YouTube's crackdown on tools that block advertising continues with server-side ad injection. The developer of...
YouTube is testing server-side ad injection to counter ad blockers, integrating ads directly into videos to make them indistinguishable from the main content.
This new method complicates ad blocking, including tools like SponsorBlock, which now face challenges in accurately identifying and skipping sponsored segments.
The feature is currently in testing and not widely rolled out, with YouTube encouraging users to subscribe to YouTube Premium for an ad-free experience.
Go right ahead. If they actually manage to do it, that will be the end of my YouTube watching. Except on extremely rare occasions. I don't need it badly enough to deal with that.
On the one hand the ads suck, we have a good way to bypass them and I certainly don't want to watch Youtube videos if the ads are unskippable.
On the other hand, if I'm being honest I watch more Youtube than Netflix or Amazon Prime and I sure give those guys money for a subscription. If I counted the cost per watched minute, Youtube Premium would make way more sense than a bunch of subs I do pay.
But I also don't want to watch a Youtube that is a paid service. That was never the point. The reason I engage with it so much is it's supposed to be UGC, not TV.
So yeah, torn. Youtube is very weird and the relationship we all have with it is super dysfunctional, creators and viewers alike. We made a very strange future and now we have to deal with it.
I wouldn't mind sitting through an ad or possibly another one mid-video.
Small issue with that for me is that their ads are privacy nightmare but what isn't these days..
Biggest issue is that their ads are ridiculously annoying and so inappropriate. They just don't even try. They are sexist, fraudulent, and often times plain illegal.
So unless they fix these issues, I won't watch them without ads blocked.
With the state of AI and computer vision, and legal requirements to disclose ads, i wonder if a ytdl + editing script will he the nicest way to watch at some point
Why should I pay or watch ads to listen to someone tell me I need to
• like and subscribe
• who’s sponsoring them
• a life story
... before getting to the small percentage of possible useful information therein?
I've taken to using Ai to summarize video content just to be able to review if the video even contains an answer or information which is relevant.
I know I'm just one use case, that I don't watch a ton of other content. It's usually how to do something or fix something or configuration of something. I've sat through countless ads and videos which just wasted my time and left me frustrated trying to find information.
This wouldn't be a problem IF content creators were paid a fair share. I wouldn't actually mind ads nearly as much knowing that the channels I enjoy watching were getting paid reasonably for every ad that I watched. Google has the technology to make it possible.
It sounds like this would be easy for tools like SponsorBlock to label and skip segments as ads. However, it would be tough on smaller channels where people might not be labeling them as such.
How likely we can defeat it with something similar to YT's own ContentID system? We download a tons of ads, process it with feature extraction, and match it on the fly to carve out those ads. A similar system to SB can be used to let people mark where the ads is, process, and share.
I will say, I don’t know what they’ve done but it’s been fucking up my casual circumvention nicely. Now I just get forced into almost 10 minutes of ads every time, and the ad bars shows up underneath videos, the end cards at the wrong time…
I always wondered why they haven't been doing it from the start, seams like it is not as simple as I imagine.
People will take it, there is no other option and G is working hard not to allow another video platform.
Problem is ads they are playing are awful and loud. We will make way to silent them and black them out, it is not hard.
Bigger problem is content they are pushing is getting bad and is pushing creators into burnout. And I don't want to see videos companies are creating, but want individual contributions.
I don’t get why so many people begrudge YouTube for trying make money. They serve up 5TB of video data every second. Somebody’s got to pay for all of that. They know ads suck, that’s why they sell no ad subscriptions.
It seems that Youtube's IT department has decided to utilize the budget and show investors that they are not getting paid for nothing. After all, Youtube is only testing a new type of advertising, and there are already a dozen solutions to the problem in the comments.
Don't get why they don't just embed them in the middle like a few growing and actually good channels I watch do with their content.
I just fast-forward but they're embedded in the content so there's not really a way to "block" them but I don't mind skipping if im not interested like 45-60 secs.
Ads are the worst at the start and more tolerable in the middle, altho that is reversed for music where the content needs to maintain continuity
After seeing all the edge-AI stuff being shown by Apple at WWDC, I started wondering how long before people created apps that can download video in background, detect ads using AI, and then create a clean, cached version for consumption. Since it's all device-side, there would be no way to detect or block it.