YouTube tests server-side ads to make your coveted blocker obsolete

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

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.

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?

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 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 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??"

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).

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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.

There are already sponsorship-skipping add-ons. YouTube lost before they began.

how i wish there was a good alternative for youtube

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YouTube tests server-side ads to make your coveted blocker YouTube obsolete

ftfy

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.

This must consume a tremendous amount of processing to do since they would have to transcode copies for every ad region/campaign and every resolution on demand. I am interested in how they made this financially viable.

Have a sneaking suspicion that google is doing the classic spend 100 dollars to save 1 cent type scenario, cause all the money they've dumped into this anti-adblock shit? theres no way its less than what they've not made from adblockers.

Especially when all this money could have been spent on improving their ad service so people don't have to view 2 hour ads, or malware laden bullshit, or just blatant pornographic advertising.

but why spend money moderating their own service, when they can spend 10x the money trying to force their open septic tank of a service on everyone.

Yea the moment my adblockers don't work I stop using youtube

Watch how quickly I drop your fucking platform lmao. Please give me a reason

I'm getting them already, which is a bit annoying, but I still prefer the black screen with an adblocker to the wild mix of commercials that range from MLM schemes and "join my telegram group for totally not financial advice" to flat out hate speech that I'd get without an adblocker. So yeah suck it Google.

I mean I'll settle for the ad being blacked out and muted while I wait for the content. Or have it play elevator music while I wait.

I give it 5 hours from mass release before ad blockers catch up.

If they make it shitty enough I just wont use it.

Imagine what YouTube could be if they spent all this cash on improving their service instead.

It was going to happen eventually. It sucks since so much good content is still housed on youtube. The bright side is that I'll probably read more when uBlock stops working so well.

Nothing that can't be blocked by sponsorblock.

And if that doesn't work we'll find something else. Even if we'd have to download the same video multiple times to compare and strip out the differences.

Google may have plenty of nerds, but the world will always have more.

I know there's a significant part of the market that'd just say yeah, fuck it, i'll pay for Redtube Youtube Red Youtube Premium, but there's also a significant part of it, where a lot of people would rather just stop watching stuff entirely.

It's just like Hulu back in the days. You'd have no choice but to pay for a premium tier, just to have 14 unskippable ads forced down your throat, all in a span of a 19 minute long tv episode. I stopped paying after that month and resorted to piracy.

Piracy is always a service issue, except now it's legitimately going to harm individual creators, who have just about everything to lose, rathen that a rotten husk of some corporation, that's going to print free money, no matter what you do

Server side ads sound more expensive for Google to me. I'll just use some future plugin that blacks out the screen or whatever if it comes to that.

This is where AI would come in handy. Start scrubbing the buffer as it’s coming in to identify the difference and jump past it.

Does the ad restrict play back controls (such as disabling fast forward)? Trivial for an add-on to detect and if nothing else black out the video and mute the audio until playback controls are restored.

If it doesn't restrict fast forward then everyone can skip the ad without an ad-blocker.

Also, now that ads are server side YouTube is more responsible for the content of them as they are hosting them.

I have no problems with this.

Ad blockers are useful for more than just YouTube. So they are not going anywhere. However it will be a bummer if we can no longer block YouTube ads.

On android I have to endure the ads but on desktop I never see them.

Google is getting desprite

Maybe if they cleared out the scams and served more than 3 ads on repete, I wouldn't feel the need to block them. Yes, no one likes ads, but I get its to pay for the content I'm watching for free.

The moment they fix the search, fix their recommendations, stop wasting money on junk projects like games and allow me to completely disable Shorts, I will resubscribe to YT Premium.

fucking YouTube, am i right?

no seriously, havent used it in months, and weirdly dont Miss it. i used to watch YouTube the whole day.

And that’s when I moved to Invidious and haven’t looked back

Commercial detection systems exist already although I couldn't vouch for their efficacy. How they will integrate with streaming however is another question.

I for one am excited for this phase of the cat & mouse game, as solving this challenge means keeping the monkey off our backs for good while longer.

Next article...UBlock has designed AI to detect ads and blackout/mute video until it is done. Even better, it can buffer queued videos ahead of time and just remove ads.

I'm so fucking sick of their greedy bullshit

I'm sure I'll be downvoted to hell, but I just pay for Premium because I use YouTube all the time, don't want to see ads, and acknowledge that YouTube is an incredible service/product.

Aha! So this is how one snuck into a video I downloaded last night. Fuckers. At least with a locally downloaded file I can quickly skip ahead.

No, I would rather quit watching youtube rather than to watch Japanese style animation porn ads.

Things look much better if I'm on a US VPN. But I don't want to get bothered by those porn ads if it suddenly stops (yeah, it sometimes crashes for some reason) or I forget to turn it on. And yeah, I still don't like Grammarly ads although it's much better than porns.

Please do this! YouTube will finally be unusable and Google can finally start to die completely :3

Rumble and PeerTube

EDIT: I'm already paying YouTube with personal data and privacy.

Let's develop an AI that can detect where ads in videos start and end. And cut them out client side. Anti corporate advertising AI :D

I'll be the devils advocate: if this lets them stop trying to fucking break all the 3rd party tools, then I'm almost willing to say it's half a win.

I only half use 3rd party tools to block ads, the MORE important half is that the 3rd party apps fucking show me my subscriptions in chronological order and NOTHING FUCKING ELSE.

I'd trade off ads you could skip by hopping forward 30 seconds in a video stream vs. missing things you're actually subscribed to, and having to deal with all the garbage google shovels at you.

Fuck youtube

Arse has fallen out of their money printer so they're getting desperate.

A few more years till they measure engagement via your camera

There is no way for advertisers to know that their ads are actually shown. That is why an ad is a link to the advertiser's website. If there is one thing I have learned from uploading to YT and watching, it's that YT is terrible at transparency and this kind of logistics. I doubt this will work at all.

God it sure would suck if there were trojan advertisements threatening to take down Youtube servers.

Yet another reason I'm glad I use youtube-dl.

Sounds good. It’s a waste of time anyway. Maybe I’ll do something else like go outside or create something of my own.

My local invidious instance is borked too. Not sure if its related and I don't have time to investigate now.

Guess I need something else for background noise.

Edit: Took enough time to get a fresh image and its working again. Looks like I hadn't updated since September.

Since it is server side, will this effect the alternative front ends?

I got the server-side ads a few weeks ago. Switched to another account and was ad-free again. I'd be happy to pay for Premium as it supports the creators I watch, but for ad-free alone it's not worth the £13/mo. The other features jacking up the price aren't much use to me.

Won't this totally break deep linking to time codes?

FUCK GOOGLE SO GODDAMN MUCH

If only there were hundreds of other sites on the Internet that stream video. If porn sites can make it work, anyone can make it work.

use libretube or grayjay 👍

Oh no, Anyway - Invidious/Piped user Hmmm wait, those may not work with it... damn

There's already a solution for this, do it like the Sponsorblock plugin.

Ive had no issues with Brave Browser on my Desktop, but NewPipe on Mobile has been all over the place the past few weeks.

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