8mo ago

YouTube’s ad blocker crackdown now includes third-party apps

www.theverge.com YouTube’s ad blocker crackdown now includes third-party apps

YouTube’s ad blocking battle continues.

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Makes me miss a time where they couldn't tell if ads were actually watched or not.
Sooner or later, ad blockers should just simulate the ad being played (in the background) with the real content going in the foreground to act as if the ad was watched.
Kind of like going to the bathroom during commercials.
Then again I wish we had a real alternative to YouTube. (Don't point me to the fediverse video stuff ... that's not what I mean.) There is no real competition for a place to freely upload videos ... or on the other side find all that content. No one wants to scale enough to compete. (Very few probably could considering the amount of new content per minute).
If only there was real competition, then YouTube would have to fight over our attention/usage by lowering ad count.
No competition means worse for all.
- Well, YT is literally getting petabytes uploaded to it. Every single day. Thats 1000 terabytes, and thats 1000000 gigabytes.
  I bet you haven't even seen a petabyte of storage in one place (assuming you didn't go to a data center yourself). How is a small company, or even fediverse, gonna handle that? Thats absolutely insane amount of data and, without moderation or curation, it is not feasible.
  It's a giant waste of space and resources, to be honest. Most videos are seen once, and the rest is mostly spam or bad quality content.
  
  Actually the cost issues wouldn't be the storage it's self. Storage is pretty cheap, it's content delivery networks. YouTube is supported by being owned and run by one of the worlds larges content delivery networks. There's virtually no latency, videos play immediately.
  Having millions (potentially billions in YouTube's case) of people accessing data at once is an immense challenge and YouTube perfected it pretty early on, that's part of why there's no competition.
  
  Content delivery is not cheap, but not hard to do, either. I'd wager storage would be a bigger problem, because it just keeps rising. Sadly, YouTube is the one with money, and the monetization comes from people.
  
  I can speak from experience that content delivery is harder than storage. Companies like YouTube tackle the storage issue by having tiered storage levels. Trending content is stored on SSDs, new and often viewed content is stored on harddrives with a caching system similar to optane and archived storage (essentially old videos that very rarely get views) goes on tape storage. It's really cool, and it allows massive about of storage in a small space, it's costs alot to implement but because of the tape storage they essentially have "infinite" (it's not really infinite of course but it's a problem for next decade not this decade).
  
  Fair enough, but that's YouTube, who can afford all of it. Of course, if you have tons of money, you don't need to count pennies where counting them would just slow you down.
  But take a competitor - how can a different service be viable if they lack money to have (virtually) infinite storage? Heavy moderation or monetization. Youtube kinda does the second one.
  To reiterate, I am not saying you say things that are not correct.
  
  I remember seeing a startup at one point that wanted to put mini-CDNs in people's homes. Small black boxes that would automatically be a CDN not just for your home, but the whole area. Of course, sites would have to use their CDN network, etc.
  I actually thought it was a really interesting idea. Almost like federated CDNs.
  Imagine if every Xfinity router has a built-in 16TB CDN: it would be an interesting way to possibly change how bandwidth works and makes it back to the DCs. Most popular stuff would be closer, faster.
  
  God could you imagine the security risks though, having a physical risk in a network, that would be fun. Limewire on steroids.
  
  Well break it up "lemmy wise" or more? I mean nobody can replace youtube but it would be possible having your own fishing channel for example. If it gets wildly watched you probably have to figure out some sponsorship for sure.
  BTW no I haven'tseen a PB storage, but I did write visualisation and computation software for treating and seing datastructures up to PB size with hdf5.
- There's a tool that does this. It speeds up the ad so it takes only a couple of seconds. The ad is "watched" but muted the whole time so you don't actually have to deal with it.
  Edit: The article isn't great but the tool is sort of the same as what you mentioned. https://9to5google.com/2023/11/25/youtube-ads-speed-up-workaround/
- Sooner or later, ad blockers should just simulate the ad being played (in the background) with the real content going in the foreground to act as if the ad was watched.
  I wish adblockers did this, open the ad in a little silenced sandbox window. I don't see the ad, creator gets their pay
  
  Even the advertisers don't lose out because you wouldn't have paid attention to the ad too. They might even win a little because now one doesn't have to get annoyed by the ad and deliberately not buy the thing.
  
  Exactly, I don't overly mind the "paid advertisements" the creators do, the guys I watch that do this are extremely funny in how they do it so if I don't manually skip I get a good laugh, like the "Adstronaut"
  
  Adnaseum is a fork of unlock that fakes viewing ads. The thing is its banned from chromes app store because google is at its core an advertising company.
  
  Hmm, I only use chrome for my YT chan control, not watching. Watching ANYTHING is done on FF+UBO, but if adnaseum is on FF I may switch. Poor google has YET to show an ad I would be interested in, hell the tv in the 80s showed me more of interest than ads today. Thanks for the suggestion,will check it out!
  
  They do have a ff version
  https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/adnauseam/
  
  I know what I am checking out tonight
- No one wants to scale enough to compete.
  I don't consider scale important from the perspective of making and watching good videos. People get hung up on it when citing barriers to competition with Youtube, and while it's certainly there, it only matters to Google itself (so it can continue to plausibly lie to its customers about ad impression numbers). In fact YT's offering was at its creative peak when scale was lacking.
  It makes no difference to me whether a knowledgeable hobbyist has 20,000 subs or 250,000. I don't care about their "content" suitability for advertisers (that creepy term can get nuked). I certainly couldn't care less whether the algorithm promotes their work, deserving as it may be. This sort of creator operates on the assumption their viewers are intelligent, and is typically savvy enough to route around YT with alternate donation/support mechanisms. These people will continue on any platform. For them, quality is an end in itself rather than a feed-in to a metric. I would rather watch a badly filmed insightful critical appraisal of a new piece of hardware than Canadian/Black Technology Man's 8K press release rehash full of slick cuts and pointless b-roll.
  Scale is the concern of middlemen.
- I wonder about this. Youtube is made so that videos has to be long (10 minutes at least, or you won't get exposure, right?) so we get all those dragged out videos with long summaries.
  Also you are supposed to earn money with it, which combined makes videos, IMO, often not very interesting.
  Sure, I get it, everyone can't make videos all day long for free, but isn't that something that we shouldn't maybe want?
  I prefer a genuine hobbyist making one video a year, than a sponsored person pushing one a day.
  Which brings me to hosting and bandwidth needs, youtube needs a lot of that because of its business model, but say Lemmy communities could probably host quality videos without large hassle (especially if small servers wasn't defederated all the time).
  Thoughts?
  
  I thought the 10 minute was a monetization requirement.
  
  The problem is the term quality would be used to block out certain creators. The definition would wind up being vague and/or arbitrary.
  What one person thinks is quality may not be quality to someone else. In a way that's a niceness of YouTube. We can each upload what we think is good.. or bad.
  Even then if a video goes big viral (which is arguably something a creator may want), the bandwidth costs could skyrocket.
  Then it's like: maybe we need CDNs and more storage and boom now it's even more expensive. I just don't see fediverse video working great long term without big money to back it.

334 comments