Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

YouTube experimenting with server-side ad injection

fosstodon.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 95 posts

Re: YouTube experimenting with server-side ad injection

#51

Post by silverquiet »

nequo wrote: post #29
giancarlostoro wrote: post #20

I have to wonder if they never have due to fear that people will stop using the platform. I honestly will stop using it. I don't mind ads, but they always come on YouTube at the worst time, if you're watching something informative, they cut your brain off from that into some obscure that has no relevancy to your life.

I’d like to say that I don’t mind YouTube ads but I actually do much of the time because they try to sell me on an investment scam, some tactical doomsday merch, or fundamentalist religion depending on the theme of the video. Many YouTube ads truly feel adversarial and it is hard to not mind that.

I got one that straight up told me my penis was too small to please my partner. I have to say that you'd think the supposed best and brightest that FAANG companies hire could come up with a bit more of a sophisticated pitch than "your peepee is too small".

Re: YouTube experimenting with server-side ad injection

#52

Post by jsheard »

csmpltn wrote: post #43

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…

They don't necessarily need to re-encode anything, encoded video has keyframes which don't depend on any prior frames placed at regular intervals to facilitate fast random seeking, and you can splice the video at those points very cheaply without having to re-encode.

Re: YouTube experimenting with server-side ad injection

#53

Post by simion314 »

How can Google defend the mobile app where they do not let you close the screen in YouTube unless you pay, so you get both ads and they screw your battery, which is not ECO friendly? Tons of batteries and phones are sent to the garbage bin faster and Google is allowed to do it and seems nobody shits on them and the google devs for this EVIL actions.

Makes you wonder if Google devs could intentionally make the app eat more battery or do other EVIL shit since they prove they are OK with this tactics. 2

Re: YouTube experimenting with server-side ad injection

#54

Post by Hamuko »

csmpltn wrote: post #43

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…

Can't they do on-the-fly stream concatenation to avoid re-encoding everything?

Re: YouTube experimenting with server-side ad injection

#55

Post by mschuster91 »

csmpltn wrote: post #43

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…

> They'll have to re-encode videos at all permutations across countries, regions and locales.

Nope. Just inject them right before a full keyframe, that can be done pretty much on the fly.

Re: YouTube experimenting with server-side ad injection

#56

Post by Retric »

yuck39 wrote: post #17
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.

Or the ~100% of users who wouldn't understand anything you just wrote will shell out for a premium subscription.

There’s going to be a split between premium and not watching YouTube. I’m not paying something like 2,000$ to per hour of advertising cut from my life.

I might click on a video I find elsewhere, but I’ve basically given up on using the YouTube interface for finding videos.

Re: YouTube experimenting with server-side ad injection

#57

Post by tbeseda »

Honestly, I'm surprised it took this long.

A lot of ad tech is defeated simply because it is provided by a third party, outside the original request, and executed in the browser. So make it first party, use the main request, and build it on the server. It's not as easy, but Google can do it. Make it fast (requires compute + infra) and charge a premium for the placement - after all, it's going to be more "effective". Again, definitely something Google can do.

Re: YouTube experimenting with server-side ad injection

#58

Post by hedora »

silverquiet wrote: post #51
nequo wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’d like to say that I don’t mind YouTube ads but I actually do much of the time because they try to sell me on an investment scam, some tactical doomsday merch, or fundamentalist religion depending on the theme of the video. Many YouTube ads truly feel adversarial and it is hard to not mind that.

I got one that straight up told me my penis was too small to please my partner. I have to say that you'd think the supposed best and brightest that FAANG companies hire could come up with a bit more of a sophisticated pitch than "your peepee is too small".

Amazon Prime Video is not much better. We recently got an ad for an all black dating site. I’d expect them to guess our ethnicity a bit better (and the content was as 1950’s cracker white as can be), but ignoring that, they were literally selling us diapers a while back, and the kids have their own video profile. Based on our purchases, it’s not physiologically plausible that only one adult lives in the house.

Given how bad the output of ad targeting infrastructure is, I wonder who the “real customer” of it is.

Logistics? Intelligence agencies?

Re: YouTube experimenting with server-side ad injection

#59

Post by danaris »

jasode wrote: post #47
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 str…

It shouldn't be that difficult for video downloaders to learn how to strip out in-video ads. They're going to be a sharp cut both in video and audio, for a specific, fairly-well-known length of time, then a cut back.

Re: YouTube experimenting with server-side ad injection

#60

Post by consp »

Retric wrote: post #56
yuck39 wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or the ~100% of users who wouldn't understand anything you just wrote will shell out for a premium subscription.

There’s going to be a split between premium and not watching YouTube. I’m not paying something like 2,000$ to per hour of advertising cut from my life. I might click on a video I find elsewhere, but I’ve basically given up on using the YouTube interface for finding videos.

> but I’ve basically given up on using the YouTube interface for finding videos

Not just you, youtube has as well.

Post reply on HN