So if YouTube is now serving up the ads directly to me, does that mean they’re finally liable for the content of those ads? Can we have them investigated for all the malware, phishing, illegal hate speech, etc.?
Ads will always be detectable because you cannot speed up or skip an ad like you can the rest of the video.
If they do make it so you can speed up or skip the ad sections of a video, mission accomplished.
If all else fails, I’d enjoy a plugin that just blanks the video and mutes the sound whenever an ad is playing. I’ll enjoy the few seconds of quiet, and hopefully I can use that time to break out of the mentally unhealthy doom spiral that is the typical YouTube experience.
Yep. YouTube must include a manifest with each video to tell the player what time ranges are un-skippable. Baked in ads were doomed from the beginning 🤡
My brain just does that anyway, after decades of ads I just tune them out. And at home I use ad blockers.
The reason we’re absolutely fucking blasted away with ads is because even if they only have a 0.01% success rate, that’s enough to make them super profitable. So if you and 998 other people all pay zero attention to ads, they still make money.
There’s also lots of people (like one of my family members) who become absolutely irate by ads but still buy the shit they’re shilling anyway.
That’s not how it works. Or, rather, that’s not only how it works. Sure, advertisers dream of users who see an ad once and run to buy a product. But ad effects are spread over time. They build brand recognition. They fake familiarity. Say you are in a supermarket and you want to buy a new type of product that you haven’t bought before. Very likely you’ll pick something familiar-sounding, which you heard in an ad. Ads pollute the mind even if the most obvious effects are, well, obvious and easily discarded, more subtle influence remains.
I wish I had more upvotes to give this comment cause you are so on the money.
[Enshittification intensifies]
Seeing as these ads will be targeted and of varying length, I wonder if a SponsorBlock-like extension with the ability to accept training data from users to help identify ads.
The Plex server application has a feature which scrubs videos and identifies intros so you can skip them like you can on Netflix. Wouldn’t it be sort of like that?
Seems like a good use of AI/ML.
If YouTube offered premium without music for a discounted price I’d probably be willing to pay for it. But I just want no ads, not a bunch of bundled stuff.
This is exactly me.
I’ve been paying £5 a month by using a VPN to sign up for Premium from Ukraine. Been doing so for the past couple of years without complaint. Literally all I need from them is to fuck off the adverts. I have Apple Music for music and I’m happy with it.
Now they’ve rumbled us and will be cutting off our Premium next month.
I am fucked if I’m paying those ratfuckers £20 a month just so I can watch other people’s hard work without the adverts they force in. Fuck that noise.
So I’m now researching ways to get my subs onto Plex so I can carry on watching on my Apple TV.
I’m a bit surprised they don’t do this actually. Premium is good valued off you use the music side of it as well, which I do, but not for just ad free YouTube.
I get what you’re saying, but YouTube music is pretty much just a different front end for the normal site.
Sure, it does some filtering to attempt to be music only (though I’ve seen non music stuff sneak in before) but in the end, you get pretty much the same core experience if you open up the YouTube app and start “watching” a song (with premium for the background play capability).
I’d be willing to bet this is why they won’t go the route you’re talking about.
I’d prefer some kind of limited amount of viewing. I don’t watch a ton of YT, so give me some kind of reasonable ad-free cap. I’m willing to pay to not see ads, but I don’t watch enough to be worth their asking price.
I would rather micro transactions. Like just load up a dollar and get like 1000 minutes ad free…with the ability to turn off and save for later.
Even then it doesn’t have sponsorblock or a customisable UI like revanced does.
It’s crazy how unofficial free is actually better than official paid.
See, I don’t really mind the sponsored segments. Some creators actually have fun with their ad reads, like the Map Men or Colin Furze. But if it’s boring I just tap the forward button on my Apple TV remote and skip past.
Well it sounds more scary than it realistically will be.
YouTube must pass to the player the metadata of where the ads start/end. Why? Because they need to be unskippable/unseekable/etc. If the metadata is there it is possible to force the seek 🤷♂️
Just matter of time
Why would that be the case? The player can simply be locked into ad mode till it gets the cue from the server all of the ads have been streamed. Only then will the player unlock. When watching what amounts to a video stream, this doesn’t have to be handled clientside.
Well the player and its controls are client side.
The arms race continues.
Imma start subscribing to the RSS feeds of torrents made for specific channels before i watch ads.
If youtube wants to make their website so hostile its easier to get better versions of youtube videos without YouTube then those games will be played.
RSS feed -> yt-dlp script -> auto queue the folder into the player of your choice. Hmm…
(Edit: Though that may not actually work considering this is apparently fully server side. Gonna have to get clever…)
(Edit: Though that may not actually work considering this is apparently fully server side. Gonna have to get clever…)
Next step is machine learning to recognize ads and cut them out automatically hah.
Don’t need to go that far, i think. If you had your extension hash some piece of each keyframe (basically: tokenize some IDs for each keyframe) and submit them to a database you could then see which parts were shown to everyone vs only to some people and only display those. Basically similar to how sponsorblock crowd sources its sponsor segment detection but automated. Some people would see the ads but then you’d know what the og video was unless it gets edited.
This is assuming they’re not reencoding the video for each advertisement, which they probably aren’t. If they are it probably gets easier, actually. Sponsorblock could do that.
Oh that’s a smart way of doing it!
Imagine all the cool stuff we could be doing if we weren’t wasting the time of hundreds of engineers figuring out how to shove ads in people’s faces.
This is ad driven economy and bar must go 🆙
“Line go up” is the animating force of the age, the critical philosophical principal around which our entire society is arranged.
Gives me a fucking headache.
“Line go up” is the animating force of the
agethe rich and powerful, the critical philosophical principal around whichour entire societytheir livesisare arranged.I choose not to confuse their values as mine or that of my community.
Agreed. I really hate it when people see the problems in the world, fall for misanthropy, and blame everyone, most of whom are blameless beyond their failure to put their lives at risk to change things.
People are great. We’ve done great things. We’re a species who’s defining advantage is cooperation. None of what we see today would be possible if most of us were greedy, hateful, idiots.
People can be lead astray. but who can blame them? We’ve created a world more complicated than any one of us could fully understand. It’s bad enough that a handful of psychopaths can take advantage of that, we don’t need to add to it by making it seem like everyone’s at fault for not instantly bashing their heads in.
I really appreciate this take. It’s good-hearted and makes good sense. I’ll try to remember it going forward, when cynicism overwhelms.
Thank you.
If everyone were a paying subscriber we could actually do all those things. No one wants to be ad supported, including the people at YT. But there are bills to pay.
They’d have more paying subscribers if they didn’t charge more than Netflix for what amounts to user-generated content that they’re getting for free.
I’m not terribly sympathetic to arguments about covering costs when it comes to corporations. If they were just looking to cover costs or even just make a reasonable profit, there are all sorts of arrangements we could come up with that would be acceptable to most people.
But they’re not trying to do that. Profit isn’t enough for a corporation. They need to make the most profit. And then after that they somehow need to make more than the most.
So they put in ads. But that’s not enough and oh look there are more places we haven’t put in ads, we should fix that. Oh look, our studies show that if we make the ads more obnoxious in these ways they increase this number by 3%. Oh wait, we have all this info we got from spying on people, why don’t we sell that too? Hey guys, we’ve heard you about the ads. Have we got a solution for you! For a small
protection paymentsubscription fee of $10/month, you can get rid of those pesky ads we know you don’t like! Oooh sorry everyone, the price of the subscription went up again. We promise this is all necessary. Oh by the way, we’re adding ads back into the service. But don’t worry, wait until you hear about our NEW subscription tier! (I don’t think that last one’s happened with YT premium yet, but it’s happened with cable and most of streaming at this point, so I wouldn’t put it past them.)There’s no way we can have nice things while this is the driving force organizing where our resources go.
I’m not terribly sympathetic to arguments about covering costs when it comes to corporations.
That’s fine. No one needs you to be.
If they were just looking to cover costs or even just make a reasonable profit, there are all sorts of arrangements we could come up with that would be acceptable to most people.
What are those? No, really, this is the crux here. The whole rest of your comment is about growth capitalism generally, and I agree it sucks in many ways. But until you can reasonably provide a working alternative to property ownership, we will continue to have things like rent and lending. Investment is a form of lending. And yes YT shareholders don’t give a shit about anything but more and more and MORE insane profit. Because to succeed, a company has to not only profit but profit above expectation, rewarding the speculative investments others have made in them.
It’s foolish though to think that YT’s management are the source of this desire for profit. It’s their shareholders. YT really want to deliver the best product while making a good living, and their staff are also minor shareholders to some extent.
But your problem is capitalism. And if it took ads on the pause screen to get you to see the issues with growth capitalism, then sheeit you are late to the game and I won’t wait up to hear what your alternative suggestions are going to be. I’ll just point out that you waved your hand at that subject and then moved on like we wouldn’t notice.
And if it took ads on the pause screen to get you to see the issues with growth capitalism,
I don’t know why you’d assume that. I’m pretty staunchly communist from a mix of seeing our current problems and understanding history enough to know that this didn’t start yesterday. But if it takes companies being really obviously greedy for some consumers to see anything is wrong, it doesn’t hurt to try to focus their anger to a productive understanding of the problem rather than whatever other nonsense they might get drawn to.
As far as alternatives. I’m always up front with people in saying that I don’t have precise answers for what our future ought to be after capitalism. That’s a difficult problem and up to everyone to work together to figure that out. But there is no future where we stick with capitalism. Or at least, not one we’d want to live in for very long. It’s a cruel system and it’s going to be responsible for ending the human habitable environment if we don’t do something about that. People need to understand this and they need to understand that tweaking around the edges isn’t going to fix the issue.
The thing about if they were ok with a reasonable profit is a thought experiment or rhetorical device more than it’s a proposed solution. It’d be nice if it worked that way. Capitalists want us to think things do or could work that way. Hence corporations saying they NEED to cut costs or raise prices while continuing to make increasing profits. But it’s important to understand why it could never work that way, at least for very long.
I would love to be a subscriber if Google could guarantee that they won’t take my viewing information and then sell it to other advertisers or data brokers, or use that info to push ads on behalf of those brokers in other Google products.
As it stands now, why would I pay with my money AND my data? Google shouldn’t get to double dip.
This is not double dipping, because the value of your data is factored into the subscription cost.
Personally, I don’t care that much if I watch YouTube videos about Game of Throne and then see ads for HBO House of the Dragon in Google search. But that’s me. I don’t have this overinflated concept of how precious my YT watchlist is to me.
An old coworker of mine started a company that was an ad network that paid YOU for your data every month, drawing from the ad revenue they got from using your data. The fact is that your data is not worth very much at all on the open market.
With some exceptions I think all the “BUT MY DATA!” is disingenuous pearl-clutching. Because everyone ITT has a credit card in their wallet right now, and that company has sold their personal information and purchasing habits thousands of times over and they’ve never cared.
But suddenly they have to sit through a YT ad because their ad blocker got killed, and now people suddenly care about their data, and fairness to creators, and capitalism, and privacy!
All those are just ways to legitimize the fact that people lose their minds when they have to wait 15 seconds to get the thing they want for free. They’re ashamed to admit that they are that childish, so they make it about their deep, deep commitment to data integrity.
People need to take a step back from their devices IMO.
There’s a lot of implicit assumptions about me and my ego in your reply by grouping me with some nebulous group of “childish”… tech privacy moralists?
You’re right, people should take a step back from their devices…
MythTV solved this long ago. We already have the tech to bypass this shit.
Could you supply a source for this?
I’m getting tired, man. these people are truly just the shittiest individuals ever.
MBAs on their way to destroy their company’s relationship with their customers and cause a socioeconomic disaster (their numbers will grow by 0.01% 💪💪)
deleted by creator
If you don’t pay for something, you are not a customer, you are the product. If you pay for Youtube, you don’t see the ads, but you are also still their product. Lose /Lose
Okay, but if you sell cows, and all your cows escape or die, your business is still ruined
The network effect is too strong. The minority that are whining here isn’t going to make a dent. Next time you’re out, look at how many people are using ads ridden apps instead of paying $0.99 or whatever to remove them. The users have already decided their time and privacy is worthless and would rather getting the service for “free”.
Line go up 💹
Hey don’t blame us, blame the nepos who got on the board without even needing to study for it!
My MBA track actively rewards me for thinking like a socialist XD.
As in my profits, our losses?
Honestly, I’ve kind of always wondered why they didn’t just do this. It’s always seemed like the obvious thing to me.
I mean, I hope it doesn’t work, because screw Google, but I’m still surprised it took them this long to try it.
Because it’s much more expensive. What they’re talking about here is basically modifying the video file as they stream it. That costs CPU/GPU cycles. Given that only about 10% of users block ads, this is only worth doing if they can get the cost down low enough that those extra ad views actually net them revenue.
This isn’t how YouTube has streamed videos for many, many years.
Most video and live streams work by serving a sequence of small self-contained video files (often in the 1-5s range). Sometimes audio is also separate files (avoids duplication as you often use the same audio for all video qualities as well as enables audio-only streaming). This is done for a few reasons but primarily to allow quite seamless switching between quality levels on-the-fly.
Inserting ads in a stream like this is trivial. You just add a few ad chunks between the regular video chunks. The only real complication is that the ad needs to start at a chunk boundary. (And if you want it to be hard to detect you probably want the length of the ad to be a multiple of the regular chunk size). There is no re-encoding or other processing required at all. Just update the “playlist” (the list of chunks in the video) and the player will play the ad without knowing that it is “different” from the rest of the chunks.
It wouldn’t cost any CPU with custom software that Google can afford to write. The video is streamed by delivering blocks of data from drives where the data isn’t contiguous. It’s split across multiple drives on multiple servers. Video files are made of key frames and P frames and B in between the key frames. Splicing at key frames need no processing. The video server when sending the next block only needs a change to send blocks based on key frames. It can then inject ads without any CPU overhead.
Wouldn’t it still need overhead to chose those blocks and send them instead of the video? Especially if they’re also trying to do it in a way that prevents the user from just hitting the “skip 10 seconds” button like they might if it was served as part of the regular video.
It has to know which blocks to chose to get the next part of the file anyway. Except the next part of the file is an ad. So yes there is overhead but not for the video stream server. It doesn’t need to re encode the video. It’s not any more taxing than adding the non skip ads at the beginning that they already do.
Compared to the cost of reencoding the video (or even segments of it) it would be basically nothing, though.
You’re forgetting the part where the video is coming from a cache server that isn’t designed to do this
They’re already appending ads to the front of the video. Instead of appending an ad at key frame 1 they append the ad at key frame 30,000.
This is not necessarily the case.
You could only use this new system if the old one fails, ie. only for the say 10% of users that block ads, and so even if it were more expensive it would still be more profitable than letting them block all ads.
But I don’t think even that is the case, as they can essentially just “swap out” the video they’re streaming (as they don’t really stream “one video” per video anyway), bringing additional running costs to nearly zero.
The only thing definitely more expensive and resource intensive is the development of said custom software
But I don’t think even that is the case, as they can essentially just “swap out” the video they’re streaming
You’re forgetting that the “targeted” component of their ads (while mostly bullshit) is an essential part of their business model. To do what you’re suggesting they’d have to create and store thousands of different copies of each video, to account for all the different possible combinations of ads they’d want to serve to different customers.
To say that it’s just much more expensive would be a huge understatement. This is not going to work, at least not in a near future…
Yeah, I’ve thought the same. It’s like with ads on websites - ads are served from different domains and as blockers work by denying requests to those domains. If they really wanted they could serve the ads from the same domain as the rest of the website. I guess one day they might but so far it must not be worth it.
I also wondered why they didn’t do this, but I think it’s tricky because the ad that gets inserted might need to be selected right at the moment of insertion. That could complicate weaving it into the video itself. But I guess they finally found a way to do it.
I think more and more people are getting really tired of the ads, so it’s starting to affect their revenue a little bit with all the ad blockers.
this has more to do with they got caught lying about their ad numbers and inflated their ad prices. So now they are doing this to show their shareholders they are doing something to protect their revenue and thus keep their stock price inflated.
I’m really getting the push I need to finally get rid of the last couple Google services I still use
It’s only a matter if time til they enshittificate gmail as well.
The best adblocker is to stop using youtube 🤣
Won’t happen. People are too addicted at watching"creators" talking shits.
The miracle of creation
I wanted to jump into using Peertube, but unfortunately Youtube grew enormous because it was the only thing at the time. Pulling people from it to other platforms with less viewers and usually no compensation is tough. (although YT compensation as of late is a joke as well)
now I need to move away from Telegram & YouTube at the same time… oef
