161–170 of 282 posts
Removing whatever Ublock Origin needed to exist in Safari is one of the dumbest moves Apple has made. To get most of the battery advantages of Macs you're forced to use Safari. But when it comes down to having to see YouTube ads I'm willing to make the tradeoff and switch to Chrome.
WebKit + uBlock Origin = bliss
Part of the problem – as AdGuard concedes in the post – is that Easy List (which AdGuard and many other ad blockers use) is a woefully inefficient rule list with over 50,000 entries. Many of which are out of date, redundant and not optimised for performance. This leads to excessive memory use and performance slowdowns and is one of the reasons why there is a 50,000 rule limit in the Safari Content Blocking API. As a…
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That would require delivering ads from first-party servers, right? So third-party ad and tracking networks would die a painful death.
Couldn't they just be proxied through a first party server?
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YouTube subscription views are worth far more to the creator (some 10x (I've even heard 100x from some creators) more) than full ad views within the same video. So, regardless of YouTube's cut, it's much more valuable to the creator, and valuable to you (no embedded ads). Win win, at least until an alternative arises.
I suspect in the big picture this is not true. The kind of people with disposable income to give for paid subscriptions are far better targets for nearly all adverts, since they are far more likely to buy the premium products that have a far larger and budget, and therefore give the creator more per impression. I don't think YouTube reveals to creators enough information about which audience members generated which r…
A simple google search revealed the following topical article.
https://www.dailydot.com/upstream/totalbiscuit-youtube-red-p...
The relevant quote: “... a Red view is on average worth 20x that of a normal ad view.”
Another youtuber i follow recently said that this is still true today.
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I think you’re right from the short-term perspective but largely irrelevant long-term. If Safari allowed arbitrary code execution, it’d be a little better for as long as it took publishers to deploy first-party ad injection. We’d still get the security problems, though. You can already see what that’s like with podcasts where local ads are spliced right into the audio file. You’re not stopping that short of doing som…
If I can recognize an ad, I can construct JavaScript that can recognize that ad too. The current extension APIs let me inject that JavaScript, while the declarative ad blocking APIs do not.
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Couldn't they just be proxied through a first party server?
That would partially defeat the purpose. First party adds see first party cookies, so they have no inherent cross site tracking ability.
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That would be more effort than including a single html-script tag to import google analytics. I have hope that most parties would decide that the extra server load and difficulties would make it not worth it.
You underestimate the desire for precision tracking, unfortunately. Hiding behind custom subdomains is common. Stepping up to cloaking it to be delivered from the application is more effort but it'll happen.
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I think you’re right from the short-term perspective but largely irrelevant long-term. If Safari allowed arbitrary code execution, it’d be a little better for as long as it took publishers to deploy first-party ad injection. We’d still get the security problems, though. You can already see what that’s like with podcasts where local ads are spliced right into the audio file. You’re not stopping that short of doing som…
> if that became widespread we’d just see more embedded placement Which is completely desirable. The problem isn't "ads", it's "targeted, personalized ads that rely on thoroughly destroying the the privacy of everyone on the internet in order to function". If a show/podcast wants to vet its own advertisers and endorse a specific product, that's great; it establishes a concrete relationship with the advertisers that h…
The podcasts I mentioned aren’t running their own ad network, they’re using a service which injects audio segments into your download. I’d expect things like that to become more common as ad revenues decline, with an endgame something like CDNs inserting tailored content directly to avoid any other hostnames or paths which easy to block.
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I'm saying platforms can't have it both ways. If they want to avoid ad-blockers and video downloaders then pick another medium, or invent one and create a new thing that achieves this objective. The web is not TV. Public content on the web is public and user-rendered. That's what made the web and YouTube what it is today. YouTube has every right to create a proprietary YouTube client (which they do on mobile devices)…
Sure, it is all on YouTube/Google's fault if you decide to install an adblocker and not participate in the compensation of the creator who made the very video you are enjoying. Definitely not illegal to do so, so do as you please, but don't turn yourself into a white knight by some mental gymnastics with the sementics behind what a user agent is. You want to enjoy the video without ads, regardless of the consequences…