YouTube's new anti-adblock measures

Post by thomassmith65 » Fri, Jun 20, 2025, 11:33 PM UTC

ranger_danger wrote: post #9

I'm surprised they don't just inject the ads directly into the video stream, I think that would solve their issue overnight (not that I want any ads personally). You could also rate-limit it to the playback speed to prevent pre-downloading the stream easily. But now that everything uses HLS/DASH, it's easy to inject different content right in the middle of the stream without re-encoding anything.

  To be clear this isn’t server-side ad insertion; the ad and content streams are still separate (YouTube is doing a server-side ad insertion experiment, but that’s separate from fake buffering)

Post by thomassmith65 » Fri, Jun 20, 2025, 11:35 PM UTC

noman-land wrote: post #110

ranger_danger wrote: post #9

I'm surprised they don't just inject the ads directly into the video stream, I think that would solve their issue overnight (not that I want any ads personally). You could also rate-limit it to the playback speed to prevent pre-downloading the stream easily. But now that everything uses HLS/DASH, it's easy to inject different content right in the middle of the stream without re-encoding anything.

There exists crowdsourced adblocking based on timestamps (SponsorBlock, Tubular). Soon we will have realtime on-device content-aware AI adblocking. They will ever win.

Post by peer2pay » Fri, Jun 20, 2025, 11:37 PM UTC

ranger_danger wrote: post #9

I'm surprised they don't just inject the ads directly into the video stream, I think that would solve their issue overnight (not that I want any ads personally). You could also rate-limit it to the playback speed to prevent pre-downloading the stream easily. But now that everything uses HLS/DASH, it's easy to inject different content right in the middle of the stream without re-encoding anything.

Post by vlod » Fri, Jun 20, 2025, 11:38 PM UTC

Madmallard wrote: post #109

thangalin wrote: post #100

Mostly stolen from elsewhere: ! Stop sites from prompting to sign into Google account ||accounts.google.com/gsi/*$xhr,script,3p ! Stop annoying reels from littering friend feeds www.facebook.com##[aria-label="reel"]:upward(2) youtube.com##.ytp-ce-element youtube.com##.ytp-ce-element-show youtube.com##+js(set, yt.config_.openPopupConfig.supportedPopups.adBlockMessageViewModel, false) youtube.com##+js(set, Object.proto…

Is this something to put in host file? What is this

Post by smoe » Fri, Jun 20, 2025, 11:39 PM UTC

briffle wrote: post #89

mbac32768 wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In 2025 it's actually not that expensive. CDNs aggressively drive down the cost of streaming video. A 1080p music video costs about one tenth of one cent to serve to one person at retail CDN rates. You could easily host this yourself and decide what the terms are to view it. E.g. ads, or paywall or free because you benefit from the exposure. Once upon a time AdSense/YouTube saved you from getting an unmanageable $5,0…

Youtube is $14/month. netflix is $17/month. That is VERY expensive, considering that most of Netflix's cost is production. Youtube has almost no production costs. Their users create content. Maybe if they paid their users more, so they didn't also have to add 'sponsor segments' inside their video's it would make more sense. The bundling music for the same price is the same crap cable and phone companies have been doi…