YouTube has been spotted testing server-side ads, which could pose a problem to ad blockers.
www.youtube.com##+js(json-prune-fetch-response, playerAds adPlacements adSlots playerResponse.playerAds playerResponse.adPlacements playerResponse.adSlots, , propsToMatch, /player?)Click on uBO icon > ⚙ Dashboard button > Add the filter(s) in “My filters” pane > ✓ Apply changes > Open new tab and test again.
from the reddit page idk if it works but most comments say it does
and if it does, that’s fucking hilarious
this will have taken a team months of work and one ublock dev just threw it in the toilet within an hour
ok, so i added this code to my ublock origin filter list, then went to youtube, and the injected ads were still showing up in about half the vids. closed firefox, reopened, same. rebooted my win11 machine, now the injected ads are NOT showing up any longer. not sure if youtube switched it off because they’re still beta testing this bullshit or if the code is working but it SEEMS to be working. if it stops i’ll come back to edit this comment. thanks for the tip man!
The ublock origin guys are wizards, I tell you…
I am amazed how they didn’t spell like others did in that market.
Prolly should donate.
So in theory… can reVanced come up with something like this,
NewPipe works, so I’m sure reVanced can/could do it as well. SmartTube (Android TV exclusive) also implemented it weeks ago, I never have seen a single ad.
This worked for me. Thanks!
👑
Thank you!
I stll haven’t get any ads with just stock ubo but when it does I’ll try this filter, thanks
Do I need to add this filter or are the uBO devs going to update the extension to include it ootb?
i’d be shocked if they didn’t update it but i just timed myself doing it and it took less than 10 seconds
I would rather pay an ad-block company a monthly subscription than give it to YouTube in blackmail. This will just be another salvo in a never ending war.
I used to pay for youtube premium. My logic being that I was using an adblocker anyway, and I wanted the content creators I watched to get some kind of revenue for my watchtime. Youtube stopped taking my money a while back, and I can’t be bothered to figure out why. These days, there’s so little content that I find interesting that I spend more time scrolling than I do actually watching videos. It’s only a matter of time until I just stop regularly going to youtube.
I paid for it until they basically doubled the price.
I paid for it before they removed Google Play Music. I was on one of the plans that was $8 for both Google Play Music and YouTube Red.
Too Much engagement slop being pumped into the feed and you can’t block offenders on teevee app…
WTF I lay for this. If I don’t want to see some clown, I should be able to block.
I report them for misconduct and it seems to reduce the spam but they come back in few weeks amyway…
Like no I don’t want linus, I don’t want brownlee apple whore… Just stop.
All of these issues have reportedly led to an increase in ad block uninstalls, leaving users with the choice of YouTube Premium or sitting still until that “skip ad” button appears.
Oh yes, I totally believe that people are opting to delete their ad blocker, that works on not just YouTube but the entire internet, simply because YouTube has become obstinate and difficult. Who the fuck wrote this article? And how much are they getting paid by Google? Do they really think we’re going to buy into this bullshit and follow suit?
it’s total bullshit. For example if you use ublock origin every now and again sure you might get ads that pop up, but AT MOST that lasts for a day, generally it’ll last a couple hours as the team at ublock update their lists to block ads again. There’s no need, literally zero need, to remove it from your extensions. and at worst, like I got yesterday, you’ll just see a black screen that buffers for a bit before the video plays. the ad is still blocked.
you can also circumvent most of this if you use freetube. OR if you just want music the youtube-dl script on linux. I also ditched spotify for youtube-dl as I can also download entire playlists with it.
if I understood it correctly UBlock original would be totally unable to block server side ads right now
Just FYI I have a user driven plugin that skips self promotion in videos, wirks like a charm most often. I bet someone will make one that detects and skips ads even if they’re added randomly.
Sponsorblock, i have it too. it might break if they add ads server side. though im sure sponsorblock and ublock would find workarounds. those workarounds dont exist yet tho afaik
It’s illegal not to disclose when something is paid promotion. Worst case scenario, the ad blocker blacks out your screen while it detects the ad notification and auto skips when it can. We’ll never actually be forced to watch the ads.
New article title. YouTube tests more ways of making their service shit and driving away users.
Edit: TIFO Scott Manley is on Odysee so i will start watching him there instead. One less yt channel is always a good thing
I mean, if you’re not paying for it, and they can’t advertise to you, what do they need you for?
To keep claiming they have x billion accounts…
There’s a big reason why these companies don’t remove the bots and willingly allow them to do whatever. It boosts their numbers to inflate their actual worth.
at least on my part, what they get from channel memberships (a whopping 30%) I’m sure exceeds the amount in ad revenue they lose from me
Does YouTube have competition? Your line of inquiry doesn’t mean much if the content is only on YouTube.
I’m not sure what point you think you’re making.
YouTube doesn’t want you visiting if they can’t either put ads in front of you or get you to subscribe to premium. I appreciate wanting to access YouTube without ads, but from where they’re sitting, if they scare you off with server side ads all the better.
Simply put: why care about their point of view? Google does not have your best interests in mind, often the opposite. There’s no where else to get almost all of the content, why do without or waste time with ads in this short life.
YouTube could fall off the face of the earth and I would probably see my quality of life improve slightly.
I don’t give a shit about Google. Perspective here is important when you threaten to leave the platform all together, as if they would care. If you’re one of the users they gain no ad revenue or subscription revenue from, they’re probably happy to see you go.
Could they be doing more to try to turn Adblock users in to paid subscribers? Sure. I’m not here to defend their methods. I’m just saying that if you’re not paying, and you can’t be served ads, they really don’t care if you continue to use the service or not.
I did pay for it but they massively increased the price while the recommendation algorithm was deliberately made worse and they wouldn’t stop pushing short format videos.
Youtube is google No 1 source of machine learning content. Fuckloads of video, audio and subtitle data they can use to feed and train their systems. Youtube itself doesnt need to make profit, thats just a bonus for them.
YouTube advertising is more than 10% of Google services total profits.
That’s not a bonus, that’s a dependant revenue stream.
Yeah no, that is revenue. Youtube is 10% of total Google/Alphabet revenue. That doesnt necessarily equate to 10% of profits.
YouTube: oh no, the freeloaders costing us money are going away, what will we ever do!?
FAFO
I would settle for something that simply turns the screen black and turns audio off whenever ads play. I don’t care if YouTube gets paid for it, I just want to decrease the value of ads and prevent myself from seeing them.
I don’t care if YouTube gets paid for it
Legally, YouTube have to detect if ads were blocked and and mark the impression as non-billable. They can’t charge advertisers for blocked ads.
They can only tell that something is blocked because the ad wasn’t loaded from a server. If it’s not loaded, then they can’t count it as “viewed.”
If the ad is just blacked over, it is still loaded, and they wouldn’t know.
If the ad is just blacked over, it is still loaded, and they wouldn’t know.
If it became a common thing, they’d have to add detection for it. Not necessarily to stop people doing it, but to ensure advertisers aren’t charged for invalid impressions. Practically every major ad network has adblocking detection; they just don’t always make it obvious (e.g. they might silently log it).
If they were effectively able to detect it they would be able to block you watching the rest of the video.
Well they also infest the client side since they likely developed the main part of your web browser, so they can still know there’s a black cover in the DOM.
I already put my phone down on my desk and turn the audio down whenever an ad pops up, they can’t tell it isn’t being viewed.
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I find it fascinating how media companies evolved their usage of ads over time. Used to be that the purpose of showing someone an ad was to get them to buy your product. Now, though, the companies who make the ads are paying to have them put on media networks who use the ads to annoy you into paying for a premium membership so you don’t have to see them. It’s double dipping.
Not sure how I would feel if I made an ad, and YouTube was saying to their users: “Yeah, you like that fucking ad? Super annoying, isn’t it? If you don’t pay me more money, I’m going to cram that annoying bullshit down your throat every time you want to watch a video. I’m going to put ads at the beginning of videos. I’m going to sprinkle them throughout the middle. Hell, I’m even going to make you watch ads after the video ends! You like that, you little bitch??”
It’s the evolution of the premium cable model. HBO, Showtime, etc. The upgraded cable tier has ad-free content and exclusives.
Yup. I’m old enough to remember when the selling point of cable TV was that it was ad-free. Then, of course, they started adding ads. And then they sold us premium channels that didn’t have ads. Now those have ads, too. You just can’t get away from them.
You just can’t get away from them.
Now i want Pirate Bay to play the theme of pirates of the Caribbean every time i load it up.
Gotta make that line go up somehow
It’s been seven years, and this sketch is just getting more and more fitting each day.
Let’s go full guerilla: Plugin that lets you select the first and the last frame of an ad, thus allows to report the beginning and length to a synced database. When that frame is found in the buffer, skip X frames ahead.
For ergonomics, the plugin should be able to spot cuts in the video so you can easily select the correct frames.
For resilience, maybe settle for similar frames. Thinking about anti-abuse, maybe require a minimum number of reports relative to the views (and ofc allow to not skip stuff).
Due to legal reasons, and to keep advertisers happy, YouTube is forced to display the “Advertisement” mark and a link to the advertisers website. With these, all the required information exists to allow an adblocker to skip any ads embedded in the video stream. No community flagging of ads is required.
YouTube is forced to display the “Advertisement” mark
They’re forced to identify that it’s an ad, but they don’t have to do it in a machine-readable way. There’s many different approaches to show an “Advertisement” or “Sponsored” label that appears to users but that blockers can’t easily find.
If they don’t link to the advertisers page, they’ll lose advertisers, which is the last thing YouTube would do. Legally, a video-embedded “Advertisement” indicator could work, but the link to the advertisers page remains.
Let’s go full guerilla: Plugin that lets you select the first and the last frame of an ad, thus allows to report the beginning and length to a synced database. When that frame is found in the buffer, skip X frames ahead.
This would fit in well with SponsorBlock, which already does the same thing for different parts of videos (eg sponsored segments, intro and outro animations, non music segments in music videos, etc).
I suspect YouTube will find ways around this, like running ads of differing lengths, add random amounts of padding at the start of the video or between ads, etc.
It actually already did break sponsorblock for a bit because user submissions would include the wrong timestamps, due to the ads changing the duration of the video.
This would be hard to implement, but I personally would be happy to donate more to fund the development costs for such features. Adblocking is the largest consumer boycott in history and I won’t let a corporation try to crush it again.
The challenge is that videos will have a varying amount or type of ads based on the client’s country/demographic and simply on the timing of ad campaigns.
Not baking-in ads was the advantage of Youtube and other streaming platforms over the likes of traditional TV. That’s why they were client-side in the first place. I wonder how much the extra effort, bandwidth, and processing will cost Youtube to achieve server-side ads. Would be funny if it simply ended up being too expensive for them.
They have a LOT of compute power… They could have several baked in ads per geographical area / demographic and only store them on servers in / close to the relevant country. There’s definitely associated costs but I wonder if it’d amortize well given their viewer count.
Let the games begin.
That sounds very much like the idea of SponsorBlock (but might need a bit of refinement to work for different ads of different length). You should definitely check out Piped for watching YouTube videos without any tracking/ads/dark patterns, I am very sure they will do something to remove server-side ads as well (hopefully).
And if it is just five seconds instead of 15, it would be way better!
For ergonomics, the plugin should be able to spot cuts in the video so you can easily select the correct frames.
This shouldn’t even be too hard, I doubt YouTube is completely rerendering every video with ads, they’d just insert the ad in before an I frame in the video. So each ad will start with an I frame, and the video will resume on an I frame, meaning just let the user select all the I frames, no fancy cut detection algorithm is needed.
I have no idea how to do this from JS though.
Also I mean video I frames, not HTML iframes.
Oh. I like this. Sponsor block but network wide basically xD
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I will pay for an adblocker before I pay for an ad provider to stop harassing me
Chad uBlock Plus dev doesn’t even want our money.
Chad Raymond Hill who refuses to accept donatoins or sponsorships of any kind.
That being said the people that maintain the filter lists I believe, don’t quoute me on this, you can donate to a few of them. Really depends if they mention it on their githubs though and you pretty much have to go about finding them on your own as there’s no real centralized list of all the people that contribue to the filter lists.
That’s correct. uBlock Plus’ Github says he won’t accept donations but give instead to the unsung heroes maintaining the lists on which his software depends.
YouTube shell company running highly effective subscription based ad blocker! Hahaha I could see it.
If anything, adblock taught me about pi-hole, which brought me into the raspberry pi world.
And id rather spend money on that.
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I’m not so sure. Once they are embedded in the video they become hard to block. Twitch is like this now.
And yet there are userscripts you can use to block out twitch ads. I haven’t seen one for months now despite not being a subscriber.
I’m holding out some hope, since twitch is live but YouTube is pre-buffered, but they could still block loading past the ad on a timer or a key computed from hashing the decoded frames of the ad, idk
I’ve been a premium user for a while now and the platform has never been shittier than now. I pay for premium but I see integrated ads in videos and nowadays YouTube sneakily includes actual product videos in your home feed as if that’s not an ad. Recommendations have sucked for so long that I don’t remember the last time I watched something good on it. Inclusion of yt music was the thing that kept me on the subscription but shit man
I’ll just download the video and skip the shit, idgaf, I’m not watching ads, google can suck it.
Try the app called Seal on FDroid
There are already sponsorship-skipping add-ons. YouTube lost before they began.
I’m not sure if a sponsorblock like solution will work. Sponsorblock is entirely reliant on timestamps provided by users.
A similar solution for YouTube’s ads will only work if the ads always happen at the same timestamps and have the same length. This is not necessarily the case, as ads can happen at any point.
There’s already a filter for UBO that blocks it. That was much quicker than I expected. Works and is further down this thread.
It’s only a matter of time until YouTube stops that as well.
It’s an arms race. But there’s not a weapon that doesn’t have a counter, even if that counter is mutually assured destruction. YouTube’s efforts are inevitably a futile chase that does little more than keep their shareholders happy that they’re chasing the dragon.
Then on to the next one. Google won’t get a dime from me. They can’t stop it, even if I have to set up something for my computer to record my videos while I sleep so I can watch them on a video player the next day, I will not watch ads.
Possibly, but as long as they are not completely server-side (which they can’t be, they want to target people) then they are fighting on hostile ground.
Of course there are attempts to lock down PCs so that ad companies can tell it what to do (probably with some DRM argument), but we’re not there yet.
I remember using MythTV in the beforetimes, and you’d record the show off the cable tuner, then it would process the file and remove the commercials based on volume levels and light signatures. It was remarkably good at it and was how I watched all TV until streaming came around.
I would imagine someone could do the same even better today with an AI model that would recognize all the ads and deliver an edited stream. The problem is that the video would have to be downloaded beforehand and then the streams stored elsewhere and referenced by an addon that redirects you.
then it would process the file and remove the commercials
This still exists today, for example in Plex’s DVR. Practically everything that blocks commercials these days uses comskip or a fork of it.
There will have to be designated points where midroll ads can happen, just like the current system has, so the ads aren’t inserted mid-sentence or destroy an important sequence in the video. Nobody would accept it otherwise.
It’s a matter of detecting those points, mapping them to specific frames in the video, then automatically detecting when an ad is inserted on that basis.
It’s slightly harder to do, but not impossible.
Unfortunately I think there’s been a good bit of evidence recently that people WILL accept it. As a prime example lemmy hasn’t exactly replaced reddit despite the relative uproar that the API changes caused. Netflix & co just keep hiking prices and people just keep buying it.
And then on the technical side, if the ads are coming from the server it’s possible youtube might just refuse to serve the rest of the video stream until all or most the ad’s runtime has passed. It depends on how serious they want to get about capturing the revenue lost to adblock users.
Sure, but then that’s an even worse enshittification if they do make it random.
The mandatory wait-time will stop people from seeking through videos organically. Yet another thing that makes it worse for everyone.
And even then, it should still be possible to detect which frames are part of the original video and which are not, either by detecting original video frames, or building a database of ads and detecting them within videos.
The fact that lots of people still use reddit is just due to inertia. Platforms don’t die immediately overnight. Digg still exists. It still calls itself “The homepage of the internet.” The process of transitioning to a federated internet is going to take many years.
Reddit is still dying however. There’s been a marked drop in the quality of posts over there, and they’re harder to access, now they’re doing an exclusivity thing with google which is also enshittifying massively. That is making it less and less appealling over time. It won’t last forever as a culturally relevant site.
if you’re downloading the video locally it would be incredibly trivial to remove the segment of the ad. There are various different mechanisms i can think of that would work.
obviously, beginning and end ads are super trivial.
Ideally, youtube won’t be natively encoding the ads into the videos, because that would be a nightmare, so presumably they’re doing injection instead, that would be pretty obvious from the get go.
If not, they have to have some kind of interface for the advertisement you could very easily use that to track the ad placement itself, though that might be problematic.
There are likely other clever things that can be done, we’ll have to see what happens.
Ideally, youtube won’t be natively encoding the ads into the videos, because that would be a nightmare
I’m afraid this is what they’re going for.
if they did, the only way it would work is if they live encode every video on request, which as we know from twitch, is incredibly cost prohibitive. So i doubt it. This could mostly be assuaged through caching, but i’m not sure how long the economics hold up on that compared to just not doing any live encoding at all.
No, that’s not necessary. The only thing they need to do is to find an I-Frame (which there are plenty of), make a cut at that frame, show the ad instead, and then resume to the original video after the ad is done. No extra encoding is involved. It’s just like concatenating video files together.
I’ve done similar stuff like this. It’s not too difficult, at least not in H264. Not sure about YouTube’s own format, but I guess it’s quite similar.
that’s what im saying. Maybe not in this thread, idk, i’ve had a few of these now, but they’re almost certainly just injecting the AD somewhere through the middle of the video.
Yeah they just need to range the ad from x->y time into video playback starts.
IIRC the developer of SponsorBlock was asked about this and seemed very unconcerned.
how i wish there was a good alternative for youtube
Support candidates who want to limit the ability for large tech companies to acquire their competitors. Maybe even those that wish to see their acquisitions rolled back. Maybe even those that wish to see them broken up.
P-Peertube?
Not a great alternative. The second it becomes actually successful it will collapse.
Shucks.
peertube would be great, if there were more content creators. out of 330 or something channels that i follow on youtube, 4 are on peertube.
4 out of 330 is quite a lot. Are they tech youtubers or something?
yeah, linux-oriented youtubers
I’ve tried it. Every server i choose is either slow af, has no videos or the videos just stay at 00:00.
Not a great experience.
Grayjay has been useful for that. I still follow people on YouTube, but if they setup a channel anywhere else I can switch my feed to draw from those sources instead.
Oh cool! Is there any non-mobile app/service that does something similar?
The source code for GrayJay is available if you’re concerned or want to work on a non-mobile app/service yourself, but otherwise I don’t know of anything that combines the services like that.
The alternatives are around now, and we know that many YouTube content creators are exploring other revenue streams, so it’ll be interesting to see how exodus works. Clearly YouTube is going to continue to get worse and some people are going to leave. What’s next? I’m excited.
It’s always interesting to watch companies implode. Apparently Reddit is blocking non-Google search engines from indexing them, and Twitter wants you to be logged in to view people’s profiles. Those types of moves guarantee that the platform won’t be relevant a decade from now and possibly sooner than that.
Piped. It uses SponsorBlock to also skip ads by the creator in the video, I am very sure they will update it to remove ads injected by YouTube as well. It is also very privacy-friendly.
Just got hit with this for the first time, and at first I was like what the fuck is this happening here, I’m running Firefox latest, and UBlock origin latest, never seen this before. Happening for every video, two injected video ads before the video, seem skippable, but i’m not clicking on them. Hope UBlock catches up to this quick, this sucks.
Mine are getting trapped by pihole. They take 10 seconds to time out and just show a banner ad that won’t automatically go away without hitting the skip button. It’s really frustrating since I liked letting videos auto play as I fall asleep.
at least it’s not currently spawning an actual video advertisement, so, small blessings, the two injected ads stay static for 10 seconds a piece (makes sense), and if you don’t click skip, the first tiers to the second then tiers to the video (was thinking of going pihole but you just confirmed it won’t make a difference, if they start injecting autoplay video ads, then it’ll be back on my todo list)
There’s a comment in this thread with a ubo custom filter that’s working for me.
yup, just tried that too, and after a reboot, it’s working for me too
YouTube tests server-side ads to make
your coveted blockerYouTube obsoleteftfy
Honestly… How much has Google spent trying to counter people skipping ads?
Is it less than the amount of potential profit if everyone was forced to watch ads?
This seems like that situation recently where NYC paid a million dollars to enforce people to pay for train tickets, which was less than twenty thousand a year in lost revenue.
