What took them so long?
Anyway. I’m sure the adblocking Industry will adapt.
Adapt to what?
If they’re mixing the content with the ads server side, it’s going to be like trying to extract the flour from the bread loaf.
I’ve never understood why they haven’t just provided a method of doing this for all their customers. Like a Google Ad service that meshes together everything on the page with the ads server side, so it’s harder to target them client side.
I mean, the dream is to make the Internet like cable television, isn’t it? Where it’s all one signal/stream. When ads could never be targeted and blocked or skipped unless you recorded and played back later with fast forward. Feels like we’ll get there eventually, with Chromium effectively calling the shots now.
Google is required by EU law to show what is an ad and what isn’t. Adblockers could somehow detect that and skip forward.
If they’re predictable with the timing and length then sponsorblock will still work.
And if they’re not, the client can download the video twice and diff the copies.
The most pernicious thing they could do is randomize the ads across users, but serve each user the same ads each time. In that case, you’d need a peer-to-peer client to compare hashes of chunks with other users to detect the ad segments.
Dear Satan,
Your application for the Alphabet engineering position has been acce–[your message will continue after a word from our sponsors]
Honestly, I’d be happy to take the job and sabotage them from the inside.
Even if it comes down to a browser addon placing a black rectangle over the video and muting browser audio when an ad plays, I’ll be choosing that over watching ads.
If they do it properly, you won’t be able to do it.
In the extremely rare event that I watch a youtube video on a my phone, and an ad comes on, I mute sound and literally turn my head away. Advertisers can’t do shit about that lol.
There will always be a way
Can you skip ads on live TV? No.
With a DVR? Yes.
When ads are a distinct bit of content recognized by the client, then the casual user with the stock client/no add-ons can’t overcome the UI choice to block you from seeking unless youtube lets you. But this allows ad blockers to skip even downloading the ad, because it’s clear what is content and what is ad.
If the ad is completely “just part of the stream” with zero indication where ads begin and end, then you can at least seek back and forth, with not even the official client able to block you from seeking, because it doesn’t know where the ads are either. The client downloads the stream.
If the stream is accompanied by some metadata letting the client know when to block seeking, then ad blockers can use that to auto-seek.
I suspect the last one is going to be the case, because they both want to limit seeking during ad, and they also want to change things to an ad experience so that you ‘click through’ to what the ad is trying to get you to do.
You can fast forward on yt though :p, so unless they remove that for the duration of the ad (in which case an addon could possibly use that to determine if an ad is being played) you could at least skip it manually. And maybe there’d be a crowd sourced solution to somehow determine the actual videos beginning (like detecting the first frame of the actual video or something, idk).
What’s to stop them from timestamping the time they sent you the ad and wait until like 90% of that time has gone by until they send you the video? It’s all server-side, nothing a plugin can do.
Plugins could have lengthy buffers and a start-up delay, not ideal obviously, but some people and for some videos, people might be willing to wait. Alternatively as many others have mentioned in this post, a plugin could mute the audio and/or black out the video if it detects an ad playing. There are trade offs, but it’s a workable approach as well.
Honestly that’s not much better than muting and doing something else like we used to do with cable. If it gets to this point, I’ll be long gone, probably to curiositystream or nebula.
Honestly, I am surprised it took them this long. This technology has existed for a while, there is even a standard for it (see: SCTE-35).
The harsh truth of the matter is that YouTube is a victim of its own success. The sheer scale of what is needed to keep the platform running at its current level of activity is something that I think most people don’t give a second thought to. It requires a truly astonishing amount of technical expertise, infrastructure, monitoring, throughput capacity, not to mention sheer compute and storage, to keep it running. And that is considering the technical side alone, never mind the business that has evolved around it
All of the above costs money. A lot of money. So much money that only a shitty mega corporation with no moral scruples would ever be able to afford to run the platform, let alone turn a profit. And so here we are.
There are niche alternatives like PeerTube, but in practice it is currently in no state to be a drop in replacement. If the fediverse had to deal with the amount of traffic and content from YouTube in its current state, it would collapse immediately. This won’t change until the user base begins to increase, but to do so requires an incentive for people to jump over. And sadly, far too many people just don’t care enough about avoiding ads to do so.
I think in the long term there will be a reckoning; no matter the size of your platform you are not invulnerable to change. Nobody back in the early 2010s could foresee Twitter falling from grace, and look how that turned out. YouTube will eventually die, the only question is who will be footing the bill for what replaces it.
In the meantime, if you’re unable or unwilling to deal with YouTube’s ads, or pay to skip them, then just don’t engage with the platform at all. Read a book. Touch some grass. They haven’t found a way to monetize that (yet).
All of the above costs money. A lot of money. So much money that only a shitty mega corporation with no moral scruples would ever be able to afford to run the platform, let alone turn a profit.
Some estimates put the total number of YouTube Videos around 500 million, and I’ll say each video takes 200MB to store every version. That’s only an extra $24 million a year. With back-end processing and other stuff I’ll bump that total up to $2.0 billion a year for hosting fees, if you were to run YouTube on AWS.
If the fediverse had to deal with the amount of traffic and content from YouTube in its current state, it would collapse immediately.
The Fediverse would be a very different place if it was hosting anything remotely close to YouTube tier traffic. FFS, how much of the Fediverse is even outside English speaking countries? None of our systems are getting bombarded with hundreds of gigabytes of Good Morning messages like Whatsapp is dealing with in India, for instance.
So much of the content on these big services is both trivial in terms of audience and enormous in terms of relative file size. My sister-in-law sent me a thirty minute compilation video from their latest summer vacation, which she hosted to YouTube. That video is going to get maybe five views, unless one of us goes back to watch it a second time. How much is it costing YouTube to host and stream? Obviously far more than what they make from any of us.
Now scale that up to millions.
The Fediverse isn’t trying to do anything remotely like that.
It’s not just file size either. Video basically has several different things going on, where improving on one aspect tends to require compromise on the others:
- Resolution
- Frame rate
- Quality
- Bit rate (file size)
- Encoding complexity
- Decoding complexity (which affects battery life of mobile devices viewing the content)
- Robustness for dropped or corrupted data
Over time, the standards improve, but generally benefit from specialized hardware for decoding (thus making decoding complexity a bit more complicated when serving a lot of people with different hardware).
Netflix, for example, serves a small number of very large files to many, many people on demand. That means they benefit from high encoding complexity, even if it shaves off a tiny bit of file size, because spending a few extra hours on encoding a movie that’s 10mb smaller is worth it if 10 million people watch that movie, as that’s 100 terabytes of traffic saved.
But YouTube/Facebook and the others with a lot of user-submitted video, they’re ingesting hundreds of hours of content every minute, chopping it up into like 5 different resolutions/quality levels.
Then YouTube has a shitload of processes for determining which video gets which treatment. A random upload of a kid’s birthday party might get a few hundred views at most, so YouTube cares less about file size and more about saving that computational complexity up front. But if a video hits 1000 views in a few minutes, that means it’s on the cusp of going viral, and it might be worth re-encoding with the high cost encodings that save space/bandwidth.
If a service doesn’t scale, it won’t be necessary to have that kind of complexity in the service. But those videos will load a bit slower, use a little more battery and bandwidth to watch, be more prone to skipping/distortion, etc.
Video is hard. User submitted video is harder. Especially at scale.
Great analysis
Goodbye YouTube. Hello…?
…PeerTube!
Fedierse admins get your PeerTube instances ready, they’re coming to move
i pay for everything in cash to avoid being tracked.
i use a multi-hop VPN and privacy browser
i use a private email services
i am terrified of being tracked and use linux
The last consumer product i bought was a probably-stolen bottle of head and shoulders that was illegally being re-sold by a poor vendor who lacked a permit. At the time, i did not have a cell phone with me and my wallet has RFID blocking build into it. I paid for it in cash. I kept it in a bag and showed it to no one until I used it in secret.
I finally saw an ad on YouTube after YEARS of not seeing that bullshit.
Those mother-fuckers showed me a head and shoulders ad. How the fuck did they know?
Fuck YouTube, fuck head and shoulders. I’ve decided to never wash my hair again, shave my head, and get as much dandruff as possible. I am just done.
This could be a copy-pasta if it isn’t already one
what is a copy-pasta?
deleted by creator
Stop this tantrum throwing and just buy premium.
Hosting/streaming videos is not free.
If you watch yt at least 10 hours a month then it’s good deal.
YouTube used to host and stream videos for free, without ads, for years.
They operated at a loss just for this reason. Years of loss revenue to trick people into using the service and building a user base only to pull the rug out from under us and go ad crazy. They did this to themselves, we got used to being ad free so now they think we will just roll over and accept the ads. Too bad there wasn’t a way to sue companies for operating at a loss on purpose to artificially create a market then fundamentally change the product after the fact but as it was a “free” service there is only one stakeholder.
“bait and switch” is the technical term.
