Inside the 'arms race' between YouTube and ad blockers / Against all odds, open source hackers keep outfoxing one of the wealthiest companies.

Ads are effective, sadly. And why so much money is poured into them. I believe there are a few effects at play but the direct, see and ad and want to go buy it now is only one ofbhem that mostly only affects some people, or a lot of people occasionally.

I think a bigger effect is familiarity. You are far more likely to pick a product you are familiar with or have seen before over something younjave never heard of. Even if you have only ever seen it on advets and completely forgotten that you have ever seen ads for it. So even if you don't think they work on you they likely do without you realizing, at least enough of the time on enough people that make them worth while running.

Ads work. These companies wouldn't spend millions in them otherwise. Consumer behavior is among the most studied psychological phenomenoms in the world. If you show an ad to one person it's near impossible to tell if it had an effect or not but show it to a thousand people and you'll see it.

That's not how ads work.

Yeah I feel mostly this way too, but the data is solid, ads are effective. Even on me, very rarely. And I'm the type of person who doesn't ever click ads, out of spite. Even if it's exactly what I was already looking to actively buy. But every now and then they give me an idea that I pop open a new tab, research, and then buy.

That's not really how they work, or that is not the only way. Their point is to put the logo, slogans, company etc into your memory. This way when you're shopping for something specific, then the brand pops out to you because you've seen it and it gives you a sense of familiarity and hence, higher trust.

Likewise. I don't think I've ever been moved or compelled to buy, check out, or even pay attention to a YouTube ad.

To be honest, I once fell victim on reddit to an add that promoted AFK-Arena. It turned out to actually be a decent game.

ABP has always been a shitty adblocker because it's meant to make money rather than actually block ads effectively. They've been accepting money from ad networks to allow their "unintrusive ads" (an oxymoron) for over a decade now, and I'm sure Google is paying for this to happen now.

AdBlock Minus

Too bad Google doesn't want to have a conversation, at least one that isn't at gunpoint. I wouldn't mind unintrusive ads. If it stayed at banner ads and things like that, I would probably enable them. Shoving crap in the middle of videos just makes it a horrible experience, so I'm going to get rid of them.

An Adblocker allowing ads to.. start a conversation that's already been had and over for decades at this point.

People don't like intrusive ads. Give intrusive ads and we'll always find ways around them. It's a story as old as the internet. Google is no exception. You may have billions of dollars and thousands of employees but nearly everyone in the damned world hates ads. You can try to fight it all you want. The only reason that nearly anyone puts up with ads is they want to support the creator or don't yet know they can avoid the ads. Even those supporting the creators don't like the damned things.

I've seen so, so many people watching ads on their phones

Why do you think they were pushing so hard for WEI? They did try to fundamentally change how the internet works.

i wouldn’t be surprised if this was partly a war between the team they have implementing this and the team they have implementing this, in their spare time

I'm not that optimistic. They could implement some sort of aggressive DRM. In the US, all they have to do is label protection as DRM and then it becomes illegal to even have any discussion of how to circumvent it. The overwhelming majority of users aren't going to bother with any ad blocking. In the end, this could end up hurting Google if people build decentralized Youtube alternatives and then they could take viewers away from Youtube.

Here is an alternative Piped link(s):

RESUME VIEWING

Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.

I'm open-source; check me out at GitHub.

It's how we did it with MythTV and over the air or cable tv. The algorithms will just save a file in post, that has the ads removed. And that was 15yrs ago.

And if Google went nuclear and starts embedding the ad into the videos themselves?

This type of war happened 15 years ago with Hulu vs Xbox. Hulu won because despite there always being an exploit it was always several days before a work around was uploaded. Eventually it was Hulu on xbmc for 1 day, then 3 days no Hulu on and on until everyone gave up.

YouTube's end game is baked in ads. There are streaming services that already do this so it's not impossible. It would not surprise me one iota if YouTube isn't working on this now.

Once this happens, I suspect that the last round of people that have been holding out to subscribe to premium will either cave and do so or people will simply abandon YouTube.

Twitch has increased their ad blocking techniques for the last 3 years or so. Twitch has been a lot more advanced and aggressive with their method. Yet, there are still ways to subvert the ads on twitch. If I didnt read lemmy, i wouldnt even know youtube was doing anything. I have just basic adblocking ublock

Although every once in a while, twitch will release a new technique and it might take 24 hours to solve.

I think that's a big part of why Google doesn't fight (and in fact helps) the banking and streaming companies that want to lock down Android more. It's harder to block ads if you can't block them in the browser and can't block them system wide via hosts file. (Yes you can use VPN + DNS, but it's a lot more battery intensive.)

They even made a series of movies about it.

Wow that's full on antitrust surely? Or was this before the regulatory precedents were set for Internet providers?

That's a big if though. Unless an actual creator-exodus happens, it's not going to happen.

I went through a period of de-googling a couple of years ago. Swapping browser, mobile os, search engine, storage, maps, music, video purchases, voice assistant and even email service was relatively simple, there are alternatives out there which do the job just as well if not better than what Google offer.

The only exception is YouTube, yea there are individual sites that occasionally offer some of the videos I want (often with a subscription attached), there are some federated systems like NewPipe which have some videos but there is no one offering remotely the quantity or quality of what you can get on YouTube for free.

As the article states, it’s basically a monopoly at this point without a viable alternative.

Not going to happen. Most of us, and the ones making the service profitable pay.

You have no value for Google and lemmy isn't a population Google cares about in the first place.

Exactly, I had people tell me that we should support YouTube, because it costs money and if we don't it will disappear.

I would celebrate the day it would happen, YouTube is actually the reason we don't have much competition there. They used their position and Google monopoly in other areas to establish this monopoly.

That is and big if though. Yeah you, me and half the people here might leave over this, but we block ads already and so are not highly valued to YouTube or a lot of the creators and are only a small drop in the ocean of viewers.

YouTube is betting on more people turning off ad blockers then those that leave. And i am glad to see that it might be having a small effect on more people actually discovering ad blockers instead. Which I bet is something YouTube did not expect to see.

Why would creators leave? They only earn money from users that watch ads or use premium. Ad blocker users leaving doesn't affect them.

And if you "just leave", guess what? You just saved them a few bucks in bandwidth. It's a win-win for them.

It's YouTube, they don't need "exposure". They are out to make a profit.

They ditch the "do no evil" motto years ago when seeking military contract to help them kill people

How many assholes do you have?

Not really. There are lots of protocols and such that haven't been broken in any meaningful ways. Attackers have advantage is a weird thing to say.

quoth Rage Against The Machine:

'fuck you, I won't do what you tell me'

I was gonna say, the Internet wouldn't be what it is today without those so-called open source hackers. They're the giants that Google and all the rest are standing on the shoulders of.

Client side versus server.

To use a metaphor: the internet is a mailperson, and a YouTube video is a package. The mailperson hands it off to me. Then I have to fumble with opening the box to get the item inside.

Well, let's say I have a butler. The butler can take the package from the mailman, and rip out all the unnecessary stuff, and give me what's inside the box. The butler is adblock.

YouTube/Google cannot mess with my butler. Why? Because it's outside of their power. They can try to do things like force a signature before giving me the package. But guess what? My butler can sign off my package. YouTube knows to get to me, they have to go through my butler - period.

So there's no "blocking traffic" because once the package is sent, they have to deal with my butler. And they can make all sorts of detectors on the package, but we'll keep finding ways to bypass it and convince the package that my butler can totally sign for me.

There is no way to determine if the request comes from an alternative frontend or a legitimate user. Even if they start blocking all public instances of alternatives, which is highly unfeasible since most of them use VPN and blocking all VPNs is extremely restrictive for legitimate users too, you can host them locally.

If someone hosts their own front end, Google has no way of knowing whether or not it's legitimate.

Really enjoying LibreTube on my phone, for listening to long videos without the video on screen. Its audio mode is very clean in my opinion.

Google could implement Widevine DRM for all videos.

I refuse to use it.

What's this? How to use it? Can someone please ELI5 ?

Or (If you have the storage), yt-dlp.

What's this?

For some reason I'm getting:

Unable to extract uploader id; please report this issue on  https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp/issues?q="  
[ytdl_hook] youtube-dl failed: unexpected error occurred 
Failed to recognize file format.

Seems weird.

I believe this phrase uses the original, older meaning: https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/309252/has-hacker-definitely-gained-a-negative-connotation

Vimeo: "Today is the day!"

newpipe is just a client for accessing youtubes servers, yes, so if youtube went away we would need to use vimeo or something else (maybe peertube, open source yt alternative?)

There's no need to look for conspiracies when the truth is simple enough. Current YouTube CEO Neal Mohan was senior vice president of display and video ads at Google. Ads has been his wheelhouse for quite awhile.

Google = biggest advertising company in the world

Youtube = biggest money drain for Google

Adblock = a direct obstacle to the longterm feasibility of Google's ability to ever reconcile the money drain against their primary product (advertising) and end up in the black

The current state of Youtube's profitability is a long way off mattering for anything. For all it costs to run, it can be sustained indefinitely without much issue. This will remain the case until Youtube advertising reaches saturation. Given how much stuff like TV ads still cost, we can safely say this is still a long way off, regardless of the potential rise of competing platforms.

The landscape of youtube & adblockers is unlikely to be the same then, and restrictive measures taken now aren't really representative of what it'll be like. The actions taken now are for 2 reasons: maintenance of consumer expectation, so that it doesn't feel like site monetization is changed substantially when the money faucet gets switched on. And market research.

I have no doubt that a primary intent behind recent actions to do with delays or slowdowns was to measure the blowback, using it a yardstick for further actions not yet taken, which will eventually culminate in some action which actually meaningfully changes Youtube's monetization. But this may not be for many years.

None of us here are really experiencing problems, we have only heard of them and are discussing them. When something new happens, you'll hear "what else is new? they've done [something similar to] this many times before", with those people ignoring that the historic actions were totally mitigated everytime. And in the process, we the vanguard of the internet keeping Google's advertising monopoly restrained by engaging with adblockers, become conditioned to yield to advertising and a Google-controlled internet.

Because that's the only way they can win. Barring serious pro-Google changes to privacy laws around the world, the ultimate means to force advertising simply isn't available to them. Their best hope is to try and convince us that blocking ads is just too much of a hassle, ideally without ever actually making it so in a way that causes some mass migration away from Youtube. That's not a hard line to tread

You look from a position of a tech-savvy user.

You know how Firefox is built different from Chrome. You know what Manifest V3 is. You know how Ublock Origin is different from other adblockers, etc.

The fact is, we are the minority. Most people would just keep using Chrome or Chromium-based browsers and won't know any better. They'll end up (and already end up) in a trap that's super easy to escape, they just don't plan to/don't know how.

And for us Firefox geniuses they prepare quite a few surprises, like the recently found artificial delay of 5s when your user agent reports you use Firefox on some experimental users. This will drag on, and while we absolutely know what to do to fuck them up, normal users, who are the majority, don't.

They probably believed there were easy things they could do that wouldn't result in an "arms race" that would net them a larger profit than the effort they put in. Once you promise x% more revenue they won't let you take that back so they keep pushing.

The YouTube team at Google isn't all outsourced and generally Google uses it's top talent for the money making side of the business

The people in the ads side are some of the best around. The problem is: they don't necessarily care about ad blockers.

My laptop came pre installed with Firefox and ublock origin. Google Chrome had ad blocking in it as well. The devs in the company don't like ads any more than anyone else... Also ads are a major security risk, and using ad blocking is just good opsec.

Your perception of Google software engineers is way off. They're more often than not some of the best software engineers in the industry because their hiring bar is very high, and they get paid like it. YouTube is an astounding complex problem to solve with thousands of moving parts and non-trivial problems. It's honestly astounding people are able to build sites that complex, and that they're not only common but extremely reliable.

The issue is there are even more extremely intelligent software engineers outside of Google than in, and many of them spend some of their free time working on FOSS projects including ad-blockers. It's also almost always harder to be red team (attacker, or the ad-blockers devs) as opposed to blue team (defensive, or the people trying to stop them).

No, it is your right to choose what code is executed in your browser and which isn’t. There’s a case to be made about accepting the EULA but if you never registered a Google account, then you never accepted any EULA. This is not the case with modded android/iOS apps as in those cases you are violating DMCA 1201.

Because YouTube doesn't want you to skip ads? If the ad was just another part of the show, you would just fast forward past the ad.

Switching stream sources is the most easy detectable form of ads. Also the most easily blocked, simple dns blocking will suffice.

uBlock-Origin on Firefox.

ublock origin by far. Just refresh the filter list every now and then.

I apologize for my strongopinion but I believe yours is misguided or similar. Ublock origin is objectively the best ad blocker , they are an extremely talented team, dedicated and have been for a long long time.

The enemy is getting stronger, not the defense not working well.

:)

Apparently you need to clear the plugin's cache semi-regularly.

As sometimes it won't update itself as fast.

Vinegar + SponsorBlock on iOS/iPadOS/MacOS.