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.?
No, because that would be communism, and that killed 100 million people. You also think genocide is bad, aren’t you? And besides of that, if there were less regulations, you could make your own video platform to challenge Google’s monopoly!
i think people may have missed that you’re not serious
The problem with pretending to be a dumbass on the Internet, is it’s almost impossible to outdo the professionals.
Reading comprehension is for people who paid attention in school. Nerds.
It’s not possible for everyone to just tell if it’s supposed to be sarcasm. ADHD makes it hard. A bad day makes it hard. A tiring day makes it hard.
The downside of the misunderstanding isn’t just downvotes. It’s possibly a proliferation of misinformation and an impression that there are people who DO think that way.
Being not serious while saying something grim is not a globally understood culture either. It’s more common and acceptable in the Western world as a joke.
So… call it accessibility, but it’s just more approachable for everyone to just put an “/s”.
Poe’s law
Well… Communism is directly responsible for multiple famines that killed into the hundreds of millions. Then there are the inevitable purges that have taken millions of lives and hosts of terrors as well.
You’re free to dispute history if you need to, and claim that theoretically communism is nice, but in practice, history tells us that living under communism reaaaalllyy sucks.
There are people here not from western europe or north america, we felt all of that and beyond with capitalism too. Do you think Asia and Africa, who received aid and support from the soviet union to free themselves from capitalist Europeans will fall for that ? Where did you arrive at ''multiple famines that killed into the hundreds of millions" ? Even the soviet famines of 1930s and chinese great famine ‘only’ killed at maximum intervals of estimation 9 and 50 millions each, and this article over-viewing all atrocities maxes at 150 million, with a low 10-20 million estimation, not hundreds of millions in famines alone.
Are you paraphrasing that ‘Black Book of Communism’ shtick ? It is a propaganda tool not valid in actual academic research, even by liberals that are not fraudsters, because the author twists every single communist countries-adjacent deaths as ‘‘mass killing caused by communism’’, including brilliant takes like total number of abortions (ex: France, that practices 250.000 abortions per year must be enraged with a capitalist regime that killed 5 million people only in the 21st century !) and all WW2 eastern front deaths (so both the nazi germans and allies that invaded USSR and USSR soldiers and civilians killed count as ‘killed by communism’).
Last but not least, the USSR had much higher GDP per capita and living standards than the average third world capitalist country (which is where the demographic majority of capitalist people live), so even if the USSR could not equate Switzerland, they achieved a good quality of life better than the world average.
Last but not least, the USSR had much higher GDP per capita and living standards than the average third world capitalist country (which is where the demographic majority of capitalist people live), so even if the USSR could not equate Switzerland, they achieved a good quality of life better than the world average.
why would this be relevant? The US had a higher per capita GDP than the USSR and it was capitalist, surely that means that capitalism would be better here?
that’s like saying capitalism is directly responsible for school shootings because it happens all the time in the US. but no one’s dumb enough to claim that because that’s not how things work.
well, technically the USSR exported lots and lots of grain during the 30s famine. So.
It’s still not perfect, but you could argue there was mismanagement there.
TBF, stalinism wasn’t really communism, it was more authoritarianism than anything, but.
This kind of messages should have a “/s” attached. IMHO, that’s just proper Netiquette.
I kind of inferred the /s by the end of the post, but respect that such inference isn’t universal. Also there are many /s comments that I wouldn’t infer if it wasn’t explicit.
This is a good question.
No, at least not in the USA. They’re still protected under Section 230, which makes them immune from liability of third-party content on their platform.
now serving up the ads directly to me
What do you think they were doing before? 🤔
Does anybody know how this will affect the EU?
Great, now it’s Russian roulette every time you hit that pause button. <clickPause> ¡BOOM ZERODAY MALWARE!
no because of sec 230 and publisher rights, they were still directly serving them before, the only difference now is that it’s tied into the video stream directly, rather than broken out as a second one.
In the past they have always said that they aren’t transmitting the content and so it’s the responsibility of the transmitter of the data. Now the content at least appears to be coming from youtube not the advertisers. So I’m curious if that’s enough to make it fall under section 230 which would require that they make a good faith effort to remove “objectionable” content.
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% 💪💪)
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?
Line go up 💹
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”.
Reddit is still going strong I feel.
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.
All time high all time!
“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.
Thank you.
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.
Machines could be doing all the work. We could have clean energy , air ,water and food and shelter for all…
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 get loads in governments tax breaks and they data mine the fuck out of us so fuck them and their ads.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2024/sep/19/social-media-companies-surveillance-ftc
I’ll continue to block them as long as we can and then move on to something else if we can’t. By paying you are just rewarding this exploitative behavior.
If you simply must pay for something then donate it to a charity instead. These companies do not need your money.
I did $390 in charitable giving last month and paid $23 for YT Premium. My priorities are just fine so please don’t lecture me on how to spend my money.
I’m using lemmy right now and it’s not ad supported and I’m not the product.
It’s always weird to me when people post on lemmy and just assert something that implies lemmy is impossible, bro your using it right now!
LOL I donate to my instance, “bro.” Lemmy costs money. You’re just freeloading for the moment.
yeah, the admin of the instance chose to do so, they often accept donations, so you can stuff money there if you feel like it.
I’m not getting a “free lunch” the instance admin is giving me a free lunch at their own expense, and being compensated in other manners.
ah yes all you have to do is spend like 100 USD yearly, ever year, and pay for features you don’t want, just so youtube can maybe stop posting ads.
It’s not a “maybe” for me. I haven’t seen a YT ad in years. That’s Premium.
that’s great, how long until you think youtube makes a new premium tier that starts showing ads?
Or that one notable bug where premium shows you ads.
my point is that there is no guarantee in the quality of the service, they have no legal requirements for it (here in murica at least)
I have no thoughts on the hypothetical of what if YT starts showing ads on Premium.
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.
Ads give more profit than subscriptions, since if you would adjust subscription price to match ad income, too less people would buy it at that price.
Source: Netflix and Disney Ad-supported tier analysis.
The ratio of income to bills is way lower on our side than YouTube’s.
We need that money more than they do.
I can point you to some people who need your money more than you do. Are you going to give it to them? Why not?? Doesn’t money flow to those who need it??? Isn’t that how this works???
It doesn’t, which informs the rise technical mitigations of YouTube’s terrible ad schemes. YouTube isn’t interested in a more egalitarian society but serving its shareholder masters, and it sucks even at that.
YouTube subscriptions are not a good deal for the consumers, so they’re not going to be popular, which might serve to explain to you why everyone is not a paying subscriber, nor will they ever be.
All you have to do is look at other streaming services which are subscriber-only to see the truth of what I said. Even the ones that have ads are not doing backflips to cram them everywhere as the other commenter complained, because ads are just supplementary revenue, not primary. The subscription model is incredibly strong historically and currently. It’s patently ridiculous that you think you can wave it away so easily. You’ll also notice that most other subscriptions are cheaper than YT Premium - because they’re going for subscriber scale where YT has a powerful ad business in place that subscriptions replace.
If you’re not following me, I’ll simplify: if everyone on YT has to subscribe, as on Netflix, it in fact would cost a lot less. But you don’t, so you get ads up the wazoo.
I’m even more baffled by your criticism that YT cares more about shareholders than creating an egalitarian society. Thats true of literally every business including the one you work for. YT never said they were trying to make society egalitarian. Where do you even get that shit from?
I’m even more baffled by your criticism that YT cares more about shareholders than creating an egalitarian society. Thats true of literally every business including the one you work for. YT never said they were trying to make society egalitarian. Where do you even get that shit from?
The pissed-off engineers that develop effective adblockers, for which there remains robust support.
Much like the west coast oyster monopolies of the 1880s that were scourged by oyster pirates, YouTube is fighting a losing battle.
PS: I take you’re aware of the cord-cutting epidemic of cable television, yes?
Piracy, cable TV, cord cutting.
You’re throwing a lot of words together without making any argument.
YT is winning the battle against blockers as evidenced by the extreme vitriol toward them here right now.
YT are winning at business: they are massively successful.
YT are winning competitively. Just listen to the cries of monopoly around here. That’s how strong YT are.
YT won my business by making something I use every day and mostly can’t find a substitute for.
What are they losing again? They’re not even losing the ad blocker users, who clearly and obviously depend greatly on YT or they wouldn’t be so mad that their free ride is over.
Explain to me again how someone who writes an ad blocker gives you the idea that YT is supposed to be creating an egalitarian world? That part made no sense.
I can point you to some people who need your money more than you do. Are you going to give it to them? Why not?? Doesn’t money flow to those who need it??? Isn’t that how this works???
i can point you to the basic fact that if i just keep my money, i can very well do more work with that money that i keep, rather than just giving it away to other people.
Money doesn’t flow to those who need it, money flows to those who get it through commerce most effectively.
That’s exactly right!
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…
Don’t worry, I spent zero seconds considering who you might be. I’m arguing with your point of view as expressed here by you but also similar statements by others.
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.
They’re not getting it for free. They pay video creators. And they know that the more they can pay them, the more and better content they will get.
And with any product pricing, there is always a balance between charging less to get more customers, or charging more to get more money per customer.
I’m pretty sure YouTube knows more about how to price their service than any of us.
They’re not getting it for free. They pay video creators. And they know that the more they can pay them, the more and better content they will get.
barely, most of that payment is from premium subscribers and memberships, people who spend their own money on this, youtube gives them a share of the ads, sure, but ads are basically a fraction of the majority of most youtuber incomes these days.
It used to be free, it’s not like the majority of YouTube users voted yes to google takeover.
It’s not like YT is a democracy LOL
And YT was never free. It has had ads from the beginning. Perhaps not its very first months as a startup but those were supported by its seed investment capital so obviously a special and finite circumstance.
YT is ad supported. It always had been. Free services need to make money somehow and ads are one way. It is baffling watching people realize this for the first time because they’ve been shielded by their ad blocker for years, but dude, here outside that little bubble, in the real world, this is how things work.
Thy take as much as they can get and pay as little as they can, using AI for both:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4EmstuO0Em8
Quasi-Monopoly makes services worse for everyone!
Everyone in every aspect of this economy tries to get the most while paying the least. I swear people in here are bitching about absolute economic basics that they themselves are guilty of.
If you hate monopolies, go pay for Nebula and Curiosity stream like I do.
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 🤡
Are they? What if the server refuses to serve the video until the ad’s duration has passed? You’d have no better option than to hide it, which most people wouldn’t bother with.
Seems like that would foil a plugin, but I think it would effectively kill video scrubbing, or simultaneous streams, depending on how that restriction was implemented. I still don’t see this working well for YouTube
My brain just does that anyway, after decades of ads I just tune them out. And at home I use ad blockers.
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.
If it makes you feel any better, I intentionally never use products that have intentionally repetitive messaging or earworm tendencies out of spite. Though I know I’m probably in the minority
Do we unintentionally use products we didn’t realize repetitively messaged us?
We’ll never know…
Just kidding, we can be sure it’s incredibly well studied given the billions and billions of dollars going into ads!
Totally no bias in these studies at all either, they totally wouldn’t try to skew these studies for personal gain and to try and justify the huge spending on ad money right?
You can fool some of the people some of the time… right? :)
I’d expect nothing less than executives at a number of the Fortune 50 to be ruthlessly cutthroat, including when it comes to vetting the claims of their marketing teams.
(I know I’m speaking about studies I only assume to exist by the way, will have to research it later)
surely large corpos would waste billions on ads if they didn’t see any financial return right!
Also, we should be taking a page from the propaganda playbook right now, that should pretty much tell us all we need to know lol.
I think the main problem is that this type of reasoning can’t actually be proven scientifically, even if we have a study there’s not a guarantee it’s unbiased (who do you think funds research on advertising effectiveness). Then there is the problem that every product or brand in modern advertising is likely one of the handful of pseudo monopoly brands. One might argue that a person bought their product because they heard it in an ad, but in reality they might not have really had much choice, that makes it hard to say if people buy the products because they’re familiar or if they just don’t have much option.
The main point I’d like to make is that advertisers would like to believe they aren’t wasting money or time, they need people to believe it in some capacity, because if enough people don’t, eventually the dumb and blind companies who give them money will realize it too and stop giving them money. That’s why the ad-funded internet is considered a bubble, it’s not worth it, or necessary in a lot of cases, and the moment the dumb and blind corpos realize that, they’ll stop dumping money into a hole.
deleted by creator
Advertisers claim that it’ll work eventually which is how they can justify companies paying them to display ads, and how they can justify paying for ads on a service like YouTube or even a website. In a sense they are being hung out to dry, many of the big companies seen in ads these days don’t actually need to convince you to buy their product because they have an almost complete monopoly on the market, they’re only technically not monopolies, so you’re going to buy their products anyway or live without the convenience. This is why among other things Ad-funded internet is considered a bubble in a sense, because advertisers are spending money paying websites to show people things they don’t think or care about, but somehow this translates into profits? Seems like the only one profiting is the site being paid, and the creator on it.
I’m sure Nestle, Pepsi Co. P&G, CocaCola Bottling Co. Walmart, Amazon, and the other big boys really need to tell others about them or people wouldn’t know they exist and buy from them. Get real, these companies have their foot in the door, when it comes to the whole consumers buying from them. You can’t not buy from them and live as anyone else would, it takes effort to cut them out, and in many cases living without the convenience they bring.
always be detectable
Maybe with some content ID system… but you’ve just predicted their 2025 update which we might imagine would go something like this:
I briefly touched on this in a lengthy comment when this scheme was originally floated a few months ago. Your prediction, which granted is something that Youtube/Google absolutely would try if they thought they could get away with it, would only work on viewers that remained within the confines of Youtube’s native player.
Any third party app capable of bullying or tricking Youtube into handing them the video data is free to do whatever it wants to with it afterwards, even if this ultimately means impeccably pretending to be the official Youtube player in order to get the server to fork over the data. Furthermore, video playback is buffered so a hypothetical pirate client would have several seconds worth of upcoming video to analyze and determine what it wants to do with it.
Youtube could certainly make this process rather difficult by including some kind of end-to-end DRM or something, but at the end of the day you need to make a playable video stream arrive on the client’s device or computer somehow, and if you can’t guarantee full control of the entire environment in which that happens, dedicated nerds will find a away to screw with that data.
Oh, the year is 2100 and YouTube only plays on dedicated Alphabet-produced hardware (available “free” of course) with cam-proof screens? Storytelling will come back in style with a vengeance overnight!
…and then, with the passion of a man whose next meal depends on it, he pleads:
”like and subscribe.”
OK kids good night!
I wish I had more upvotes to give this comment cause you are so on the money.
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If they do make it so you can speed up or skip the ad sections of a video, mission accomplished.
Mission failed sucessfully, if people can speed up or scroll through the ad, then it kind of defeats the point since people can skip ahead or increase the speed.
Hence “mission accomplished”
i remember when i put a video at 2x speed the next ad i got was also at 2x speed lmao
Unless you are watching live content, you are correct
No you don’t have to be able to detect it if you can’t skip. Since they’re injecting the stream directly every time you hit skip they move the counter and when you come back in it just continues to stream you the ad. Just let the time code go negative at the end of the video if you skipped.
All they have to do is not really care about minutes and seconds displaying correctly exactly if you’re working around with fast forward. Alternately they could also just disable fast forward and rewind if they detect you’re using it to abuse commercials.
I think Sooner or later, pretty much all blocking becomes a store the entire video with commercials and strip the commercials out with comskip end. If you’re just storing the buffer off, and stripping it out privately there’s not really a lot they can do about that.
I may not like it, but you do make an interesting technical argument.
I think it would still be detectable though because of buffering.
What you’re saying assumes that videos are streamed frame-by-frame: “here’s a frame”, “okay, I watched that frame”, “okay, here’s the next frame”.
With buffering videos will preload the next 30 seconds of video, and so if you pressed a button to skip ahead 10 seconds, that often happens instantly because the computer has already stored the next 30 seconds of video. Your plan to just pretend to skip ahead doesn’t work in this case, because my computer can know whether or not it really did skip ahead, because of buffering.
i feel like with a relatively basic audio and visual analysis you could probably get a decently accurate detection of ads, paired with a collective “sponsor block” type system, this would like be very reliable. Even just ignoring the stream info itself.
Just let the time code go negative at the end of the video if you skipped.
horrendously bad UI, this should never be done, recalculate the time, maybe. But don’t just make it negative, that’s fucking stupid.
Sponsor Block Addon does it fine.
However I have bigger complains for my Firefox cannot handle most videos anymore. Affected are those with many ads. It starts with a still image and if I don’t quit the video within 10 seconds, my desktop environment crashes, bouncing me back to the login screen. 💩
Did you read the article? The article shows a post from Sponsorblock and it specifically states that they turned off sponsor block submissions on effected browsers since they can’t be reliable with the new ad delivery method
Sorry, but I didn’t feel like opening the link on my phone. 😅🤦
The blog talks about how this changes is also breaking sponsorblock
That doesn’t sound like a Firefox issue.
I’ve read about YouTube delaying video play, buffering, and showing a blank screen for X seconds on all videos for non-Chrome browsers.
The desktop crashes don’t sound like YouTube, but I think the rest is the genuine anti-competitive behavior Google has demonstrated. I get these 5-6 second video delays and page refreshes on Firefox and Safari periodically but never in Chrome.
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.
On my phone I use youtube revanced and adguard dns, kiwi browser with ublock origin. On my PC I use just ublock origin. So far** I havent run into issues
AB testing, you probably haven’t been affected yet
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
10% where do you get that. The data I have heard is it’s around a third of all internet users globally.
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…
I’ve been getting around it by setting my frontend to use an embed request, that way YouTube thinks it’s a third party embed and the ad injection doesn’t work. I’ve also in the past geospoofed to Russia and that works to block ads too.
Wouldn’t that technology make them easy to rewind forward?
rewind forward
As a child of the cassette era, this phrase hurts my soul.
ok, i fixed that 😆
This comment confuses me
The fact that they can do expensive, on-the-fly video processing like this, and still make a profit, proves that video hosting costs are not an insurmountable barrier for the open-source internet. We need to make hardware accelerated peertube ubiquitous, and get creators to move over.
Processing isn’t the expensive part. It’s bandwidth. Transferring that much data gets expensive.
Storage more likely. Google owns fiber backbones and peers against the tier 1 providers directly. The over all point of ‘no, it’s still prohibitively expensive’ stands unless you’ve got 20B of dark fiber in your pocket.
Bit of A, bit of B?
Yes, that’s also why bittorrent (which PeerTube runs on, by the way) is a figment of our collective imaginations, impossible to viably implement.
Torrenting was created precisely to solve the bandwidth problem of monolithic servers. You very obviously have no idea how torrents (or PeerTube for that matter) works.
Was my sarcasm not thick enough?
My point was that PeerTube works just fine because BitTorrent is viable.
I caught it, down voters suck at reading lol
And our own bandwidth, too. Google isn’t paying my Internet bill. Hope the rest of my content creators switch soon, otherwise I’ll miss them.
What could content creators switch to that would save your own bandwidth?
Right, that’s probably true. Video encoding hardware and storage is incredibly cheap, but we get talks from netflix engineers where they’re talking about how they’re limited by dram bandwidth on their servers.
Some napkin math:
Youtube has ~7M average concurrent viewers.
https://streamscharts.com/overview?platform=youtube
A 1080p av1 stream is roughly 2-3mbits, maybe 5mbits for 60fps. You could serve all of those users with 14tbps of bandwidth, then.
Stockholm peering pricing for 14tbps (rough ballpark at this scale tbf) over 43x 400gbit ports at a Stockholm Internet eXchange, would cost about 240k EUR/month, with a 25% volume discount.
https://www.netnod.se/ix/netnod-ix-pricing
For comparison, Mastodon’s monthly donations are about 30k EUR/month, and lemmy.world receives about 2k EUR/month.
Super rough calculations, but there’s probably enough of a base in the fediverse for us to take over like 5% of Youtube’s viewer base, funded through donations. Not as cheap as wikipedia, but still doable with a committed open-source community. Beyond that, and a netflix/spotify/nebula subscription model would allow to fund further market share.
It’s notable to see though that Nebula seems to have millions in monthly revenue, but only about 700k subscribers (aka barely 100k concurrent streams). However I believe the majority of their expenses are going towards their creators and towards marketing for future growth.
But yeah, I think network effect is a bigger barrier than cost here.
The battle goes on and on.
I read about some sucker that paid for YouTube premium and still got ads in his pause screen. Lol.
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)
So AdGuard works on the YouTube website. I haven’t been there for some time - I use 2 other methods to watch YouTube ad-free.
- Newpipe - Android app that works by parsing the website, will probably be affected?
- YouTube Kodi add-on - works with Google YouTube API, I was wondering when this loophole is going to be plugged…
Anyone with knowledge of the matter care to comment? So far my YouTube watching is still ad-free.
I also run pi-hole in front of my WiFi. Nothing gets through. Or will it?
I noticed some podcasts these days have random server injected ads - usually the same ad repeated 2 or 3 times, is this going to be my video stream soon?
If ads are injected server-side like the article is taking about, your downloads in Newpipe and Kodi are going to have the ads in them.
Pihole will not work because it works on the DNS queries. With server side injection it’s gonna be tougher to block ads, but I’m sure we’ll find a way
Nothing gets through. Or will it?
You would have to block the video itself to get rid of them
use ublock origin, so far it’s been pretty much problem free.
Outside of this, use something like yt-dlp to run your own jellyfin instance or something.
reply to me with youtube URLs videos, channels or playlists that you find interesting.
optionally specify these tags so I can organize the data better
- it’s video component is nesisary (VIDEO)
- it’s video component is summerised by a single image (STILL)
- it’s mostly talking (COMMENTARY)
- it’s a person talking into a camera (FACE)
- it’s music (MUSIC)
- it’s a square thumbnail or video (SQUARE)
- Its a 4 by 3 thumbnail or video (4BY3)
- high resolution video (HIRES)
Ive been archiving for years and this looks like it may be the final clean batch I can produce. Feel free to specify other tags that may be useful and I will add them.
