YouTube is testing server-side ad injection to counteract ad blockers

Looks like I'm testing not using YouTube.

113

Yeah, that'll be hard. I'm trying to use Peertube but network effect is big on YT (not sure if that's the right expression here, noone is using Peertube, everyone is on YT).

32
- I'm sending my videos on my Peertube and Youtube. I send the link for Peertube a few days before Youtube, so people following me would have more interest on looking at it on PT earlier but the numbers can't be beaten : between 5 and 20 views on PT against 1K / 2K on Youtube.
  
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- try odysee, some creators mirror their yt vids there
  
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- I watch at most 1 video a week. It's not hard.
  
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- Yeah, that’ll be hard. I’m trying to use Peertube but network effect is big on YT (not sure if that’s the right expression here, noone is using Peertube, everyone is on YT).
  
  There was a time "noone" was on YouTube.
  
  2
It’s past due that we need a new platform.

16
- We don't need a new platform. We need 20 new platforms, and authors can post on whichever ones are best for them. Have real competition and real incentive to be better.
  
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- PeerTube?
  
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Been using Nebula for a while now. Going to miss some YouTube creators, but I'll expect to get over it.

9

That'll make youtube disappear for me.

Over the years I watched less and less. I only seldomly have to look into youtube for things that are easier in video than in text.

Teens and many people don't know that there is a world without ads. They have to be educated that there are alternatives - not watching youtube is a real option. You do not depend on it.

I's a horrible world many people live in. Recently I saw someone browsing on instagram, each third post is an ad and oftentimes there are ads after ads. And people follow other people and watch their ads. Incredible!

Recently, I was browsing linkedin and there were 12 ads instead of real jobs in a row. in a row. Unrelated to my profession.

45

But the point is there’s always been a way to avoid ads, even while browsing sites with ads and browsing YT. Personally, if that ability entirely disappears, i hate ads, ad-voice, and the concept of advertising so much that I will stop and close a whole tab if an ad plays. I’m in the minority though. Because, I think you’re right, a lot of people just don’t even think about it and mindlessly consume. I can’t. When Reddit fucked us and showed us our opinions and feelings didn’t matter, I left. I will do the same to YT.

16
- I think I hate ads just as much. But I might cave in and start subscribing to premium again. I just stopped because they don't allow a family plan here in Korea.
  
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I think many people see it as normal/expected.

A coworker showed me a video yesterday on their phone, I said 'holy hell what is this shit? This is what it looks like for you?' And opened it in Tubular. They had no idea such a thing existed.

I rarely watch videos because I prefer to read. The people I work with spend a vast amount of their free time watching YouTube and TikTok. They just seem to zone out, or be really interested when an ad comes on.

9
- I think many people see it as normal/expected.
  
  Yes, that's it. People born in the early part of last century (my grandparent's era) only knew over-the-air TV which in the US included commercials. It was just part of reality, like billboards by the highway.
  
  6

I know this is an unpopular opinion but I love YouTube and it really bums me out to have to drop it. My home account has been heavily curated over the past two decades and it's pretty rare to see a video on my homepage from the shitty part of YouTube...now I'm getting ads and just closing the tab. I have a separate account just for listening to music on my work laptop and I've found a ton of new artists through it, too....not sure what I'm gonna do once it starts getting ads, too.

I have a Nebula subscription but only like 1/3 of the channels I watch are on there. And obviously none of the music

38

I'm with you so I pay a subscription (it is literally the only one I pay for) but even that is not enough as the enshittification is encouraging creators to release special videos just for their own channel subscribers now. So I need subscriptions on top of my subscriptions (dawg).

YouTube (Google/Alphabet) is a monopoly that needs to be smashed to itty bits.

16
I feel the same way. Or felt. It is a wonderful platform that will let anyone upload and share videos at absolutely no cost. Video hosting isn't as expensive as we are often lead to believe, but it isn't cheap. Especially if you want to provide a great experience like different resolutions and qualities.

I used to subscribe to YouTube Premium and was quite happy about it. However they slowly made the platform worse and worse. At some point it hurt to give them money, even if the subscription was "worth it". I just didn't like giving money to people destroying a great platform.

Luckily YouTube still supports RSS. This means that I can easily mix in other video platforms with no bother. I now subscribe to Nebula and have 35 subscriptions there. I also have a handful of PeerTube, video podcasts and other self-hosted creators. It isn't the "majority" of my subscriptions (Apparently I have ~200 YouTube channels that I subscribe to, but a huge number of them are dead, second channels or incredibly infrequent.) but it doesn't matter. All of my subscriptions come to the same "inbox" and it doesn't really matter what platform they are on.

6
- Video hosting isn't as expensive as we are often lead to believe,
  
  Then do it yourself. Video hosting is the most expensive form of hosting you can do on internet, and no other form of media even comes in the ballpark (games, photos, audio, text, databases). YouTube is running on CIA money. None of us can pull off what they do, because the fucking US government is running YouTube in an indirect way. Wanna know who owns Utah data centers? That's right, US government agencies and its little puppet corpos.
  
  Tiktok, as colossal as it is, does not even compare because it hosts merely 30-60 second video clips. YouTube hosts an average of 10 minute videos and countless hour long documentaries and video essays. Even the likes of MindGeek owned porn sites are tiny compared to what YouTube hosts. Vimeo, Dailymotion, Facebook, VKontakte, Bilibili, none of those ever became as big for video hosting.
  
  The reality is we have lived as freeloaders since the 90s, and many of these Big Tech services should not have been free in the first place. Now we are used to the convenience of these digital drugs. I forgot who talked about this once in a blog, but I will echo that message, and am unapologetic for this blackpill.
  
  -7
Why don't you drop the nebula subscription and pay for YouTube premium then? You get rid of the ads and get some extra features and can keep your curated account.

This isn't a solution for everyone, but those who can afford it could help making YouTube make money and keep it around.

1
- Because Nebula pays more to the creators. The people who make the videos I watch didn't make shit on YouTube
  
  4

This is where we could use a browser plug in that uses AI to learn what an ad is and skip it for us. Now we just need someone to start working on it.

29

Plugins can add controls and it can download videos, but plugins can't interact with videos directly I think.

Maybe use the Youtube API closed captions and figure out the patterns for ads that way?

9
- Of course they can interact with it just fine, look at "sponsorblock" plug-in. It would also solve this problem completely. It already exists and works well, it just isn't "AI" nonsense.
  
  2

Youtube is testing my fucking patience.

23

For a lot of things I already had changed to alternative sites, the best alternative to YT IMHO is Odysee, music of all kind you can listen here 24/7, or in Bandcamp, for movies there is PlutoTV and the pages of the local public TV for free, news are in the homepage of the prefered newspaper, etc..

9
- Stay away from Odysee unless you are a neonazi
  
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Thats fine. This just fuels developers to make more efficient ad blockers. Youtube wont win the long game and the more they try stuff like this, the more people find out about ublock and other adblockers.

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uBO and other traditional adblockers can do nothing against embedded ads in YT vids, at least not those in the extension stores. YT won't permit extensions in the official stores to make useless it's new policy. The solution can only be in independent sources, that is the problem. In the stores you'll find only descaffeinated adblockers which blocks only traditional ads on websites. Install, Greasymonkey or Violentmonkey, maybe Tampermonkey and keep an eye on the script repositories.

3

Crap I just opened youtube today and it looks like I was chosen. The ads load like normal videos and it sucks. My brain actually glitched for a couple of seconds when I opened a video because I wasn't used to seeing an ad. I dunno if there's any chance uBO can even counter this.

19

Try to watch the video embedded, simply edit it's URL, using instead of

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xxxxxxxx

this URL

https://www.youtube.com/embed/xxxxxxxx

17
- Welp, restarted my laptop and I'm off the testing list so can't replicate (unless I turn off uBO of course). But thanks, this will be handy if it happens again.
  
  6

Oh dear lord no.

16

I'm surprised it took them this long.

16

YT has 2 posibilities

Hosting all videos doble, one with ads and the same vids without for premium user
Insert also markers which at the end also are exploited by adblockers and userscripts

I think they'll hit their teeth against a rock with this.

Meanwhile a lot of content creators a changing to Odysee

13

That's not true. The way their streaming works is basically a Playlist of shorter fragments. They can easily insert their own fragments without obvious visual tells if they don't alter other elements of the page to indicate that an ad is playing.

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- But they will have to alter othet elements on the page. For example, scrubbing. It will either have to be paused at one specific timestamp while the ad is playing or the ad would have to be incorporated into the length of the video.
  
  In either case, it is detectable.
  
  The video chunks hash can be calculated and then blocked, in a crowdsourced way like with sponsorblock (but way more effective, because it will cover all videos)
  
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Hosting all videos doble, one with ads and the same vids without for premium user

Not quite sure why, they simply could in the fly stitch those files together.

Twitch is doing that for a while now i think.
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- Exactly this. It isn't even really "stitching" as YouTube videos are served as a series of short chunks anyways. So you simply tell the player that there are a few extra chunks which happen to be ads. There is no video processing required it is basically free to do it this way on the sever side.
  
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Actually the videos get stitched together dynamically.

8
I think they'll hit their teeth against a rock with this.

Press X to doubt

Most people do not have an adblocker. Most people watch YouTube to varying degrees of frequency and duration. Most people will continue to watch the ads. I’d be surprised if YT noticed any amount of users leaving the site because of this. The privacy minded folk are few and far between.

7
Not precise. They can dynamically generate the video stream from the ad-free original.

3
one with ads and the same vids without for premium user

If it worked that way, which others have already explained it doesn't, that would break their business model of showing each person individually targeted ads.

2
Odysee is not an alternative

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- Better than any other- Well, there are some selfhosted video sites like PeerTube and others, but respect content are not a real alternative, nor other proprietary streaming sites, like removedute, Vimeo, Dailymotion, etc. Front-ends or desktop clients (FreeTube) with the new YT policy will die. What other alternatives then?
  
  3

Honestly, I just pull videos from Youtube to watch later. I don't actually watch anything on Youtube. I do wonder if there's an upcoming replacement for Youtube like there was for Twitter.

10

Peertube

13

Would sponsorblock be a solution for this?

7

From what I read, this also breaks sponsorblock - as the ads are part of the video, it moves the time stamps of the video so it makes it not correct. The ads will also change I imagine so idk if sponsorblock will be a solution.

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- So videos that reference timestamps in their own video won't work? And comments that reference a timestamp won't work?
  
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With a little adoption yes it could. We could pass around checksums of known good blocks, or checksums of known advertisements. Or the audio signature of known good blocks or the audio signature of known advertisements.

So a service is like sponsor block would now just be a curated list of either good or bad signatures be them checksums or audio signatures or video signatures. There would be some engineering work to account for different compression ratios etc but it's totally doable

8
No, not in it's actual form, nor the front-ends can't not longer cutting the ads with their current form. Or they change their script, or you have the alternative to use YT or using another streaming service. But I think that there will be other solution in the future to show the middle finger to YT.

6

I'd just drag the time seeker though...

6

What are the YT alternatives? I use it by default and I'm to exhausted to look for another landing place

6

Odysee ! I use a extention even so if I click a video on YouTube and it is also on odysee it opened odysee instead.

6
That is a good question

5

Honestly no idea why they didn't just do that to begin with.

5

Because it’s actually really hard to achieve technically. When ads are served outside the stream you can easily serve different ads to different viewers based on their profiles. When the ads are baked into the stream you can either

A) Create a whole bunch of different copies of the video asset with different ads baked in and then rotate these on a regular basis. Which would be expensive to update and store and limit the range of adverts that could be served to a particular user.

B) Dynamically create a stream on the users request, which while possible means standard CDN caching isn’t going to work so there’s a distribution challenge.

Or some other alternative they’ve come up with. I’d be really interest to know what their approach is here.

7
- They’re probably inserting the ads “on the fly”. It can be finicky depending on codec, but doable.
  
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- Look up how HLS (HTTP Live Streaming) works. They just need to generate a personalized playlist for each person which points at things already hosted on CDN, and insert the ads where they want in the literal text file that your video player reads from to serve you the video.
  
  I don't know much about it, but it looks like there's specific tags designed for dynamic ad insertion. Idk if YouTube plans to use them in this case though, if they want it to be undetectable to the client.
  
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It's easier and less resource hungry to deliver targeted ads like that.

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That move would finally rid me of my addiction to YouTube. So much time, so many possibilities...

5

It depends on what the publishers publish for. If it’s money then Peertube is probably not attractive.

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As said, some creators already had changed to Odysee, because there they also can monetize their work, but without all the YT crap and nags, apart Odysee is freemium OpenSource https://github.com/OdyseeTeam

3

Anyone know if and how this might affect Grayjay or revanced?

4

If it ain't Foss it is a toss

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I noticed some lagging lately on ReVanced, but nothing more, ATM. If the server side ads are the cause it's nothing major for now.

3

Can we train a local AI model to recognise ads?

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Not with the crrent ones, it's easier to difference ads by code than by content in most Vids, eg, divulgations, news, influencers, etc. YT, to not destroy the own business modell, also avoiding that there later also 5 years old vids with outdated ads, must use some kind of dynamic insertion, that means, it can be discovered and skipped by some userscripts, for sure not in the extension stores, but in Greasyfork or OpenuserJS, which are independent from Google influence.

4

Inserting ad clips between DASH HLS packets seems to have done the trick for YouTube. RIP ad blocking on YouTube. Have fun I guess... :/

3

We'll see.At the moment I see any ads, nor nags in YT, using userscripts instead of extensions, but anyway I'm going to keep an eye on what's happening in Greasyfork and OpenuserJS regarding YT in the future, this in any case offers many more options than the castrated extensions that will be in the stores to be able to stay there.

2
- I am pessimistic about scripts being able to handle this, since it is a server side manipulation of streaming packets. It might be interesting if instead of seeing ads, a workaround is invented where the ad is not shown to user and video remains black and silent for that duration, and Google gets to hear such a thing has happened. If they get angry about it, it might reveal more about what they desire with forcing watching ads for people.
  
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- Don't be too optimistic, you probably haven't seen it because it's not being rolled out universally just yet; they like to A/B test their massive feature changes.
  
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