YouTube is experimenting with server-side ads

What took them so long?

Anyway. I'm sure the adblocking Industry will adapt.

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 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.

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).

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.

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.

Goodbye YouTube. Hello…?

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

Oh well.

This sucks but they need to keep turning up the dial so more people jump over to peertube.

1. Sorry.

2. They could have fucking paid me...

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.

Damn! I wonder if yt-dlp will get a workaround for this.

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.

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?

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'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.

Wow, thanks youtube that's so cool.

YouTube's also been experimenting with built-in sponsorblock for Premium subscribers, which I find weird.

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

Okay, so what we now need is a browser plugin that skips ahead 15 or 30 seconds, mapped to a hotkey.

Honest question: why isn't video distributed like podcasts?

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.

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.

So is it over? 😭

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.

I wonder if these will hit freetube. seems likely

Permanently Deleted

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?

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.

You don't have to watch YouTube.

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.

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.