YouTube tests server-side ads to make your coveted blocker obsolete
YouTube has been spotted testing server-side ads, which could pose a problem to ad blockers.
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
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.
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.
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
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: 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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
How is this bundling even legal. YouTube ist pretty much a Monopoly and they are using this fact to push YouTube Music. If that's Not anti competitive behaviour what ist?
I think the EU should step in and force Google not to bundle Music.
Inclusion of yt music was the thing that kept me on the subscription
Same here. I was struggling to get the ad blockers to work consistently, so I said fuck it and canceled Spotify and subscribed to Youtube. FWIW YT music does a much better job of choosing random music that I like; Spotify just plays the same shit over and over again.
I miss GPM. YouTube music is full of community-made playlist that are actually YouTube video playlists, so you'll start one up and have all the music video intros, interrupts, and extra sound effects and shit that get thrown in.
I started a Disney playlist for my nephew in the car, and you could hear all the sound effects from the movie over the actual soundtrack.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
YouTube tests server-side ads to make
your coveted blockerYouTube obsolete
ftfy
But do you have a viable alternative in your back pocket?
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.
The amount of people who:
Are not statistically significant to YouTube's viewership or income.
I figured that. If I was to guess, I would say ~90% use the native app on their phones or TV to watch YouTube.
In total, I have to assume ad blocking viewers make up a single percent or less.
I don't see how this could make financial sense.
I think it's mostly about saving face for advertisers. Which is funny because Google never does anything for saving face for their users as they shut down services that literally cost a rounding error for them to run.
I think it probably breaks even and fits with their strategy to abuse everyone until they pay for premium
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.
Not necessarily. They could split the video in advance, assuming the ads will always be at the same point. Even if not, they could still use the direct, unaltered source with a range. The big challenge would be keeping it all synced, which I think is safe to say that they will get right.
But even if it did need to be transcoded, YouTube automatically transcodes every single video uploaded, multiple times. They are clearly not afraid of it.
Since AI has caused them to complete abandoned any illusions about their carbon zero footprint I think they just stopped caring.
I’d guess its a solution similar to DASH that dynamically streams different content.
They don’t need to do any extra transcoding. It’s not that costly to stitch videos together. If done at specific strategic locations, it’s like copying a text file into another.
If they only do it for very popular videos, the additional cost will be trivial.
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.
It's what happens when you hire MBA grads and they're trying to find relevance.
Maybe... but in the long term advertisers aren't going to be willing to spend as much on a platform if they know that ads are easily blocked.
except ads are blocked everywhere when you have an adblocker.
and people have adblocking because ads are cancer
Because as are everywhere.
and they carry malware.
and they are obnoxious, if not straight pornographic.
Moderating the advertising would do far more for making adblock useless, than starting a petty dickslapping war they wont win.
I have a personal rule that anything advertised on YouTube I will never buy.
all I ever see advertised on youtube, during the brief times I have no adblocker (mostly when I'm working on other peoples computers and making sure audio and stuff is working) are either 2 hour long fake documentaries/talk shows/etc pushing some bullshit product
or PragerU pushing racist bullshit.
In fact, the overwhelming majority of it is PragerU pushing racist bullshit.
If you remove all other reasons for adblocking, Not seeing PragerU bullshit and not letting google make money off PragerUs racist bullshit is still an incredibly valid reason for adblocking.
Watch how quickly I drop your fucking platform lmao. Please give me a reason
Or just one more thing to add to the open seas of piracy. Or start supporting nebula?
Although this would be the case for piracy, as a better means to support artist, because I pirate my music. I do attend more live music venues which gives more revenue directly to the artist
When the YT apps stopped working a few days ago, I just continued watching on Nebula until the apps were fixed. Only went back onto YT to read discussions in video comments
Have you considered paying for their ad free service?
Yes, and it took less than a minute of googling to find "I'm paying, why do I still see ads?". There's also someone in this thread complaining of the same.
Premium also has lots of ads in your feed (disguised as product videos) and videos include sponsorships ads.
The problem with that is they will eventually introduce ads to the paid service as well.
Yea the moment my adblockers don't work I stop using youtube
I suspect they're fine with that.
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.
or do some back end trickery where they can buffer the video for longer than youtube allows, then selectively clip out the ad parts so you can continue to seemlessly watch.
I wonder if the server throttles that ads so you can't 2x the playback speed. Sounds like a good way to detect when the ads are being served.
I give it 5 hours from mass release before ad blockers catch up.
If they make it shitty enough I just wont use it.
That will only be an option if content creators don’t use it either. And they will look where their audience goes, which will mostly be nowhere.
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.
The issue is that Sponsorblock uses timestamps of videos to skip segments. If the ads injected all have different durations, then SponsorBlock is now obsolete.
It's not even that simple. If you skip ahead during an ad, the YT servers could just keep streaming you the ad content anyway. Their servers can ensure that the next 30s of packet data you receive is an ad no matter what, so the only way you can skip it is to wait it out and close your ears and eyes. Basically the same concept as ads on broadcast TV. Which means we'll have to do a TiVo for YT... Gross.
What if sponsor block started collecting the durations of videos (if they don't already), then it could skip forward by the difference.
I had to drop sponsorblock as it was letting those ads in. Now just use unblock and I don't get those ads anymore.
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
except now it's legitimately going to harm individual creators,
I know it isn't the world we live in anymore, and there's nothing we can do about it...but maybe we shouldn't have treated YouTube like a job and just kept it as a hobby video website between ordinary people. Like what it started out as.
I'd 100% pay for it if the pricing made any sense.
The price is absolutely obscene. No fucking way i’m paying that
When it was 9 bucks, it was worth it. Certainly isn't now.
Redtube is a porn site, lol.
Yeah, that's the joke
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.
Sounds like a price increase is coming our way!
They are coming your way for sure. Cause I'm not paying a dime 😉
Wouldn't sponsorblock be enough?
No, the ad timings will vary
In fact, it's likely that it might fuck over SB in general, if they don't compensate for it
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.
It becomes an AI war. They will use AI to make ads to get around the AI blocking. The ads will end up looking very similar to the content.
Ad: "Hey guys. It's ya boy, NordVPN, here today to tell you about the dangers of using the internet without my VPN...."
Whatever happened to ad placement lol
Then you start using ai to put in anti ads that point out all the bad stuff about the usual ad subjects, I'd say get as code to libel/slander as possible without risking a lawsuit
I'd be watching a car accident compilation and a Buick starts trying to tell me to ask my doctor about Cymbalta. You know... I might actually watch that.
Aren't they legally required to indicate that an ad is playing? Should be almost trivial to detect and I don't know how they'd get around that.
I'm the US? I think only if the content is targeted at children.
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.
I use revanced:
Revanced manager: https//revanced.app/download
MicroG: https//github.com/revanced/gmscore/releases/tag/v0.3.1.3.240913
Use newpipe on Android, no ads
I love newpipe except for one very annoying quirk: if you pause a video for more than a few minutes it "breaks" and skips to the end of the video when you hit play again.
For long videos this is very annoying, but I'll gladly pay that "price" if it means I don't have to hear 25261516 insanely annoying advertisements a day.
What's hilarious about this article is that I'm actually getting YouTube premium for free as some kind of bonus to my phone service yet I'm still using ad blockers on it and everything else. I really don't give a shit. If they want to get better at injecting ads I'm going to place my bets on ad blockers getting better at blocking them. Or just not using YouTube. Cause, quite frankly, most of my favorite creators are on Nebula anyway and I pay for that service.
I use Firefox and just use the web browser. You can even listen to YouTube with the screen off. Plus Firefox add ons/extensions
Try LibreTube. Or Firefox Mobile with Ublock Origin. Or one of many other solutions. You don't need to watch YouTube ads on Android.
If you're on Android, use revanced
You can use the brave browser on android. As of now it blocks youtube ads.
Added bonus it saves on your data plan because wouldn't ya know it, the copious amounts of ads they shove in our faces uses a lot of data... that we already pay for. I'm not paying my cell provider for data just so advertisers can use it to try to get me to pay for more shit I don't need.
On iOS I have to use some niche app that lets me circumvent YouTube asking me for my ID but if it doesn’t want ID vinegar extension and wipr works for ads. Vinegar replaces the whole player I wonder if it will work for server side ads
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.
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.
Why do Shorts (and Reels, and Stories, and whatever other catchy names they give short form videos) even exist?
The number of ads per hour of video is higher. And people get addicted to the dopamine fix. Short videos generally will have to be incredibly stimulating to keep people watching.
Your dopamine goes through the rood for 15 seconds or 30 seconds, after that it drops down again and you need the next video to get it higher again and again. In between the videos you get ads, so in the end they lure you into watching a whole bunch of ads.
They optimize their algoritms so they know what keeps you watching. Could be cute puppies, could also be fake news about how everything is somebody elses fault, but they just want to keep you watching. They don't care about the truth, they need your eyes on the ads.
And that is how generations will be ruined.
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.
May I ask what do you use for content instead of YouTube? A lot of certain people I follow are on YouTube and music that I listen to are often only on YouTube these days. Not even Spotify has the niche songs (mainly Arabic and Japanese songs).
well, i would never even think of using it for music (except downloading what i cant find) same with spotify (i hate streaming). I just watched regular videos, which I just suddenly don't do anymore, I started binging TV shows instead, -no ads .
I just couldn't bare the ads, they're that bad. and when I think of stuff that makes me mad, I can't do anything associated with it, I.e. watch YouTube -know there will be ads (or not, because i have an adblocker) the mere thought that there WOULD be ads is so annoying to me, that I cannot stand watching YouTube.
but yeah back to the point, TV shows, and books, especially books have been my replacement, and I must say, they are much better.
I'm so fucking sick of their greedy bullshit
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.
what ai have they designed? I have not heard about this and am skeotical
It was a /s commentary on the neverending war of ads vs ad blocking. Soon we will have to buy advanced anti advertising AI servers for our houses so we don't get them beamed to our walls from space lasers.
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.
It might even be a bit simpler than that, as YouTube's going to have to mark segments as adverts somehow so you can't just skip past them.
And that’s when I moved to Invidious and haven’t looked back
Considering I can't get Invidious to serve me a video in a higher res than 480p, no thanks.
Those ads do look good in 1080p!
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.
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.
Or even trim it.
Way back in the day when I used SageTV to record live TV there were programs that would automatically identify commercials and skip them for you. Computers are way more powerful now so I doubt it will be long before there's and app that automatically downloads your favorite YouTube channels and prescans the videos to skip the ads.
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.
I don't think that's an unfair thing to say at all.
I want to pay for Premium, but a mixture of oppressive tactics, poor payouts for YouTubers, and constant price hikes has made me reconsider. I watch YouTube more than most streaming providers, and that list continues to shrink because the cost has outpaced the value. A few years ago I couldn't imagine not watching Netflix, but now...eh, cancel it.
The fact that google also tracks and monetizes/exploits every single thing you do should be more than enough payment. Considering thats how they got to be where they are in the first place.
Besides. If google moderated its fucking ads to begin with, people wouldnt have overwhelmingly adopted adblocking, since google adsense is like the biggest adserver on the internet.
I'm in the same boat. There are a lot of parts of the Internet that should be free, but YouTube is not one of them. Video hosting is one of the most resource intensive services around, and if we as consumers aren't paying for it they'll find a worse way to fund it.
Hey very valid statement and salute to you.
Personally, I believe this ultimately hurts and affects customers like yourself. Because YT is spending all of this additional effort to effect and crowdout, if looked at a very tiny percentage. Instead of investing into platform improvements for visitors and creators.
YT should of focused on competition which is every other streaming service. If they provided shows still using network ads breaks, instead of these psycho every 4min you 2.5mins of ads unless you pay is just extortion. Plus they aren't really sharing revenue with creators... sigh
If YouTube were an independent company, I would be much happier to pay like I do for Spotify and even (borderline) Paramount Plus. I have no problem paying artists for their time, and I have spent thousands and thousands on commissions and merchandise from independent people and art businesses. Google already has enough money. I would rather save my money for small(er) companies who actually need it.
If people stopped supporting these ultra-consolidated megacorporations, we might have a healthier economy and better worker's rights overall. But what do I know lol
It's just gonna make premium more expensive because they have to recoup their engineering costs somehow and I don't think that the extra ad views from bypassing as blockers will cover it.
And people you're watching are getting money if you're a premium user.
Same. My adblockers are still in place, but YouTube premium is by far the best bang for the buck I spend on entertainment. My family uses it every day on multiple devices, and then we get YT music too.
That's fair.
Based on what I've heard from creators, they love us premium subscribers. If I get no ads and the people I like get more money, I call that a win. Having just been to the movies which have about an hour of unskippable ads at the beginning - including ads to show more ads - I'm willing to pay to not have that in my life.
Me too, I've had YouTube premium since it was called YouTube Red and I was still in middle school lol.
Ah yes, the good 'ol days of RedTube.
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
Sponsor block extension
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.
Weird, I don't use any add-ons and the subscription page by default works exactly like I think you want.
Fuck youtube
Arse has fallen out of their money printer so they're getting desperate.
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.
Sounds good. It’s a waste of time anyway. Maybe I’ll do something else like go outside or create something of my own.
Honestly the shitter they get the more content creators will publish elsewhere.
Honestly idk why more don't post to peertube already. It costs nothing to cross post if you already have the content.
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.
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.
If they're truly server-side injected, then they would also appear permanently in any downloaded copy because the server would be telling the client what pieces are available-including the ad pieces with no way to differentiate.
At least if still downloads them you can edit them out if it's something you want to save.
At least I can trim those away if needed.