YouTube has found a new way to bypass ad blockers by integrating ads directly into video content via "server-side ad insertion," complicating the detection and blocking of ads. How will ad blockers respond?
Ads will always be detectable because you cannot speed up or skip an ad like you can the rest of the video.
If they do make it so you can speed up or skip the ad sections of a video, mission accomplished.
If all else fails, I’d enjoy a plugin that just blanks the video and mutes the sound whenever an ad is playing. I’ll enjoy the few seconds of quiet, and hopefully I can use that time to break out of the mentally unhealthy doom spiral that is the typical YouTube experience.
I briefly touched on this in a lengthy comment when this scheme was originally floated a few months ago. Your prediction, which granted is something that Youtube/Google absolutely would try if they thought they could get away with it, would only work on viewers that remained within the confines of Youtube’s native player.
Any third party app capable of bullying or tricking Youtube into handing them the video data is free to do whatever it wants to with it afterwards, even if this ultimately means impeccably pretending to be the official Youtube player in order to get the server to fork over the data. Furthermore, video playback is buffered so a hypothetical pirate client would have several seconds worth of upcoming video to analyze and determine what it wants to do with it.
Youtube could certainly make this process rather difficult by including some kind of end-to-end DRM or something, but at the end of the day you need to make a playable video stream arrive on the client’s device or computer somehow, and if you can’t guarantee full control of the entire environment in which that happens, dedicated nerds will find a away to screw with that data.
Oh, the year is 2100 and YouTube only plays on dedicated Alphabet-produced hardware (available “free” of course) with cam-proof screens? Storytelling will come back in style with a vengeance overnight!
…and then, with the passion of a man whose next meal depends on it, he pleads:
Yep. YouTube must include a manifest with each video to tell the player what time ranges are un-skippable. Baked in ads were doomed from the beginning 🤡
No you don’t have to be able to detect it if you can’t skip. Since they’re injecting the stream directly every time you hit skip they move the counter and when you come back in it just continues to stream you the ad. Just let the time code go negative at the end of the video if you skipped.
All they have to do is not really care about minutes and seconds displaying correctly exactly if you’re working around with fast forward. Alternately they could also just disable fast forward and rewind if they detect you’re using it to abuse commercials.
I think Sooner or later, pretty much all blocking becomes a store the entire video with commercials and strip the commercials out with comskip end. If you’re just storing the buffer off, and stripping it out privately there’s not really a lot they can do about that.
I may not like it, but you do make an interesting technical argument.
I think it would still be detectable though because of buffering.
What you’re saying assumes that videos are streamed frame-by-frame: “here’s a frame”, “okay, I watched that frame”, “okay, here’s the next frame”.
With buffering videos will preload the next 30 seconds of video, and so if you pressed a button to skip ahead 10 seconds, that often happens instantly because the computer has already stored the next 30 seconds of video. Your plan to just pretend to skip ahead doesn’t work in this case, because my computer can know whether or not it really did skip ahead, because of buffering.
That depends on what video player you use. Of we have control of that, then sure it works. I use mpv to play things, so for radio streams or live videos I can go back/forward as long as it’s cached.
But if it’s the web service, even though the browser video player has something cached, the player is still controlled by the website. And considering most of the people use chrome/chromium derivatives or YouTube app, it wouldn’t be hard for them to make it so that the player itself will collaborate with whatever they want to do.
If YouTube was a separate organization it wouldn’t have been the problem it is because of how Google has been taking over all the different parts they need for advertising.
There will probably be a hundred different tits for tats that we can only both dream of.
In the end, they have some form of knowledge of how many minutes of data they’ve sent you. You have the entirety of the MPEG stream and a cell phone powerful enough to do things to it.
There are different levels of crazy that can be waged If they were to do something like custom stream encryption to their client. We’d be playing cat and mouse with keys much like satellite dish hacking back in the day.
That’s not how it works. Or, rather, that’s not only how it works. Sure, advertisers dream of users who see an ad once and run to buy a product. But ad effects are spread over time. They build brand recognition. They fake familiarity. Say you are in a supermarket and you want to buy a new type of product that you haven’t bought before. Very likely you’ll pick something familiar-sounding, which you heard in an ad. Ads pollute the mind even if the most obvious effects are, well, obvious and easily discarded, more subtle influence remains.
If it makes you feel any better, I intentionally never use products that have intentionally repetitive messaging or earworm tendencies out of spite. Though I know I’m probably in the minority
Totally no bias in these studies at all either, they totally wouldn’t try to skew these studies for personal gain and to try and justify the huge spending on ad money right?
You can fool some of the people some of the time… right? :)
I’d expect nothing less than executives at a number of the Fortune 50 to be ruthlessly cutthroat, including when it comes to vetting the claims of their marketing teams.
(I know I’m speaking about studies I only assume to exist by the way, will have to research it later)
I think the main problem is that this type of reasoning can’t actually be proven scientifically, even if we have a study there’s not a guarantee it’s unbiased (who do you think funds research on advertising effectiveness). Then there is the problem that every product or brand in modern advertising is likely one of the handful of pseudo monopoly brands. One might argue that a person bought their product because they heard it in an ad, but in reality they might not have really had much choice, that makes it hard to say if people buy the products because they’re familiar or if they just don’t have much option.
The main point I’d like to make is that advertisers would like to believe they aren’t wasting money or time, they need people to believe it in some capacity, because if enough people don’t, eventually the dumb and blind companies who give them money will realize it too and stop giving them money. That’s why the ad-funded internet is considered a bubble, it’s not worth it, or necessary in a lot of cases, and the moment the dumb and blind corpos realize that, they’ll stop dumping money into a hole.
The reason we’re absolutely fucking blasted away with ads is because even if they only have a 0.01% success rate, that’s enough to make them super profitable. So if you and 998 other people all pay zero attention to ads, they still make money.
There’s also lots of people (like one of my family members) who become absolutely irate by ads but still buy the shit they’re shilling anyway.
Advertisers claim that it’ll work eventually which is how they can justify companies paying them to display ads, and how they can justify paying for ads on a service like YouTube or even a website. In a sense they are being hung out to dry, many of the big companies seen in ads these days don’t actually need to convince you to buy their product because they have an almost complete monopoly on the market, they’re only technically not monopolies, so you’re going to buy their products anyway or live without the convenience.
This is why among other things Ad-funded internet is considered a bubble in a sense, because advertisers are spending money paying websites to show people things they don’t think or care about, but somehow this translates into profits? Seems like the only one profiting is the site being paid, and the creator on it.
I’m sure Nestle, Pepsi Co. P&G, CocaCola Bottling Co. Walmart, Amazon, and the other big boys really need to tell others about them or people wouldn’t know they exist and buy from them. Get real, these companies have their foot in the door, when it comes to the whole consumers buying from them. You can’t not buy from them and live as anyone else would, it takes effort to cut them out, and in many cases living without the convenience they bring.
If they do make it so you can speed up or skip the ad sections of a video, mission accomplished.
Mission failed sucessfully, if people can speed up or scroll through the ad, then it kind of defeats the point since people can skip ahead or increase the speed.
Ads will always be detectable because you cannot speed up or skip an ad like you can the rest of the video.
If they do make it so you can speed up or skip the ad sections of a video, mission accomplished.
If all else fails, I’d enjoy a plugin that just blanks the video and mutes the sound whenever an ad is playing. I’ll enjoy the few seconds of quiet, and hopefully I can use that time to break out of the mentally unhealthy doom spiral that is the typical YouTube experience.
Maybe with some content ID system… but you’ve just predicted their 2025 update which we might imagine would go something like this:
I briefly touched on this in a lengthy comment when this scheme was originally floated a few months ago. Your prediction, which granted is something that Youtube/Google absolutely would try if they thought they could get away with it, would only work on viewers that remained within the confines of Youtube’s native player.
Any third party app capable of bullying or tricking Youtube into handing them the video data is free to do whatever it wants to with it afterwards, even if this ultimately means impeccably pretending to be the official Youtube player in order to get the server to fork over the data. Furthermore, video playback is buffered so a hypothetical pirate client would have several seconds worth of upcoming video to analyze and determine what it wants to do with it.
Youtube could certainly make this process rather difficult by including some kind of end-to-end DRM or something, but at the end of the day you need to make a playable video stream arrive on the client’s device or computer somehow, and if you can’t guarantee full control of the entire environment in which that happens, dedicated nerds will find a away to screw with that data.
Introducing…
Oh, the year is 2100 and YouTube only plays on dedicated Alphabet-produced hardware (available “free” of course) with cam-proof screens? Storytelling will come back in style with a vengeance overnight!
i remember when i put a video at 2x speed the next ad i got was also at 2x speed lmao
Yep. YouTube must include a manifest with each video to tell the player what time ranges are un-skippable. Baked in ads were doomed from the beginning 🤡
What about a message reminding you what the real fight is?
No you don’t have to be able to detect it if you can’t skip. Since they’re injecting the stream directly every time you hit skip they move the counter and when you come back in it just continues to stream you the ad. Just let the time code go negative at the end of the video if you skipped.
All they have to do is not really care about minutes and seconds displaying correctly exactly if you’re working around with fast forward. Alternately they could also just disable fast forward and rewind if they detect you’re using it to abuse commercials.
I think Sooner or later, pretty much all blocking becomes a store the entire video with commercials and strip the commercials out with comskip end. If you’re just storing the buffer off, and stripping it out privately there’s not really a lot they can do about that.
I may not like it, but you do make an interesting technical argument.
I think it would still be detectable though because of buffering.
What you’re saying assumes that videos are streamed frame-by-frame: “here’s a frame”, “okay, I watched that frame”, “okay, here’s the next frame”.
With buffering videos will preload the next 30 seconds of video, and so if you pressed a button to skip ahead 10 seconds, that often happens instantly because the computer has already stored the next 30 seconds of video. Your plan to just pretend to skip ahead doesn’t work in this case, because my computer can know whether or not it really did skip ahead, because of buffering.
That depends on what video player you use. Of we have control of that, then sure it works. I use mpv to play things, so for radio streams or live videos I can go back/forward as long as it’s cached.
But if it’s the web service, even though the browser video player has something cached, the player is still controlled by the website. And considering most of the people use chrome/chromium derivatives or YouTube app, it wouldn’t be hard for them to make it so that the player itself will collaborate with whatever they want to do.
If YouTube was a separate organization it wouldn’t have been the problem it is because of how Google has been taking over all the different parts they need for advertising.
There will probably be a hundred different tits for tats that we can only both dream of.
In the end, they have some form of knowledge of how many minutes of data they’ve sent you. You have the entirety of the MPEG stream and a cell phone powerful enough to do things to it.
There are different levels of crazy that can be waged If they were to do something like custom stream encryption to their client. We’d be playing cat and mouse with keys much like satellite dish hacking back in the day.
I wish I had more upvotes to give this comment cause you are so on the money.
My brain just does that anyway, after decades of ads I just tune them out. And at home I use ad blockers.
That’s not how it works. Or, rather, that’s not only how it works. Sure, advertisers dream of users who see an ad once and run to buy a product. But ad effects are spread over time. They build brand recognition. They fake familiarity. Say you are in a supermarket and you want to buy a new type of product that you haven’t bought before. Very likely you’ll pick something familiar-sounding, which you heard in an ad. Ads pollute the mind even if the most obvious effects are, well, obvious and easily discarded, more subtle influence remains.
If it makes you feel any better, I intentionally never use products that have intentionally repetitive messaging or earworm tendencies out of spite. Though I know I’m probably in the minority
Do we unintentionally use products we didn’t realize repetitively messaged us?
We’ll never know…
Just kidding, we can be sure it’s incredibly well studied given the billions and billions of dollars going into ads!
Totally no bias in these studies at all either, they totally wouldn’t try to skew these studies for personal gain and to try and justify the huge spending on ad money right?
You can fool some of the people some of the time… right? :)
I’d expect nothing less than executives at a number of the Fortune 50 to be ruthlessly cutthroat, including when it comes to vetting the claims of their marketing teams.
(I know I’m speaking about studies I only assume to exist by the way, will have to research it later)
I think the main problem is that this type of reasoning can’t actually be proven scientifically, even if we have a study there’s not a guarantee it’s unbiased (who do you think funds research on advertising effectiveness). Then there is the problem that every product or brand in modern advertising is likely one of the handful of pseudo monopoly brands. One might argue that a person bought their product because they heard it in an ad, but in reality they might not have really had much choice, that makes it hard to say if people buy the products because they’re familiar or if they just don’t have much option.
The main point I’d like to make is that advertisers would like to believe they aren’t wasting money or time, they need people to believe it in some capacity, because if enough people don’t, eventually the dumb and blind companies who give them money will realize it too and stop giving them money. That’s why the ad-funded internet is considered a bubble, it’s not worth it, or necessary in a lot of cases, and the moment the dumb and blind corpos realize that, they’ll stop dumping money into a hole.
The reason we’re absolutely fucking blasted away with ads is because even if they only have a 0.01% success rate, that’s enough to make them super profitable. So if you and 998 other people all pay zero attention to ads, they still make money.
There’s also lots of people (like one of my family members) who become absolutely irate by ads but still buy the shit they’re shilling anyway.
Advertisers claim that it’ll work eventually which is how they can justify companies paying them to display ads, and how they can justify paying for ads on a service like YouTube or even a website. In a sense they are being hung out to dry, many of the big companies seen in ads these days don’t actually need to convince you to buy their product because they have an almost complete monopoly on the market, they’re only technically not monopolies, so you’re going to buy their products anyway or live without the convenience. This is why among other things Ad-funded internet is considered a bubble in a sense, because advertisers are spending money paying websites to show people things they don’t think or care about, but somehow this translates into profits? Seems like the only one profiting is the site being paid, and the creator on it.
I’m sure Nestle, Pepsi Co. P&G, CocaCola Bottling Co. Walmart, Amazon, and the other big boys really need to tell others about them or people wouldn’t know they exist and buy from them. Get real, these companies have their foot in the door, when it comes to the whole consumers buying from them. You can’t not buy from them and live as anyone else would, it takes effort to cut them out, and in many cases living without the convenience they bring.
Mission failed sucessfully, if people can speed up or scroll through the ad, then it kind of defeats the point since people can skip ahead or increase the speed.
Hence “mission accomplished”
Unless you are watching live content, you are correct