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YouTube experimenting with server-side ad injection

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Re: YouTube experimenting with server-side ad injection

#41

Post by thisisthenewme »

bdcravens wrote: post #21
TehCorwiz wrote: post #18

EDIT: I didn't read carefully. Ignore the first sentence. ~There's already a tool called SponsorBlock which in conjunction with FreeTube or Invidious can automatically skip portions of videos tagged as sponsorships or ads.~ I don't see server injected ads being a long-term problem for people who use blockers or third-party players. It just shifts the problem to the "analog hole".

It seems like this could be easily defeated via random ad injection.

And could this be defeated because the video itself is static and identifying the ad would then be around the unexpected changes to it? :D

Re: YouTube experimenting with server-side ad injection

#42

Post by zellyn »

Not only are the ads annoyingly long and frequent sometimes, and not only does the ridiculously expensive YouTube TV subscription I still haven't talked my family out of not prevent ads on YouTube, but the _way_ it does ads is incredibly annoying: it's easy enough to click the "Skip" button once it shows up if you're sitting in front of your computer or watching on your phone, but it's really hard to do when your hands are covered in water and dish soap…

Re: YouTube experimenting with server-side ad injection

#43

Post by csmpltn »

This sounds technically unfeasible, at YouTube's scale.

They'll have to re-encode videos at all permutations across countries, regions and locales. They'll also have to somehow account for ads that have been pulled down after the fact... then they'll need to cache this stuff everywhere so that the latencies are reasonable and the experience is good, whilst serving you different version of the same clip if you refresh or rewatch the clip... they'll have to do all of this continuously, since ads change with the times - despite the clips themselves being stale and static?

I can imagine they will have to limit this "feature" to a very small subset of videos with high view count/interest/revenue potential... maybe just to live feeds... otherwise, the costs to do this for every video on the platform would shoot through the roof.

Re: YouTube experimenting with server-side ad injection

#44

Post by randerson »

After they disabled the site for ad blockers I begrudgingly shelled out for YouTube Premium. I've now come around to being OK with paying for the convenience. Much of the content I watch wouldn't exist without the revenue they get from ads or subscriptions. I'm sure some people will find creative ways to pirate content, but Premium is cheaper than Netflix and I watch more content on YouTube than Netflix so it seems reasonable to me.

Re: YouTube experimenting with server-side ad injection

#45

Post by jsheard »

bentcorner wrote: post #3

I'm honestly surprised it took this long for them to do this. Knowing nothing about how ad delivery/networks work (or ad blockers, for that matter) my guess is that something fundamental with how they are delivered (e.g., 3rd party domain for tracking?) also made them detectable via extensions? Makes me wonder how they are solving the problem now. Twitch seems to do a good job of staying ahead of extensions.

Ads are usually delivered through third party domains so the ad network can keep their own accounts of impressions, but giants like YouTube and Twitch are their own ad networks, and serve the ads from their own domain. Third party ad domains are easy to block, so the most sites which use them can do is refuse entry to users who block their ads, but first party ads can defeat blockers relatively easily if they want to.

Re: YouTube experimenting with server-side ad injection

#46

Post by atrettel »

TheAceOfHearts wrote: post #11

If ads get too annoying people will start running a YouTube frontend and probably switch from on-demand video viewing to a DVR format where you pre-download videos from your favorite creators ahead of time. Maybe the frontend can pretend to have watched the full video and ads, I'm sure that'll go over wonderfully with advertisers.

I already largely watch YouTube through RSS feeds to find the videos and yt-dlp to download them locally. Ads injected straight into the stream will be annoying, but still just as easy to skip as the sponsored content sections of videos. That said, the ads on YouTube have gotten more and more scammy and suspicious over the years, so I don't particularly appreciate being incorporated into the video feed itself. But it doesn't materially change much of how I watch YouTube anyway.

Re: YouTube experimenting with server-side ad injection

#47

Post by jasode »

TheAceOfHearts wrote: post #11

If ads get too annoying people will start running a YouTube frontend and probably switch from on-demand video viewing to a DVR format where you pre-download videos from your favorite creators ahead of time. Maybe the frontend can pretend to have watched the full video and ads, I'm sure that'll go over wonderfully with advertisers.

>YouTube frontend [...] where you pre-download videos from your favorite creators ahead of time.

I think the post is saying the ads would be burned into the regular video stream such that even offline downloaders such as youtube-dl would also get the ads.

The current common behavior is the actual video and the ads videos are 2 different streams. The javascript in the web browser switches back & forth between the streams for dynamic ads insertion as it gets the next media fragment(s). The new behavior is to have just one indistinguishable stream that's more tightly embedded into the video media fragments.

If the above paragraph doesn't make sense, one can just load up a Youtube video while monitoring the "Network" tab in F12 Developer Tools to see the various media fragments being downloaded while it switches between the normal video and the ads.

Re: YouTube experimenting with server-side ad injection

#49

Post by tjpnz »

qmarchi wrote: post #37
flaminHotSpeedo wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It doesn't sound like that's the case, per the link: > This breaks sponsorblock since now all timestamps are offset by the ad times. Sounds like either YouTube doesn't care about timestamp stability or they missed this in testing

SponsorBlock works by telling the video player to skip to certain timestamps within the native video player. YouTube however knows the exact offset of the ad that it sent, and this can offset its timestamps.

Could they update the plugin to do a location.href at the appropriate time?

Re: YouTube experimenting with server-side ad injection

#50

Post by kraquepype »

Havoc wrote: post #14

yt has gotten very feisty all of a sudden. If you're used to dipping in & out of vids to find something interesting it is fundamentally unusable without working adblock. You end up watching more ads than video

That's the most annoying bit, they target you with an ad when starting just a 1-2 minute video.

They present the ad in the most intrusive and annoying way possible. It ensures that I will either ignore it, or never purchase that item or service out of spite. If you do this almost every time I play a quick video, it generates a very negative user experience.

If they focused on how to have ads coexist with the user experience and mesh better with the media being watched, they might not irritate every user by trying to make them impossible to avoid - and they wouldn't have to play this cat and mouse bullshit that eventually leads to their platform being irrelevant.

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