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

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).

It’s past due that we need a new platform.

Been using Nebula for a while now. Going to miss some YouTube creators, but I'll expect to get over it.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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..

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

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.

• 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.

Actually the videos get stitched together dynamically.

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.

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

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.

Odysee is not an alternative

Peertube

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.

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

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.

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

That is a good question

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.

It's easier and less resource hungry to deliver targeted ads like that.

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

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.

If it ain't Foss it is a toss

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.