Next logical step is to modify the uploaded video itself to contain ads around the video frame or on automatically detected clear surfaces in the video.
Technology circumvention and copyright infringement are just about the only power consumers have against the near monopolies and cartel like behavior from the tech/media industry since our government regulators have been neutered.
I am grandfathered into a family Premium plan from the old Youtube Red days. The price is close to doubling come April. In the absence of competition or government intervention to punish anti-compeitive, anti-consumer behaviour I will be relying on ad-blocking and other circumvention measures next year. I am willing to pay a fair price but costs of living have gone up a lot while incomes for regular people are stagnant. The executives running these companies are completely disconnected from reality.
I didn’t have ublock installed on my machines. I’d removed it a year ago because it was breaking sites and my pihole does a pretty good job, but I kept getting pop ups from sites about “turning off my adblocker”. I didn’t have an adblocker running. I was using vanilla firefox. I got so irritated, I looked up how to get rid of those messages and everything pointed me to ublock.
So, shout out to thinkgeek for reminding me what its like to browse the web without a ton of ads. If it wasn’t for your annoying popup about my non-existent adblocker, I would never have installed an adblocker.
Oh, and I hadn’t realized how awful youtube became over the last year or so with the ads. I was just dealing with it like an asshole. When I put ublock back on, my enjoyment of youtube shot up!
I was considering paying for premium too because I want to normalize paying for content and supporting things I like on the web. But I was struggling with the decision because usually you either pay with your data or pay with money. In this case I know I’d be doing both since Google will gladly take my money and also hoover up my data. Then they jacked the rates up to $14 a month…and now I have ublock installed again.
Its still a problem with the apps on my phone and appletv’s though. If they made it $4.99/mo I’d probably fork it over but $14 is more than my other streaming services and they create their own content. Youtube just hosts content.
Edit: how-to geek not thinkgeek. I think they went out of business.
you said you weren’t using an Ad Blocker but getting pop-ups saying you were. it’s because the pi-hole is blocking ads at a DNS level so the site detects that and sends that message instead.
Oh, and I hadn’t realized how awful youtube became over the last year or so with the ads. I was just dealing with it like an asshole. When I put ublock back on, my enjoyment of youtube shot up!
Try getting some kind of sponsorblock, too. I didn’t realize how annoying those little messages were until I didn’t have to manually speed through them.
God, how far Thinkgeek has fallen. Why would a retail site even need ads? You already there to do shopping. I don’t think I’ve bought anything since they got bought out.
So the article.claims that Youtube’s plan backfired because uninstall rates on some AD blockers increased and a percentage of those users cited “YouTube” as the reason.
I don’t know if it’s just me but that’s a massive stretch. I would like to hear numbers from YouTube themselves before jumping to any conclusions. These companies operate on scale and usually have enough data to back these decisions. Can it go wrong, sure. Has it already backfired. Not sure.
The article mentions people moving from Chrome to Edge to try and get around this. With how ubiquitous Chromium is as an engine behind a wide range of browsers, it seems most people won’t actually move away from a browser that Google has some control over.
No, I prefer to communicate with people able to understand sarcasm in light of the context. The best I can offer is for you to block me to avoid being exposed to my ultra-high level, military grade sarcasm.
You prefer to communicate with people who assume you’re being sarcastic? That’s kinda weird. I prefer to communicate with people who take my words at face value. You’re not worth blocking.
Telling that you think being blocked is a good thing. You’re not harassing me, you’re not trying to dox me, you’re just being annoying and bad at sarcasm. Hence, you’re not worth blocking. But you’re certainly also not worth talking to.
Not really making fun of it, just genuinely curious. Are people still installing Adblock Plus? It has had an Acceptable Ads Committee for over a decade now. What were people using if not that?
I stopped using that when it stopped working. Is there a working version? I thought they got kiked off the app store for “interfering with internet data” or something.
More like most people don’t have the patience to learn the difference between uBlock and UBlock Origin. Also, a lot of people just install Ad Block because they you tell them to install a ad blocker, they just install the one called AdBlock.
Adblock plus was the standard for so long until maybe 5 or so years ago when they were bought out or something and they were hinting at letting some ads in. I think only the very online people switched to uBlock Origin before Adblock Plus tanked itself. That is all from hazy memory but it wouldn’t surprise me that normies got recommended Adblock Plus and used it until it didn’t work right only to seek out better options now that youtube is serving them so many ads.
Dns is what translates urls (google.com, lemmy.world, etc) into ip addresses (207.94.56.21) which your computer can actually understand. Dns can be used to track you but a good dns can also very slightly speed up your Internet because it gets you the address to websites a bit faster. I use adguard and have Cloudflare DNS upstream from that
I’d like to elaborate a bit on why DNS can be used to track you.
Nearly all web traffic is encrypted (https), you can check by looking at the padlock next to the URL in your browser. But DNS requests aren’t encrypted by default. This means anyone, most likely your ISP our the admin of your home network, can see what domains you’re accessing. That means just google.com, lemmy.world, etc. and not lemmy.world/post/… This isn’t a huge amount of info, but it does tell anyone who’s looking approximately what you’re doing (googling something, looking at lemmy, etc.).
To fix that there are a few different ways to encrypt DNS requests, the most common of which (afaik) is DNS over HTTPS, which will encrypt DNS requests like any other web request your browser makes. I don’t know why this hasn’t been made the default yet. Firefox has a setting for DNS over HTTPS, it calls it secure DNS.
In video ads = no relevant ads based on the user. Less relevant ads = less revenue generated for people paying YouTube for hosting those ads. Thus, people would pay less to YouTube to host ads. Thus, less profits for YouTube.
Ad is inserted into stream. Either one of two things happens depending upon the way it is implemented:
The length of the video stream increases as the ad is inserted suddenly. The ad blocker can simply calculate the difference and skip the difference worth of time, thus skipping the ad.
The length of the video doesn’t increase to prevent this. Thus, you get the ad stream overlapping in front of the actual video stream. This would thus kinda be on the frontend, which could easily be blocked.
The ad is inserted in the beginning itself at some random time in the video. Hence, the length of the video doesn’t change suddenly like in scenario one. However, remember that regulations require you to visually indicate that a given piece of media is an ad or not. This is why YouTube ads have “Ad” in a yellow box. This could thus very easily be detected by an adblocker that analyses every frame that the box is present in, and skips that frame. This however, would be a little heavier for the user using the adblocker.
Trust me lol. There is literally no way you can prevent ad blockers.
if the platform decides which and where the ads will run during the video on page load, not during video pIay then I dont see how this could be blocked.
Anither thing they can do is enforce policy and start deleting/banning accounts blocking ads. I have some stuff on google account. Wouldn’t be fun to have it deleted.
Look at point 3. I explained this could still be skipped due to them having to visually indicate that it was an ad. This visual indication could easily be skipped by the local user.
As for them deleting accounts that blocked ads, how would they identify if someone blocked ads? Generate a secret key for every ad, that would be returned every time a user watched ads? This could easily be overcome, as an adblocker could simply extract this key and send it back to the server.
Trust me… If there was a way to block ad blockers, the greedy capitalists would’ve done so a loooong time ago.
Ok so this is how I think it works behind the scenes: the actual devs at Google don’t give af whether ppl use adblockers or not. I think it’s probably just the execs who come across stuff like this and tell the devs to “fix the problem”. Look at how Vanced was there for a long time. Only when it started becoming too popular (especially when they released an NFT), did YouTube crack down on it.
The reason why ublock origin is still in the Chrome store is because the execs prolly don’t know about it much. Maybe they are afraid that ppl would immediately hop onto Firefox if they did anything stupid like that? I dunno… However, I’m pretty confident that they’re going to do something stupid like banning ad blockers from the Chrome store quite soon. It would be quite hilarious to see the aftermath of that!
Since their pop-up already mentioned using AdBlock violating their TOS, I’ve started using a different Browserprofile with a dedicated Google account which I’ll exclusively use for YouTube.
If there will be a slow weekend coming up, I’ll set up a self hosted piped instance
I think it wouldn’t be that dificult to figure out what is interesting for people watching the video since channels themselves already usually have a target audience. If I am watching a video from a dude who focus on video games or tech odds are I’d be more interested in tech adds. But if Google REALLY wants to know what we need/want then yeah maybe you’re right. Shit it happened so many times me just saying the word pizza would set off a pizza ad later in my phone. These mfers want to inject ads in our souls.
I don’t get targeted ads anymore but it took a lot of work to get here and I don’t have a lot of the conveniences as other folks who use google play, oauth, etc.
Not rlly. Your point would be relevant for niche YouTube videos. What about generic videos tho? Say something like music videos. Kinda everyone watches them. In fact, music videos get the highest amount of views. Ads inserted in such videos based purely on the content of these videos would be too generic, thus of lower average relevancy to the viewer, thus ultimately translating to less revenue.
That IS how YouTube works. Let’s say you are watching a YT video. What your YouTube app/ website does, is that it downloads a certain portion of the video from the server. This small part is called a “buffer”. That’s where the word “buffering” comes from. Now, for the ad to be displayed within the video stream itself, it would need to be downloaded in this buffer somehow. Therefore, while there is a buffer in place, all of my above points would apply.
Completely eliminate the buffer you say (ie., stream the video bit by bit by reducing the buffering size dramatically) ? Well, then you would need an ultra stable internet connection to YouTube’s servers, without any ping difference. Good luck with that. Especially, good luck with doing that in developing countries, whose populations make up the majority of the world.
If that is true, then how is it possible for software to determine the difference between a commercial and content? They are streamed from a different source. I’m suggesting that YouTube could encode the commercial in the same stream as content, and as far as the player is concerned, there would be no difference.
Read point 3 again. Regulations require companies to visually distinguish between ads and non-ads. That’s why u get the yellow box with “ad” written in it, which indicates that the video that u r watching currently is an ad.
Software could thus use this factor very easily by scanning the stream for such an indicator. The moment it finds something like this, it skips to a frame where this indicator isn’t present.
In video ads, even those by the content creators themselves, can generally be dealt with using SponsorBlock. This is community driven, users mark the segment of the video that’s just sponsor filler or credits or whatever.
You can even get a NewPipe fork that includes SponsorBlock.
That’s the thing, even if 95% of users currently using ad blockers block ads anyway or leave the service, YouTube still wins big.
They aren’t worried at all about alienating users from which they can’t extract ad revenue. Those on the margin that turn off ad blockers or subscribe to a paid plan are the target, not everyone else.
This doesn’t make sense because they have the monopoly on video now. By monetizing a bit they are creating a a huge demand for a competitor, risking their monopoly.
I want to believe that you are right - but don’t think you are. I wanted to switch over to rumble. But, except two, none of the creators i regularly watch are there. Fine, let’s try Odysee: geoblocking my location atm.
The only reason, why i use other platforms is Grayjay. It aggregates content from wherever you want and creates one feed. If it wasn’t for this app, i’d probably only use YT with better adblocks.
Same problem, except it is even more niche. Does not really make sense as a YT stand-in. Tied into a collected feed it makes sense, which luckily is enabled by apps like Grayjay.
Part of the value of a service is the size of it’s user base, not just the size of the monetized user base. Right now, Youtube is just about the only game in town, but if half their users just Leave, even if it was the half that used effective ad blockers, the value of the site as a whole, for creators and advertisers both, is diminished.
That’s true to all extent, but the more present online folks do end up driving behaviors about regular users as well. There was a tube when even having an ad blocker at all was a “power user” thing, now everyone does it. If they fail to accommodate the people that will put energy into circumventing ads then they will just find and normalize a new work around.
It’s similar to content piracy. You will never get rid of piracy altogether, but if you make content accessible and affordable you can mitigate how common it is.
For YouTube, they need to balance how intrusive the ads are against how easy it is to get around them.
Chromium means Google gets to decide what internet standards get implemented. The existance of alternative engines (like the one Firefox uses) means that there is still some democratic control. If you care about the internet, don’t use a chromium-based browser.
go through your subscriptions and get rid of the channels you aren’t interested in anymore
export subs as .json and import them into Freetube for desktop pc and Newpipe for android. Invidious and piped instances such as vid.puffyan.us and piped.video also allow you to import subs. You can also import youtube subs into RSS feed readers.
go into your google account settings, nuke and turn off watch hiyostory, turn off targeted ads and anything else you see in there.
Repeat step 1 every so often and better curate your list of subs. Your feed only contains the videos you want to see first in formost and not what the algorithm wants you to see. When you do have to use youtube itself it will be limited in how much data it can collect off you.
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