this post was submitted on 25 Jul 2024
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YouTube has been spotted testing server-side ads, which could pose a problem to ad blockers.

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[–] [email protected] 266 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (10 children)
www.youtube.com##+js(json-prune-fetch-response, playerAds adPlacements adSlots playerResponse.playerAds playerResponse.adPlacements playerResponse.adSlots, , propsToMatch, /player?)

Click on uBO icon > ⚙ Dashboard button > Add the filter(s) in "My filters" pane > ✓ Apply changes > Open new tab and test again.

from the reddit page idk if it works but most comments say it does

and if it does, that's fucking hilarious

this will have taken a team months of work and one ublock dev just threw it in the toilet within an hour

[–] [email protected] 104 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

ok, so i added this code to my ublock origin filter list, then went to youtube, and the injected ads were still showing up in about half the vids. closed firefox, reopened, same. rebooted my win11 machine, now the injected ads are NOT showing up any longer. not sure if youtube switched it off because they're still beta testing this bullshit or if the code is working but it SEEMS to be working. if it stops i'll come back to edit this comment. thanks for the tip man!

[–] shotgun_crab 25 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (1 children)

The ublock origin guys are wizards, I tell you...

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[–] blady_blah 158 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (1 children)

I would rather pay an ad-block company a monthly subscription than give it to YouTube in blackmail. This will just be another salvo in a never ending war.

[–] glitchdx 30 points 3 months ago (2 children)

I used to pay for youtube premium. My logic being that I was using an adblocker anyway, and I wanted the content creators I watched to get some kind of revenue for my watchtime. Youtube stopped taking my money a while back, and I can't be bothered to figure out why. These days, there's so little content that I find interesting that I spend more time scrolling than I do actually watching videos. It's only a matter of time until I just stop regularly going to youtube.

[–] [email protected] 28 points 3 months ago (1 children)

I paid for it until they basically doubled the price.

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[–] buddascrayon 118 points 3 months ago (1 children)

All of these issues have reportedly led to an increase in ad block uninstalls, leaving users with the choice of YouTube Premium or sitting still until that "skip ad" button appears.

Oh yes, I totally believe that people are opting to delete their ad blocker, that works on not just YouTube but the entire internet, simply because YouTube has become obstinate and difficult. Who the fuck wrote this article? And how much are they getting paid by Google? Do they really think we're going to buy into this bullshit and follow suit?

[–] rozodru 29 points 3 months ago (4 children)

it's total bullshit. For example if you use ublock origin every now and again sure you might get ads that pop up, but AT MOST that lasts for a day, generally it'll last a couple hours as the team at ublock update their lists to block ads again. There's no need, literally zero need, to remove it from your extensions. and at worst, like I got yesterday, you'll just see a black screen that buffers for a bit before the video plays. the ad is still blocked.

you can also circumvent most of this if you use freetube. OR if you just want music the youtube-dl script on linux. I also ditched spotify for youtube-dl as I can also download entire playlists with it.

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[–] [email protected] 103 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (3 children)

New article title. YouTube tests more ways of making their service shit and driving away users.

Edit: TIFO Scott Manley is on Odysee so i will start watching him there instead. One less yt channel is always a good thing

[–] Wogi 36 points 3 months ago (10 children)

I mean, if you're not paying for it, and they can't advertise to you, what do they need you for?

[–] [email protected] 52 points 3 months ago

To keep claiming they have x billion accounts...

There's a big reason why these companies don't remove the bots and willingly allow them to do whatever. It boosts their numbers to inflate their actual worth.

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[–] [email protected] 93 points 3 months ago (1 children)

I would settle for something that simply turns the screen black and turns audio off whenever ads play. I don't care if YouTube gets paid for it, I just want to decrease the value of ads and prevent myself from seeing them.

[–] [email protected] 37 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (3 children)

I don't care if YouTube gets paid for it

Legally, YouTube have to detect if ads were blocked and and mark the impression as non-billable. They can't charge advertisers for blocked ads.

[–] [email protected] 41 points 3 months ago (3 children)

They can only tell that something is blocked because the ad wasn't loaded from a server. If it's not loaded, then they can't count it as "viewed."

If the ad is just blacked over, it is still loaded, and they wouldn't know.

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[–] elbucho 74 points 3 months ago (6 children)

I find it fascinating how media companies evolved their usage of ads over time. Used to be that the purpose of showing someone an ad was to get them to buy your product. Now, though, the companies who make the ads are paying to have them put on media networks who use the ads to annoy you into paying for a premium membership so you don't have to see them. It's double dipping.

Not sure how I would feel if I made an ad, and YouTube was saying to their users: "Yeah, you like that fucking ad? Super annoying, isn't it? If you don't pay me more money, I'm going to cram that annoying bullshit down your throat every time you want to watch a video. I'm going to put ads at the beginning of videos. I'm going to sprinkle them throughout the middle. Hell, I'm even going to make you watch ads after the video ends! You like that, you little bitch??"

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[–] UnfortunateShort 60 points 3 months ago (5 children)

Let's go full guerilla: Plugin that lets you select the first and the last frame of an ad, thus allows to report the beginning and length to a synced database. When that frame is found in the buffer, skip X frames ahead.

For ergonomics, the plugin should be able to spot cuts in the video so you can easily select the correct frames.

For resilience, maybe settle for similar frames. Thinking about anti-abuse, maybe require a minimum number of reports relative to the views (and ofc allow to not skip stuff).

[–] [email protected] 35 points 3 months ago (2 children)

Due to legal reasons, and to keep advertisers happy, YouTube is forced to display the "Advertisement" mark and a link to the advertisers website. With these, all the required information exists to allow an adblocker to skip any ads embedded in the video stream. No community flagging of ads is required.

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[–] [email protected] 29 points 3 months ago (4 children)

Let's go full guerilla: Plugin that lets you select the first and the last frame of an ad, thus allows to report the beginning and length to a synced database. When that frame is found in the buffer, skip X frames ahead.

This would fit in well with SponsorBlock, which already does the same thing for different parts of videos (eg sponsored segments, intro and outro animations, non music segments in music videos, etc).

I suspect YouTube will find ways around this, like running ads of differing lengths, add random amounts of padding at the start of the video or between ads, etc.

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[–] [email protected] 22 points 3 months ago

That sounds very much like the idea of SponsorBlock (but might need a bit of refinement to work for different ads of different length). You should definitely check out Piped for watching YouTube videos without any tracking/ads/dark patterns, I am very sure they will do something to remove server-side ads as well (hopefully).

And if it is just five seconds instead of 15, it would be way better!

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[–] [email protected] 55 points 3 months ago (4 children)

they cracked down on adblockers, adblockers got better.

They're trying to get around adblockers again, adblockers will get better again

[–] [email protected] 59 points 3 months ago (6 children)

I will pay for an adblocker before I pay for an ad provider to stop harassing me

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[–] bokherif 54 points 3 months ago (17 children)

I’ve been a premium user for a while now and the platform has never been shittier than now. I pay for premium but I see integrated ads in videos and nowadays YouTube sneakily includes actual product videos in your home feed as if that’s not an ad. Recommendations have sucked for so long that I don’t remember the last time I watched something good on it. Inclusion of yt music was the thing that kept me on the subscription but shit man

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[–] [email protected] 52 points 3 months ago (1 children)

I'll just download the video and skip the shit, idgaf, I'm not watching ads, google can suck it.

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[–] Etterra 50 points 3 months ago (2 children)

There are already sponsorship-skipping add-ons. YouTube lost before they began.

[–] [email protected] 37 points 3 months ago (16 children)

I’m not sure if a sponsorblock like solution will work. Sponsorblock is entirely reliant on timestamps provided by users.

A similar solution for YouTube’s ads will only work if the ads always happen at the same timestamps and have the same length. This is not necessarily the case, as ads can happen at any point.

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[–] [email protected] 48 points 3 months ago (13 children)

how i wish there was a good alternative for youtube

[–] [email protected] 24 points 3 months ago

Support candidates who want to limit the ability for large tech companies to acquire their competitors. Maybe even those that wish to see their acquisitions rolled back. Maybe even those that wish to see them broken up.

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[–] [email protected] 46 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Just got hit with this for the first time, and at first I was like what the fuck is this happening here, I'm running Firefox latest, and UBlock origin latest, never seen this before. Happening for every video, two injected video ads before the video, seem skippable, but i'm not clicking on them. Hope UBlock catches up to this quick, this sucks.

[–] ShunkW 24 points 3 months ago (3 children)

Mine are getting trapped by pihole. They take 10 seconds to time out and just show a banner ad that won't automatically go away without hitting the skip button. It's really frustrating since I liked letting videos auto play as I fall asleep.

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[–] bitjunkie 37 points 3 months ago (4 children)

YouTube tests server-side ads to make ~~your coveted blocker~~ YouTube obsolete

ftfy

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[–] [email protected] 36 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (4 children)

Honestly... How much has Google spent trying to counter people skipping ads?

Is it less than the amount of potential profit if everyone was forced to watch ads?

This seems like that situation recently where NYC paid a million dollars to enforce people to pay for train tickets, which was less than twenty thousand a year in lost revenue.

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[–] RonnyZittledong 35 points 3 months ago (10 children)

This must consume a tremendous amount of processing to do since they would have to transcode copies for every ad region/campaign and every resolution on demand. I am interested in how they made this financially viable.

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[–] A_Random_Idiot 34 points 3 months ago (10 children)

Have a sneaking suspicion that google is doing the classic spend 100 dollars to save 1 cent type scenario, cause all the money they've dumped into this anti-adblock shit? theres no way its less than what they've not made from adblockers.

Especially when all this money could have been spent on improving their ad service so people don't have to view 2 hour ads, or malware laden bullshit, or just blatant pornographic advertising.

but why spend money moderating their own service, when they can spend 10x the money trying to force their open septic tank of a service on everyone.

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[–] FreddyNO 34 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Yea the moment my adblockers don't work I stop using youtube

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[–] [email protected] 34 points 3 months ago (20 children)

Watch how quickly I drop your fucking platform lmao. Please give me a reason

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[–] CosmoNova 33 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

I'm getting them already, which is a bit annoying, but I still prefer the black screen with an adblocker to the wild mix of commercials that range from MLM schemes and "join my telegram group for totally not financial advice" to flat out hate speech that I'd get without an adblocker. So yeah suck it Google.

[–] [email protected] 33 points 3 months ago (2 children)

I mean I'll settle for the ad being blacked out and muted while I wait for the content. Or have it play elevator music while I wait.

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[–] TCGM 31 points 3 months ago (6 children)

I give it 5 hours from mass release before ad blockers catch up.

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[–] michaelmrose 29 points 3 months ago (9 children)

If they make it shitty enough I just wont use it.

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[–] [email protected] 28 points 3 months ago (2 children)

Imagine what YouTube could be if they spent all this cash on improving their service instead.

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[–] [email protected] 27 points 3 months ago (2 children)

It was going to happen eventually. It sucks since so much good content is still housed on youtube. The bright side is that I'll probably read more when uBlock stops working so well.

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[–] [email protected] 26 points 3 months ago (6 children)

Nothing that can't be blocked by sponsorblock.

And if that doesn't work we'll find something else. Even if we'd have to download the same video multiple times to compare and strip out the differences.

Google may have plenty of nerds, but the world will always have more.

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[–] dinckelman 23 points 3 months ago (8 children)

I know there's a significant part of the market that'd just say yeah, fuck it, i'll pay for ~~Redtube~~ ~~Youtube Red~~ Youtube Premium, but there's also a significant part of it, where a lot of people would rather just stop watching stuff entirely.

It's just like Hulu back in the days. You'd have no choice but to pay for a premium tier, just to have 14 unskippable ads forced down your throat, all in a span of a 19 minute long tv episode. I stopped paying after that month and resorted to piracy.

Piracy is always a service issue, except now it's legitimately going to harm individual creators, who have just about everything to lose, rathen that a rotten husk of some corporation, that's going to print free money, no matter what you do

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[–] ansiz 22 points 3 months ago (4 children)

Server side ads sound more expensive for Google to me. I'll just use some future plugin that blacks out the screen or whatever if it comes to that.

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