artists now.
  
  What are you talking about? YouTube pays out more than any other platform. You can hate on them for lots of stuff, but creator support isn’t one of them.
- It all begins with a compromise.
  I'm old, old enough to remember YouTube before it had ads. Hell, old enough to remember it before Google bought it out.
  The first compromise was banner ads, they were the first and they were the norm.
  Banner ads got too invasive, so we blocked them. YouTube came a-crying.
  We compromised, we allowed an advert on the first video we watched. It was skippable of course.
  We compromised again, we allowed more ads to creep in, all skippable.
  Again, with unskippable ads we compromised and allowed short 5 or 10 seconds ones.
  And here we are, "pay premium or deal with an unwatchable ad infested mess". We block the ads because they are enshittification - they denigrate the service we signed up for, and if Google didn't have the power to keep altering the deal, they'd have voided their contract with us years ago.
  So no, I'm not going to pay you for wonders made by dedicated people - you harvested and sold my data years ago, and my Hotmail inbox's unending wall of spam is testament to your unrelenting greed.
  I did my time, got shafted in the deal, no more compromises.
- premium just removes the ads. I would pay for and use google services that removed the tracking and spying too, or only. that will never happen because the spying is the point. good luck paying to the people that also spies on you and gaslight you about it.
- Hosting/streaming videos is not free.
  Neither is creating content. Argue all you want on how Google is evil and doesn't deserve the money, 50% of the revenue is still going to creators and ad-blockers do cut into there paychecks.
  Also doesn't make sense longing for the days of ad-free YouTube. Besides the fact it was unsustainable and would've gone the way of vine after a few years, it was just worse. It was full of 2 minute compilations of guys getting hit in the balls at 240p, not the 1080p 10 minute video essays with research that people have become accustomed to. That kind of quality costs money.
  
  Neither is creating content. Argue all you want on how Google is evil and doesn’t deserve the money, 50% of the revenue is still going to creators and ad-blockers do cut into there paychecks.
  Yes, and a lot of creators I follow said they wouldn’t be able to do the stuff they do if it wasn’t for Patreon, because Youtube pays shit.
  If a creator whose main audience is on your platform earns more from an external donation site than from what you’re paying them, there’s something deeply wrong with your system and no one should support it.
- Stfu. Google tracked us across websites for years without our consent. We don't owe anything to Google.
- Man, if Google wasn't aggressively trying to make the experience of using their site for free as painful as possible, then I'd probably be happy to pay. But as long as their business model is making things as shit as possible for people who don't pay instead of trying to actually provide some real value for those who do, they can fuck themselves.
- Oh Yea, Premium. Bro then pay for me too.