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YouTube's new anti-adblock measures

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Re: YouTube's new anti-adblock measures

#281

Post by Aachen »

nickff wrote: post #185
absurdo wrote: post #4

I was wondering when buffering was going to be a thing. I’ve been seeing it on YT and figured it’s the Adblock wars getting heated up. The next step is to scrape the videos, strip the ads, store them on a torrent magnet and serve that instead. Yes it would have to be from a shady RU or CN or NK or IN site. I’m fine with that.

[flagged]

Consider that it's a monopoly. You can't get 99% of this content anywhere else (not even if it's marked as creative commons¹ or any other free license, publicly funded, etc.) but I don't agree with Google's/Alphabet's practices either. One could:

Option 1: be a hermit and not watch anything on YouTube ever. You can't look up repair guides, fully use a news website that I'm subscribed to that got rid of their self hosted version, watch a subset of public broadcasts that we pay for via taxes, etc. It's not just entertainment / a Netflix replacement

Option 2: give in and enrich this monopolistic tracking company

Option 3: try to pirate the content

I'd feel very different if this were Spotify or an individual artist: I can use three other music services with massively overlapping offerings from different jurisdictions. Or supermarkets, for the same reason. But if it's irreplaceable and gatekept, I can understand both sides here

¹ https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/2797468?hl=en

Re: YouTube's new anti-adblock measures

#282

Post by cyberax »

peer2pay wrote: post #115
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.

It has to be a cost thing. HLS is so insanely optimised down to the hardware level that adding any kind of compute for targeting would increase costs exponentially. I’m not too deep into it anymore but there’s some great articles from Netflix out there talking about the crazy optimisations done to their edge servers for streaming.

> HLS is so insanely optimised down to the hardware level that adding any kind of compute for targeting would increase costs exponentially.

Not really. They'll just need to recode for you that one minute with the ad. The rest of the video can stay the same.

If they're doing it smartly, they can even avoid full recompression and just splice in the ad.

Re: YouTube's new anti-adblock measures

#283

Post by denkmoon »

timmg wrote: post #213
akersten wrote: post #209

Thank you for your important work fighting this battle, it must be exhausting. The more Google insists on forcing advertising on us, the more we should look closely at the wildly inappropriate and downright scammy ads they are hosting. If they can't leave well enough alone and look the other way on ad blocking, (which is the only way to avoid exposing myself and family to these dangerous ads), they need to be under a…

> The more Google insists on forcing advertising on us... You can... just not visit youtube, right?

You can also just not watch TV. And not listen to the radio. And not receive newspapers. All mediums that have advertisements, and those advertisements are regulated to stop the most egregious types (eg. advertising sugary foods at children, tobacco products, hopefully gambling products soon).

Media, on the whole, is a good thing. We know more about the world. We know more about the excesses of the aristocracy. We know more about the violence committed by violent people (and I don't mean local petty crime. Genocide.) Before we can improve these things, we need to know about them. "just don't consume media" is a regression to a time where people knew little outside their local sphere.

Youtube/Google has a monopoly on one part of the modern media landscape and it has to be fixed. Not just put our heads in the sand.

Re: YouTube's new anti-adblock measures

#284

Post by cyberax »

Retr0id wrote: post #229
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.

One could splice ads out of the video on the client just as easily as they splice them in, assuming you can detect them (which could be done via crowdsourced databases a la sponsorblock).

They can splice the video just for you at a random location.

Re: YouTube's new anti-adblock measures

#285

Post by hombre_fatal »

mitthrowaway2 wrote: post #247
yugioh3 wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

people deserve to get paid for the work they put into creating content and building platforms, no? books, movies, tv shows, news, etc, are all distributed in some way or another that costs the consumer either money or their time viewing advertising. if you don't want to watch ads, pay YouTube for a subscription.

YouTube spent about a decade and a half running unintrusive banner ads. Until they secured enough of the market that network effects locked content creators and consumers together in a two-sided market where it's hard for either group to leave unilaterally. Then they ramped up the length and intrusiveness of their ads while flouting content regulations on what they're even allowed to advertise. Why should I reward th…

You can keep bringing up Google, but you're still glossing over the part where you're not paying the people creating the content you're watching.

Seems awfully convenient.

Re: YouTube's new anti-adblock measures

#287

Post by dleslie »

pier25 wrote: post #193
dleslie wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Paying for YT doesn't remove the ads. On the other hand, the golden era of YouTube has passed. You aren't losing out on much if you simply stop using it.

Youtube premium does remove all Google's ads. Obviously not the ads the content creator has put into the video itself.

Depends on the Premium tier.

But yes, uBlock and Sponsorblock together do a much better job of removing the ads.

Re: YouTube's new anti-adblock measures

#288

Post by dleslie »

yugioh3 wrote: post #238
dleslie wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Paying for YT doesn't remove the ads. On the other hand, the golden era of YouTube has passed. You aren't losing out on much if you simply stop using it.

There are no ads when I use YT premium, except for the creators' Hello Fresh type segments. Which perhaps they'd be less incentivized to pursue if people didn't use ad blockers.

It depends on the Premium tier.

Re: YouTube's new anti-adblock measures

#289

Post by cvoss »

yugioh3 wrote: post #235
akersten wrote: post #209

Thank you for your important work fighting this battle, it must be exhausting. The more Google insists on forcing advertising on us, the more we should look closely at the wildly inappropriate and downright scammy ads they are hosting. If they can't leave well enough alone and look the other way on ad blocking, (which is the only way to avoid exposing myself and family to these dangerous ads), they need to be under a…

people deserve to get paid for the work they put into creating content and building platforms, no? books, movies, tv shows, news, etc, are all distributed in some way or another that costs the consumer either money or their time viewing advertising. if you don't want to watch ads, pay YouTube for a subscription.

If I can actually pay someone for content, then, if I don't pay, I should expect not to be granted access to content.

But that's not how YT works. YT doesn't charge you for good stuff. It charges you for not delivering crap. That's not legitimate business, that's a racket. I have no qualm punishing YT for that. Content creators are free to find other ways to monetize their labor, if their labor is actually valuable. (And so many of the good ones do, quite successfully.)

Re: YouTube's new anti-adblock measures

#290

Post by arcbyte »

tlogan wrote: post #239

Why do we justify blocking ads, even when we know the content we’re consuming isn’t free to create and even if the content is free, it still costs money to store and distribute? We often rationalize using ad blockers because ads can be intrusive or annoying. But let’s asking ourselves: Why do we feel entitled to get this for free? This isn’t a moral judgment. I genuinely want to understand the reasoning.

For the same reason I had all the ads cut out of my newspaper before I read it back in the day - i don't want to see them.

It's my browser, my copy of the website, and I'll have my user agent do whatever I want.

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