YouTube's next move might make it virtually impossible to block ads

some people still recommend using a VPN and IP address from a country where YouTube ads are prohibited, such as Myanmar, Albania, or Uzbekistan.

Wait, you can just prohibit YouTube ads at a national level? That's somehow awesome and terrifying at the same time.

Humanity accepts your challenge! See y'all on the battlefield ;-)

This must cost YouTube a fortune doing additional processing and reduced flexibility. They are going to hurt themselves and blockers will find a way.

YouTube's next move might make it virtually impossible to watch YouTube

Google uses tax avoidance schemes and I use ad avoidance schemes.

How it works is that once you start getting these Server Side Ads (SSA), Youtube will create a sort of queue of videos in place of your usual video, with the first few being ads that can't be skipped and have a red bar (not yellow) and in the end you'll get your video. They are not literally part of the original video stream, they are separate streams that get injected as if they were the original video. It's called SSAP, and I've been experiencing it from the last weekend. In the meantime, they've pretty much broken their player to implement this.

Ublock Origin has released a temporary fix yesterday here

Alternatively, you can use this extension to redirect from YouTube videos to piped.video I used it, it works very well, can't guarantee for much more.

edit: fixed wording

People are taking the piss out of you everyday. They butt into your life, take a cheap shot at you and then disappear. They leer at you from tall buildings and make you feel small. They make flippant comments from buses that imply you’re not sexy enough and that all the fun is happening somewhere else. They are on TV making your girlfriend feel inadequate. They have access to the most sophisticated technology the world has ever seen and they bully you with it. They are The Advertisers and they are laughing at you.

You, however, are forbidden to touch them. Trademarks, intellectual property rights and copyright law mean advertisers can say what they like wherever they like with total impunity.

Fuck that. Any advert in a public space that gives you no choice whether you see it or not is yours. It’s yours to take, re-arrange and re-use. You can do whatever you like with it. Asking for permission is like asking to keep a rock someone just threw at your head.

You owe the companies nothing. Less than nothing, you especially don’t owe them any courtesy. They owe you. They have re-arranged the world to put themselves in front of you. They never asked for your permission, don’t even start asking for theirs.

– Banksy

Worse case scenario, we gotta make an extension that detects the ad UI and blanks the screen and mutes the audio until its over

And once everybody is watching ads and nobody is skipping them, YouTube will start making the commercials shorter and less invasive, right Anakin?

Doubt. Never underestimate the hate and motivation against ads.

I accidentally watched YouTube the other night without adblock, OMFG what an experience.

If I can't watch with adblock I'll just stop using it, it's only a rabit hole to waste time for me anyway.

Good. This is how YouTube dies. This is how Google dies. This is how competitors/alternatives are born. Stop fighting to make Google services useable against every effort of theirs. Let them drive people away to make (or discover) alternatives.

My gut reaction is that this won't work long-term. Users on youtube often point to specific timestamps in a video in comments or link to specific timestamps when sharing videos, meaning there needs to be some way to identify the timestamp excluding ads. And if there's a way to do that there's a way to detect ads.

Of course, there's always the chance they just scrap these features despite how useful they are and how commonly they're used; they've done similar before.

I mean, I'll just continue to not use Youtube...

I'll be curious to see where this ends up going, as I doubt the community will take this lying down.

The few times I've had to go without an Ad blocker, I've seen just how bad the Ads have gotten - they're almost the same as regular TV Ad breaks now! ... And then YouTube Premium is just not a good deal in my eyes, £12.99 a month is an awful lot to pay just to not see Ads.

Sample the color of a specified pixel (or something recognizable in the streaming format) every 30 frames from the original video.

Store collection of pixels in a database and share in a peer to peer network or stored on invidious instances. Because the sample size is small, and the database can be split up by youtube channel, the overall size and traffic should remain low.

When streaming a youtube video, if the plugin detects that the pixel in the video doesn't match the one in the database, automatically skip until where the pixel matches the data in the database.

i would rather have video go black for the duration of ad than watch that filth

I am excited. This will break my YouTube addiction.

It'll only affect me when I need to fix something I'm unfamiliar with, and it'llead creators to using other platforms for that kind of material, and lower the barrier to entry.

I don't know why Google is shooting themselves in the foot like this. I mean, it'll be profitable in the short run, yes, but this will almost certainly be devastating to their bottom line in the long run if it works as planned.

They just escalated the arms race between ad and ad blocker. All this could have been avoided if they actually did something about the scam ads.

I already barely watch YouTube. It's mostly for music videos. Google can fuck itself to death.

Over the past years I've been reducing my youtube and twitch viewership anyways. Its literally the lowest form of entertainment and its not worth a single moment of ad watching. I'll just do something else. Most youtube content sucks anyways. I don't even remember most of the channels I used to watch.

They're just going to increase their own server costs chasing some tiny fraction of viewers who will do anything to avoid ads. they should be grateful for the adviewers they have.

Finally a use case where AI/Machine learning would absolutely make sense. If we can have AI that can generate text or images, imitate people's voices or write code, we can also have a lightweight model that can detect ads and skip them during playback. There's a model trained on SponsorBlock data for detecting sponsored segments https://github.com/xenova/sponsorblock-ml
I'm sure that we can have something similar but for embedded ads.

If the YouTube interface restricts you skipping during certain parts of the video, an ad blocker can detect that and skip over it anyway. Otherwise, I myself will just skip over the ad.

People will find a way to get around it, I could see buffering a video for 5 mins or even downloading the entire video ala locally playing podcasts, then using AI or some type of frame analyzation technique t to skip ads. Or just skip them like good old fashion Tivo from your player.

then i won’t be using it much, if at all.

this is all bullshit btw, it won't do anything for thirdparty clients and yt-dlp for example.

This is because blocking is entirely client side now, with no way of youtube determining whether or not its happened at all.

We'll just copy the video and recast without ads I guess? I do watch several videos many times over for diy, so it would be relatively painless to just download and modify.

Begun the arms race have .

I pay for premium.. but also like my sponsorblock.. and 3rd party clients. Let me have it all momma Google.

When I have to wade through sixteen different "Would you like to join YouTube Plus!?!?!?!" pop-ups every time I whisper the words "online video" in the direction of my phone, I'm rarely inclined to use YouTube to begin with. Its a bad fucking service.

My TV doesn't pull this shit on me. I get Show -> Ads -> Show -> Ads in regularly spaced intervals, like I'm a civilized human being. I don't get WOULD YOU LIKE TO GET SLIGHTLY FEWER ADS!!!!! GIVE ME $8 $12 $15 $20!!!!! every time the fucking thing turns on.

Oh well. Youtube is useful as a podcast/streamer host now; no ads with sponsor block/ublock. Once that isn't the case they (Google) will get network blocked.

No real loss to me. I tend to prefer local download/host for convenience. Most channels are chaff anyway.

The demise of Youtube begins

I think it is time to bring back The Wadsworth Constant!

Meaning they can bury that toxic ad placement bidding now?

No need to answer, i know they wont.

there is a plugin I bought, it's community driven where you can tag sections of the video as ad, sponsored, etc, and auto skip it. it's really nice, was like $5. will post when I find the link, but even if ads are server side, this plugin will skip. someone has to bite the bullet though and tag time stamps unfortunately.

found it, called dearrow, also changed clikcbait thumbnails and titles are editable by community.

https://dearrow.ajay.app/

I already barely watch YouTube but for a couple people I subscribe to, and I already pay membership for their content so I get no ads. YouTube has already whittled me down to the minimum thanks to their overbearing ad content.

We used to just get up and do the dishes while whatever injected nonsense interupted what we were watching on TV. And when it became too much we turned to DVDs or piracy. Then streaming was the "savior" until whoever funded it realized that more users do not equal more money. And now we are almost back to square one. This is just played out at this point. Google/Yt/TIktok etc are just betting on the addictive nature of instant gratification to survive.

At some point, I think, all the effords of adblocking (grayjay, newpipe, sponsorblock, ublock) will seem impractical when a download (and maybe now scan to cut out ads and sponsor segments) will achive the same. And then peer to peer is the most practical way to share that instead of redoing all the work.

Until downloading is hindered too much and someone somewhere just has OBS with some adhoc script on top running 24/7 to capture youtube videos. The conversation of when is adblocking piracy etc seems to me to be coming to a natural end (at least as far as legalilties go).

One saving grace the internet has bestowed on media is that it is easier to follow creators and fund their work (if you can afford it).

Fuckin bring it, we'll adapt

Grayjay!! 🙌🏻

I saw someone say Twitch does this, but there are many Twitch ad blockers that work

So... whats stopping something like sponsorblock from nixing this potentially bankrupting choice?

The whole point of having ads be separate from the video is for youtube to easily distance itself from malicious ads. If an ad is malicious it can easily be reported and taken out of commission. But if ads are now part of the video, what stops an ad from being an ISIS beheading clip in the middle of a video made for children? If there is still a way to still report it, then there is a way to recognize the ad.

Also how will this interfere with creators? Editing a video and giving it a proper pace is already a huge challenge. But now ads can just be automaticaly cut into it without the creators control? That's gonna fuck up so many quality channels. That's already a big problem with the current system, bit at least you can skip or block them.

Finding and innovating new ways to fuck people with ads.

YouTubes past moves have been to make it impossible to block adds. What else is new in the world?

Is water still wet?

Youtube is aware that serving ads to people who hate ads is going to reduce these brands' value, right? I thought that was the reason they were ok with adblockers before...

Oh man, I wonder why no one ever thought of randomly injecting ads into content before? What geniuses they must have working at YouTube. I can’t even comprehend the big-brainedness. I’m sure people will love it.

What impossible? There's sponsorblock. Just add a new category.

I'm surprised at this point that people are still trying to circumvent Terrible. Just stop using YT altogether.

I get it, no one likes ads on youtube. But, you realize that they have to pay the people that are producing content as well as pay for the storage space to gold all of this content. Why does everyone think that can just be free?

What's the street address of Google again? I'm already homicidally insane, I'll start by burning them TO THE FUCKING GROUND.

“Virtually impossible?” I haven’t had ads on YT in over 6 years, and I don’t even use a blocker or alt client.

It's what they always should have done anyway. I'm not so entitled that I think I should get content delivered absolutely free, but I am entitled enough to sandbox and restrict how many discrete domains my browser windows will talk to.