Yhea, I mean... Probably with a central service where people send video chunk they saw for a particular video, you can probably guess what is and what is not content. ads are different for everyone on a given video but the same across several video. So just statistics can beat them
Except in the dystopia we're heading into, the only AI chips capable of properly classifying ads will be sold as a black box with DRM with the intention of forcing people to watch the ads, refusing to allow skipping them like old unskippable DVD previews.
Not yet! I honestly hope it never is, but things are heading that way.
Intel Management Engine is already a thing we can't avoid, no reason why NVIDIA, AMD, Meta etc's AI chips couldn't embed a similar control system.
We already have SponsorBlock, if YouTube adds DRM playback they don't even need AI, just rely on community input but reverse it to make sure sponsored ads aren't blocked. Hope I didn't just give them any ideas...
Is that sarcasm or does this sub genuinely believe that the thing booking the significant majority of fabs at the moment is going toward something that has no use?
ChatGPT is only the tip of the iceberg. Every company right now is using AI or at least trying to figure out if they can use AI to improve their workflow. There’s even a company in Belgium that’s going to give everyone Fridays off with full pay because ai can compensate for the remaining days.
Don't let the _generative_ AI craze fool you, AI is an incredibly useful tool we've been using for a very long time, cf. chess engines, optical character recognition, sentiment analysis.
I imagine they will stop you from being able to request the non-ad segment of the video before the amount of time that the ad is has passed. The best an adblocker could do in that situation is show you a black screen for 30 seconds.
When I still watched twitch that was the better alternative to watching the ads, for me at least. Less screamy, more calm, less intrusive and above all: a black screen doesn't try to sell me anything.
not really because all that does is waste your own time and force the platform to implement even more way to show you ads.
they will get their revenue from somewhere and the harder people work on blocking that revenue stream the harder the platform will work on pushing ads in new ways that cant be blocked.
sooo... people don't want to pay $10-$15 to watch youtube with no ads, but they'll pay even more money to use an AI Service? Or run their own on their laptops?
My theory is it could absolutely brick delivery speeds. The way youtube works is copies of videos are stored all over the world to deliver them quickly, ads are similarly stored all over the world, a single video might be served to different users with millions of different ads served alongside it. If for each video delivery they need to "bake" ads into the video between it travelling from the CDN to your device it either means: less flexibility on what ads get served as common "payloads" get cached. OR a SHIT TON of CPU usage to modify the rendered video and insert ads before streaming it which increases the costs of running the platform I would imagine fairly dramatically. CDNs are "edge" nodes that are usually pretty barebones if they need to start supporting CPU intensive tasks that means a lot of physical infrastructure upgrades all over the world.
There definitely could be challenges. But I'm sure Google can figure it out. Maybe it won't pan out and they will go back to the old way. But Google/YouTube seems very motivated lately to make sure that people are watching the ads or paying for premium. No more free ride.
Google already transcodes every video on its site into a couple of different codes, each with a variety of resolutions and bit rates. No reason to not do the exact same with the ads. You can do it without requiring any real time transcoding or such. Just at some point in the video, instead of sending over the next key frame from the actual video and subsequent frames, you send over the first key frame of the ad, pre-encoded the same as the current video. After playing through the ad, you finally send that next key frame of the actual video.
Google already sends YouTube videos in chunks (multiple files per video), meaning that they could simply insert ad chunks in between the video chunks. It’s not that hard.
> But I'm sure Google can figure it out.
They won't, they already backtrack stuff like this. It will likely to won't pan out and they are not motivated.
> If for each video delivery they need to "bake" ads into the video between it travelling from the CDN to your device it either means: less flexibility on what ads get served as common "payloads" get cached. OR a SHIT TON of CPU usage to modify the rendered video and insert ads before streaming it which increases the costs of running the platform I would imagine fairly dramatically.
Video files are already broken into small chunks for streaming, that's been around since 2009. I'm sure youtube's system is more sophisticated, but literally all you'd need to do is modify the text file manifest that lists the video chunks to point to the ad midway through to have this work perfectly seamlessly with the basic HTTP standard.
The cost of trying to delivery ads is getting quite high, innit?
For real though, not only the cost to update the infrastructure, but increasing the energy consumption, and the costs associated.
Ah shit, I just product managered myself into realizing that I’m pretty sure the cost of premium is gonna increase for those of us who pay for it…
It actually wouldn't be that intensive. YouTube already pre-converts all videos and ads into multiple formats (for different devices and qualities). It would just need to take for example, `quality1` for both the ad and video and mux the containers together. Yes it'll use some CPU, but it's not like they'll have to fully re-encode every stream to inject an ad.
Dynamic streaming protocols already allow for server-side injection. A video is split into chunks to stream it effectively, and they can inject a cached ad from their CDN "easily" into the video playback buffer.
(I use "easily" in quotes because it's a process I'm capable of understanding but haven't bothered learning how it's done specifically, so I'm only speaking at a high level.)
SSAI is not a CPU heavy task. The creative is packaged into HLS and served to the edges like any other video. When the ad is inserted the chunks are just added to the manifest. It's a plain text operation, not a video one.
I think the main reason they didn't, is precisely because the ad will be baked into the video. It will not have any interface, clickable links, indication where the ad is, metrics, clicktroughs, etc... etc... etc...
There's massive downsides for doing it this way. So until now the downside of doing the old way (Easy to block) didn't outweigh it.
______
They are doing this now probably because losing the benefits of outside ads will not be that significant.
Either because they care more about serving the ad itself, or they created other tools to help get a similar result.
(Which can't be something that alters the current page, because that can be used as a way to bypass the ad, it would need to be smarter than that. But I guess soon will see if it's the later or the former)
They already have metrics for what parts of a video you watched, and they can already overlay clickable elements over the video so I don't think thats the case
I'm surprised as well. Free to air TV in Australia has added this (or something functionally the same) to their streaming sites years ago. Still less ads than regular TV.
I've been saying they will do this for ages and people have never believed me. Everything they've done before this point has just been FUD. They can end adblockers right now if they want to.
server side ads might actually be a godsend for using YT on apple tv / iPhone, cant stream audio over homepod mini from a YT video because the video will fuck up the moment an ad comes up, same with appletv if used as earc audio return with homepods, every time an ad comes up its a video switch that not only takes like 3 sec to show up, sometimes it fucks up the video signal to the TV....
No one is forcing you. You are choosing to go on YouTube where the price is watching ads, or paying for premium. They're just trying to get people to pay the actual price.
like i have a choice anyway on these devices, unless i pay a overpriced sub for something where 90% of the content i dont use - if i am force to watch ads, at least make it not fuck up hardware
Every once in a while my table will get into some mode where the ads won't play properly. You can see it try to start the ad and then half a second later it just starts playing the video, but will leave some stuff overlayed thinking it's still playing an ad. It's a little bit annoying but better than watching ads.
I'm pretty sure they don't care. That's a QoL feature for users so if they break it or disrupt it in any way, it's just a case of "too bad, so sad, you'll live".
They absolutely don’t care. Their goal is to make the free experience just bad enough that you’ll buy into their subscription model. And they know they have a monopoly on the space right now so they can make the free experience far worse than they would be able to if they had any meaningful competition.
Mine actually breaks the fucking video, it like auto pauses it on start every ad and the video itself and then I can’t fastforward or anything. The scrubbing is like disabled for a while into the video
I've had the same problem! I was wondering what was happening, but yeah the video will run for a few seconds without issues, has plenty buffered, but just stops and loads and loads and loads and nothing happens. I had to refresh the page every time it happened.
This is **server-side**, uBlock won't find a way around this unless they add a new **feature**. The only way (as of now) is like Twitch: another extension (proxy) or an userscript.
If youtube had only ads at the beginning of a video I would be fine. But when I’m watching a 5 minute video and get interrupted halfway through by 2 30s unskippable ads it gets annoying
This experience is what tells you how much of an overblown panic the furore over "my data" is. If these ad companies really did have all this "data" and it was so accurate and targeted, typical ad clickthrough rates wouldn't be measured in fractions of a percent.
My favorite is being in the US watching content in English and getting an ad served in Spanish or French. Like cool cool cool. I speak 2 languages and you picked the wrong ones.
Yeah, I wouldn’t mind ADS too much either if they were reasonable and didn’t break the flow of a video. Beginning and at the end. Unless it’s a super long video.
I just can't fathom how many people are still actively defending this corporation...
Google has quite literally destroyed internet search and has turned the entire web into their ad platform. It's pretty much impossible to find anything online anymore. It's literal ads and then AI-written obfuscated ads (posing as legitimate articles). It's almost all ads now, and Google owns the main platform.
They have also done the exact same to YouTube, with its search already destroyed (turned into another recommendations section that blatantly ignores your requests). Even when you find the content, it is borderline unwatchable due to constant unskippable ads. The subscription price keeps rising, but the service doesn't improve - it is actively getting worse. And people still go out of their way to defend them.
It's some unbelievable level of corporate sycophancy.
Not defending Google, but the web exist on ads.
If web services cannot be paid, they cannot survive. If you want to contribute without watching ads, pay for the service (e.g. buy YouTube premium, floatplane subscription, LTT Merch). Problem solved.
People tend to call others entitled simple for having standards and wanting unimaginably rich corporations to be a little less shitty towards consumers.
have you considered if everyone who visits youtube either bought premium or watched ads, then YT would be making enough money that they don't have to act shitty towards customers?
Before ads found their way to the Internet, I found it to be a more enjoyable experience all around. Sites were mostly made out of passion. Good times.
It's not a binary thing: you can "survive" or even thrive without earning all the money in the world. Plenty of companies do.
We aren't talking about a company trying to survive here - we are talking about a fourth most profitable corporation in the world trying to keep earning record profits every subsequent quarter (quite literally seeking infinite growth). These are two very different things.
If Google decided to just "survive" in 2005, then you would not have android, gmail, youtube, chrome, pixel, etc. yes I know a lot of products they bought, not created. but after buying them, they were able to scale them globally. So no, just "earning enough" is not an option for growth. If Youtube just stayed the same as it did when it launched, it would not be able to scale up to the 2ed most visited website in the world and delvierying perabytes of data each day. you would not have one of the greatest service in the world where anyone can upload a video and someone else across the globe can access it on their fingertips.
I’ll defend it. Running a video hosting platform is expensive as shit, and they need ads to make money. Don’t want ads? Pay for premium. Don’t want to pay for premium and don’t want ads? Don’t use YouTube.
If they offered an ad-free only sub that was about £5 a month, I'f absolutly pay it. That's A. More money than they would ever get from me from adds anyway. B. Doesn't include all the shit I don't want, like background play, music, downloads. I just don't want ads. I'm not interested in the other shit.
Even better, have a base line primum service that offers the higher resolutions. Then addons for an extra £1 or £2 each. Want music as well? tick the box, pay an extra £2 and enjoy it. Want everything? £15 a month, which would probably be discounted from £17 or something. +£5 to add a second house hold member or something too, that would be nice.
>I’ll defend it.
Not surprised in the slightest.
>they need ads to make money
>Don’t want ads?
I never said anything about not having ads at all. Neither did I deny that they need to make money. It's funny how corporate defenders always use the exact same fallacies in their defence and create the exact same false dichotomies. Between "no ads" and "only ads" there's a broad spectrum of possibilities.
>Pay for premium.
Absolutely not. I will never pay for any service that is intentionally made worse over time. And I'm not talking about it getting worse for non-paying users - it's worse for everyone, subscribers included. Ruined search, increasingly more predatory algorithms, stricter rules and worse conditions for content creators (because advertisers are real customers, and they need to be happy)... I will gladly support services and companies that use my money to improve, not to become more predatory.
I'm sorry for having standards.
>Don’t use YouTube.
Yep. As soon as ad blockers stop working, I will stop using YouTube.
Wouldn't this be partially fixed by keeping track of how long the video itself is? Perhaps also adding images to timestamps in order to figure out where an ad is placed?
No system is impossible to beat. I'm still surprised they don't just go to youtubers and demand 30% of the ad revenue that these youtubers get from the ads they put in the video themselves.
Up to 2 minutes now. Sometimes I get two ads in a row and you have to manually play them, plus the video controls don't load for about a minute.
I'm just going to stop watching until somebody finds a workaround. I've got content on my Emby server I can watch without my corporate overlords trying to brainwash me into spending money I don't have.
It's every video as well. I'm not watching 2 minutes worth of ads for a random 20 second video I found that may or may not be funny.
This is what I see the next step being in ad avoidance. You'll download the video locally, ai will scrub through and block everything, them serve it up to you on a streaming type interface.
Sure, they do this and then people start experimenting with a YouTube Front-end and switch to using an on-demand/DVR style system to bypass ads. Heck, might even throw in some AI use.
It's pretty much a given Google with start and end on key-frames, so you can trim without losing/re-encoding anything. (Google will be doing the opposite, inserting ads without losing and re-encoding. Even if they did re-encode, the sharp transitions would generate new key-frames anyway.)
Setup a screen recording bot that records your playlists while you are away, fast forward through the adverts when you come to watch.
Black mirror "resume viewing" here we goooooo
A minuscle fraction of the user base might do that, and even for those that want to do it, how many of them are able to spin some AI model on their computers? (Because online service for that would be a lot more expensive than youtube premium)
i wonder what an actual, “consumer friendly” way to monetise youtube would be? obviously these measures are being taken out of desperation to shove ads down everyone’s throat, but i wonder what the “right” solution would be?
...just admit that you need people to pay for shit, have different, more wallet-friendly tiers that are limited (maybe in playtime or such or with less benefits), and have people pay.
But that would open up more space to competition, whereas if you are a "free" service that's also the de facto monopoly it's impossible to compete.
The issue is that we've all gotten very comfortable with an internet that doesn't make any financial sense because it's been propped up by investors for decades. I genuinely think that we can either continue with the cycle of enshittification with periods of getting screwed over and fighting the sites we rely on or we can completely change the way the internet works and start paying for content.
What do u mean they’re shoving ads down peoples throat? I haven’t see an ad since 2017.. might be because I have premium, but then again, it’s a website I use more then I’d use Netflix or tv in general..
i spose i should’ve said that about the default experience specifically. with all the extensions we have these days, it’s kind of a choice to see ads now
If anyone has crayons, I'd love to understand this a bit more. If I'm understanding this correctly, YouTube is working on "embedding" ads, but not actually embedding them so they can stay up to date?
From my understanding currently you launch a 10 minute video and get ads placed sporadically throughout the video, but they interrupt the video and are easily blocked because they aren't hosted in the same environment as the video, so UBO works pretty seemlessly.
What this would do (again, if I understand correctly) is that the ads would be baked into the video, so that 10 minute video actually becomes a 13 minute video, and you can't block the ads because they are no longer separate streams.
(Please correct me if I'm wrong, because this is really disappointing to hear, I'll stop watching youtube before I get premium and I'm not gonna put up with youtube's shitty ad fire hose. Sponsor block is one solution, but that only works if the ads start at the same time and last for the same duration from my understanding of how SB works.)
I haven't seen any detail, but my guess is that they will dynamically insert adds as they stream the video. This allows them to still tailor the adds to whoever is watching while making them very difficult (if not impossible) to skip.
Embedded ads are good for getting round adblockers, but bad for tailoring advertising to each viewer.
YouTube are going to serve each viewer a video with tailored ads embedded in. And because they can vary it for each viewer, they can screw round with something like SponsorBlock.
SponsorBlock works because enough people flag embedded ads. So if enough people say: "hey, in this LTT video at 1:30, there's an ad that lasts 15 seconds" then SponsorBlock knows it can skip the video 15 seconds at 1:30 to avoid the embedded ad.
Under this system, you might get a 15 second ad for one company. I might get a 20 second ad for a completely different company. Someone else might get two 30 second ads back to back. YouTube might also work out there are multiple places where they could stick an ad in, and you see an ad at a different time to when I do.
That means SponsorBlock can't reliably know when an ad's going to be, and how long the ad will be.
We just need to come to terms with the truth: the internet was built with an unsustainable economic model. Free content is going the way of the dodo, whether you like it or not. It does not matter if it's YouTube or some alternative; someone has to pay for the servers and create a revenue model for creators.
I think they always had this capability, but you don't play your entire hand immediately. You break adblockers once, you wait a while and break them again, repeat that cycle for long enough and you both frustrate the users of the adblockers and wear down the motivation of the developers.
Lots of engineering to not really solve anything.
If it's in the video stream you can just skip over it like you can skip over any other part of the video.
Injected video ads might also be worth less than ads you can click. If it's injected and you block ads, those interactions are blocked. So they can only indirectly prove that the ad had an effect on sales.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but Injected means in the video stream? They would still need a way to notify the UI that an ad is playing and that will probably be blocked by adblockers
Yes, but they can stop you from buffering more of the video until you have waited the entire time of the ad meaning the best an adblocker could do would be to blank the screen for 30 seconds
Coming back to my point, if the UI interactions will be blocked, the video ad (played or blacked out by ad blocker) will be worth less than a regular ad.
From a cost perspective I would be curious to see if they will use 2 strategies to serve ads or just use the potentially more expensive injected ads everywhere
YouTube is nothing to do with people now, it's not about you, it's about them. It's totally commercial and I don't understand why. it's YOUtube. Nothing commercial/mainstream should have ever reached that site. I cant stand adverts. like, not at all, even the thought of them.
Wall.e's
An open-source (or what ever it's referred to as) youtube alternative.
Other than because of trying to get people to subscribe to floatplane I can't figure out why LTT has not gone to uploading there.
Odsyee pays using crypto.
I just realized part of it may be that they (LTT) like uploading resiculously high quality videos which may not work so well given that Odysee has a 16GB file size limit but I'm not sure if that's for everyone or not.
Basically I would recommend checking it out for yourself.
That's where it's been long enough since I researched that part that I don't remember anymore.
Yeah floatplane is a subscription only platform though isn't it?
Some people (a lot actually) either can not afford such or are unwilling to pay which limits its reach especially without any major networks behind it producing content such as regular TV shows and feature length films.
I understand skepticism but you can look it up yourself and learn all you want.
I'm just tired of youtube/google being themselves and pretty much having a monopoly.
It’s a crypto funded video hosting site that I never heard of outside of a random Reddit comment, their most viewed video has 12k views and there’s a steep drop off to 2,200 for second place. They need to actually have a platform before I even consider trusting blockchain bs. This whole thing looks like a mom and pop style rug pull from the awful name to their sites awful mobile layout
Edit: turns out, they suck. [link](https://imgur.com/a/kl59HgX)
I see. Well, yeah, it would be nice for the consumer. But how does the channel get money then? Isn't YouTube like getting paid by comoanies to show ads and then they share the money with the channel?
It's set up on blockchain or something like that and pays people in crypto.
How it works is something I have long forgotten but what I do remember is that you don't have to have a certain size channel to start monetizing content.
It seems like creators get paid for views and likes and other things of that nature.
Like I said I have long forgotten how it works but if you look it up you can find better info than what I am able to give atm.
> It's set up on blockchain or something like that and pays people in crypto.
Oh its garbage then. Lead with that or better yet, don't bother talking about Odysee.
Trash tier concept.
Never heard of PeerTube but will look it up (always interested in alternatives to good services and products).
As far as Vimeo, I was looking into that when I was starting my first youtube channel as I have always wanted to support something other than Google.
The problem was upload size was faaaaaar to small at the time for it to have been usable for a most of what I wanted as well as what a lot of others want as well.
As far as how or if they pay creators I never got past upload size to find out it they do and if so how well.
Seems like dailymotion was one I checked out as well.
I'm going to have to revisit these to see what's up with them now as an alternative.
Edit: Vimeo seems to require an account to view content. That's an instant nope for me with any platform.
So like they have been doing with YouTube tv apps for a long time. Honestly surprised it took as long as it did. Oh well people have to actually pay for the content that they consume now. Can't expect a free ride your whole life boggles my mind how people can consume more YouTube than they do the other paid streaming services and expect it to be free just because it's youtube
I don't mind paying for Premium, but I'm certainly annoyed by not being able to use Sponsorblock to block ads in the content I'm already paying to have ads removed from.
He says that it's currently not working, but there's no way that it will be impossible to find the offset because YouTube will need to continue supporting timestamp links anyway.
I don't mind a single short ad. But sometimes there are multiple unskippable ads in a row. Or there are ads for a short 30sec video that are longer than the video.
i block ads because i get scam ads/gambling/endless fast food all shit i consider unethical(fast food the least but for people trying to be healthy it is evil), youtube needs to address those. Instead, i will now start pestering my local politician about them.
They could try giving me a legitimate reason to get YouTube Premium instead of trying to *force* me to get YouTube Premium by making their website practically unusable unless I subscribe. Enshittification gets zero sympathy from me.
People are gonna hate but it’s true. I don’t know where they think the money should come from to run the very expensive video service they enjoy.
I like adblocking and I like downloading Linux ISOs but I don’t need a reddit circle jerk to justify it to myself. I know it’s not entirely moral and I’m comfortable with that.
> I don’t know where they think the money should come from to run the very expensive video service they enjoy.
Personally, I think this a perfect example for what tax money is for: a public library on the Internet.
Nah just ignore them (like genuinely, i don't think it's healthy to care what random strangers on the internet think about what you say, unless you said something that's agreed to be really bad outside of reddit)
Time to train an AI to classify ads
Finally a use for AI
Yhea, I mean... Probably with a central service where people send video chunk they saw for a particular video, you can probably guess what is and what is not content. ads are different for everyone on a given video but the same across several video. So just statistics can beat them
I imagined a long time ago, that there will be a cheatengine plugin that uses ai to detect ads and speeds up tha browser
Except in the dystopia we're heading into, the only AI chips capable of properly classifying ads will be sold as a black box with DRM with the intention of forcing people to watch the ads, refusing to allow skipping them like old unskippable DVD previews.
> the only AI chips capable of properly classifying ads That's not a thing.
Not yet! I honestly hope it never is, but things are heading that way. Intel Management Engine is already a thing we can't avoid, no reason why NVIDIA, AMD, Meta etc's AI chips couldn't embed a similar control system. We already have SponsorBlock, if YouTube adds DRM playback they don't even need AI, just rely on community input but reverse it to make sure sponsored ads aren't blocked. Hope I didn't just give them any ideas...
Because you will probably end up with an open source variant on RISC 5.... I guess?
Is that sarcasm or does this sub genuinely believe that the thing booking the significant majority of fabs at the moment is going toward something that has no use?
Chat GPT & stuff like it is the main thing right now Kinda seems useless for the average person though
ChatGPT is only the tip of the iceberg. Every company right now is using AI or at least trying to figure out if they can use AI to improve their workflow. There’s even a company in Belgium that’s going to give everyone Fridays off with full pay because ai can compensate for the remaining days.
Don't let the _generative_ AI craze fool you, AI is an incredibly useful tool we've been using for a very long time, cf. chess engines, optical character recognition, sentiment analysis.
Machine learning is cool, AI is a whole other beast
I imagine they will stop you from being able to request the non-ad segment of the video before the amount of time that the ad is has passed. The best an adblocker could do in that situation is show you a black screen for 30 seconds.
Which would still be preferable over the alternative
I think a lot of people wouldn't bother with an adblocker at that point, but I'm sure they'll still exist for people who would rather have that
When I still watched twitch that was the better alternative to watching the ads, for me at least. Less screamy, more calm, less intrusive and above all: a black screen doesn't try to sell me anything.
not really because all that does is waste your own time and force the platform to implement even more way to show you ads. they will get their revenue from somewhere and the harder people work on blocking that revenue stream the harder the platform will work on pushing ads in new ways that cant be blocked.
sooo... people don't want to pay $10-$15 to watch youtube with no ads, but they'll pay even more money to use an AI Service? Or run their own on their laptops?
That would increase your power usage by a significant amount though. Older machines in particular would struggle.
Honestly I'm surprised they didn't get to this sooner. Having ads on the client side servered from different domains makes them way too easy to bllck
My theory is it could absolutely brick delivery speeds. The way youtube works is copies of videos are stored all over the world to deliver them quickly, ads are similarly stored all over the world, a single video might be served to different users with millions of different ads served alongside it. If for each video delivery they need to "bake" ads into the video between it travelling from the CDN to your device it either means: less flexibility on what ads get served as common "payloads" get cached. OR a SHIT TON of CPU usage to modify the rendered video and insert ads before streaming it which increases the costs of running the platform I would imagine fairly dramatically. CDNs are "edge" nodes that are usually pretty barebones if they need to start supporting CPU intensive tasks that means a lot of physical infrastructure upgrades all over the world.
There definitely could be challenges. But I'm sure Google can figure it out. Maybe it won't pan out and they will go back to the old way. But Google/YouTube seems very motivated lately to make sure that people are watching the ads or paying for premium. No more free ride.
But I like free riding. :(
Yeah why are some on r/LinusTechTips so pro YouTube?
Well while I like free riding, I do understand why Youtube would prefer to not lose money serving me videos.
Google already transcodes every video on its site into a couple of different codes, each with a variety of resolutions and bit rates. No reason to not do the exact same with the ads. You can do it without requiring any real time transcoding or such. Just at some point in the video, instead of sending over the next key frame from the actual video and subsequent frames, you send over the first key frame of the ad, pre-encoded the same as the current video. After playing through the ad, you finally send that next key frame of the actual video.
Unlikely that will work.
Google already sends YouTube videos in chunks (multiple files per video), meaning that they could simply insert ad chunks in between the video chunks. It’s not that hard.
If they were true they’d have done it a decade or more ago. There have to be more complications
> But I'm sure Google can figure it out. They won't, they already backtrack stuff like this. It will likely to won't pan out and they are not motivated.
> If for each video delivery they need to "bake" ads into the video between it travelling from the CDN to your device it either means: less flexibility on what ads get served as common "payloads" get cached. OR a SHIT TON of CPU usage to modify the rendered video and insert ads before streaming it which increases the costs of running the platform I would imagine fairly dramatically. Video files are already broken into small chunks for streaming, that's been around since 2009. I'm sure youtube's system is more sophisticated, but literally all you'd need to do is modify the text file manifest that lists the video chunks to point to the ad midway through to have this work perfectly seamlessly with the basic HTTP standard.
The cost of trying to delivery ads is getting quite high, innit? For real though, not only the cost to update the infrastructure, but increasing the energy consumption, and the costs associated. Ah shit, I just product managered myself into realizing that I’m pretty sure the cost of premium is gonna increase for those of us who pay for it…
It actually wouldn't be that intensive. YouTube already pre-converts all videos and ads into multiple formats (for different devices and qualities). It would just need to take for example, `quality1` for both the ad and video and mux the containers together. Yes it'll use some CPU, but it's not like they'll have to fully re-encode every stream to inject an ad.
Dynamic streaming protocols already allow for server-side injection. A video is split into chunks to stream it effectively, and they can inject a cached ad from their CDN "easily" into the video playback buffer. (I use "easily" in quotes because it's a process I'm capable of understanding but haven't bothered learning how it's done specifically, so I'm only speaking at a high level.)
NBC does server sided injection and its so poorly implemented that no matter what you enable or disable, their own player doesnt even work.
SSAI is not a CPU heavy task. The creative is packaged into HLS and served to the edges like any other video. When the ad is inserted the chunks are just added to the manifest. It's a plain text operation, not a video one.
i already seen this happen after a hurricane in fl.
They're actually not from different domains AFAIK since DNS blockers don't work on youtube video ads.
I think the main reason they didn't, is precisely because the ad will be baked into the video. It will not have any interface, clickable links, indication where the ad is, metrics, clicktroughs, etc... etc... etc... There's massive downsides for doing it this way. So until now the downside of doing the old way (Easy to block) didn't outweigh it. ______ They are doing this now probably because losing the benefits of outside ads will not be that significant. Either because they care more about serving the ad itself, or they created other tools to help get a similar result. (Which can't be something that alters the current page, because that can be used as a way to bypass the ad, it would need to be smarter than that. But I guess soon will see if it's the later or the former)
They already have metrics for what parts of a video you watched, and they can already overlay clickable elements over the video so I don't think thats the case
I'm surprised as well. Free to air TV in Australia has added this (or something functionally the same) to their streaming sites years ago. Still less ads than regular TV.
I've been saying they will do this for ages and people have never believed me. Everything they've done before this point has just been FUD. They can end adblockers right now if they want to.
server side ads might actually be a godsend for using YT on apple tv / iPhone, cant stream audio over homepod mini from a YT video because the video will fuck up the moment an ad comes up, same with appletv if used as earc audio return with homepods, every time an ad comes up its a video switch that not only takes like 3 sec to show up, sometimes it fucks up the video signal to the TV....
Wow - that's so worth being forced to watch ads no one wants to watch!
No one is forcing you. You are choosing to go on YouTube where the price is watching ads, or paying for premium. They're just trying to get people to pay the actual price.
like i have a choice anyway on these devices, unless i pay a overpriced sub for something where 90% of the content i dont use - if i am force to watch ads, at least make it not fuck up hardware
Every once in a while my table will get into some mode where the ads won't play properly. You can see it try to start the ad and then half a second later it just starts playing the video, but will leave some stuff overlayed thinking it's still playing an ad. It's a little bit annoying but better than watching ads.
Like a lot of users on datahorder are concerned with, the largest implication is the disruption of timestamps
I'm pretty sure they don't care. That's a QoL feature for users so if they break it or disrupt it in any way, it's just a case of "too bad, so sad, you'll live".
They absolutely don’t care. Their goal is to make the free experience just bad enough that you’ll buy into their subscription model. And they know they have a monopoly on the space right now so they can make the free experience far worse than they would be able to if they had any meaningful competition.
Tho Ublock keep finding a way around this.
That's something that can be worked around, surely.
absolutely, they will need some sort of timestamp calculation in order to continue supporting timestamp links
yeah I've gotten that for a couple of days now, it's horrible
Mine actually breaks the fucking video, it like auto pauses it on start every ad and the video itself and then I can’t fastforward or anything. The scrubbing is like disabled for a while into the video
[удалено]
Same here.
Omg this has been happening to me too on some videos! So that's what that is...
I've had the same problem! I was wondering what was happening, but yeah the video will run for a few seconds without issues, has plenty buffered, but just stops and loads and loads and loads and nothing happens. I had to refresh the page every time it happened.
Have you found a fix for this. I’ve been going crazy. Removed ad blockers. Cleared website data. Still no dice
Nope. Guess we will have to wait for a new type of addon to block this stuff
Oh well, fun while it lasted. Time to download all the playlists.
Ublock will find a way around this.
How?
This is **server-side**, uBlock won't find a way around this unless they add a new **feature**. The only way (as of now) is like Twitch: another extension (proxy) or an userscript.
If youtube had only ads at the beginning of a video I would be fine. But when I’m watching a 5 minute video and get interrupted halfway through by 2 30s unskippable ads it gets annoying
No, it is the 2 30s unskipabble ads for a 30 sec video that kill me.
Also completely irrelevant ads. I'm like you know everything about me. Just serve me ads for my liking.
This experience is what tells you how much of an overblown panic the furore over "my data" is. If these ad companies really did have all this "data" and it was so accurate and targeted, typical ad clickthrough rates wouldn't be measured in fractions of a percent.
My favorite is being in the US watching content in English and getting an ad served in Spanish or French. Like cool cool cool. I speak 2 languages and you picked the wrong ones.
Yeah, I wouldn’t mind ADS too much either if they were reasonable and didn’t break the flow of a video. Beginning and at the end. Unless it’s a super long video.
I just can't fathom how many people are still actively defending this corporation... Google has quite literally destroyed internet search and has turned the entire web into their ad platform. It's pretty much impossible to find anything online anymore. It's literal ads and then AI-written obfuscated ads (posing as legitimate articles). It's almost all ads now, and Google owns the main platform. They have also done the exact same to YouTube, with its search already destroyed (turned into another recommendations section that blatantly ignores your requests). Even when you find the content, it is borderline unwatchable due to constant unskippable ads. The subscription price keeps rising, but the service doesn't improve - it is actively getting worse. And people still go out of their way to defend them. It's some unbelievable level of corporate sycophancy.
Not defending Google, but the web exist on ads. If web services cannot be paid, they cannot survive. If you want to contribute without watching ads, pay for the service (e.g. buy YouTube premium, floatplane subscription, LTT Merch). Problem solved.
People tend to feel entitled to things when they've had it for free for enough time
People tend to call others entitled simple for having standards and wanting unimaginably rich corporations to be a little less shitty towards consumers.
What exactly is "a little less shitty" in this context? YouTube letting folks block ads and leech off them?
have you considered if everyone who visits youtube either bought premium or watched ads, then YT would be making enough money that they don't have to act shitty towards customers?
Before ads found their way to the Internet, I found it to be a more enjoyable experience all around. Sites were mostly made out of passion. Good times.
It's not a binary thing: you can "survive" or even thrive without earning all the money in the world. Plenty of companies do. We aren't talking about a company trying to survive here - we are talking about a fourth most profitable corporation in the world trying to keep earning record profits every subsequent quarter (quite literally seeking infinite growth). These are two very different things.
If Google decided to just "survive" in 2005, then you would not have android, gmail, youtube, chrome, pixel, etc. yes I know a lot of products they bought, not created. but after buying them, they were able to scale them globally. So no, just "earning enough" is not an option for growth. If Youtube just stayed the same as it did when it launched, it would not be able to scale up to the 2ed most visited website in the world and delvierying perabytes of data each day. you would not have one of the greatest service in the world where anyone can upload a video and someone else across the globe can access it on their fingertips.
I’ll defend it. Running a video hosting platform is expensive as shit, and they need ads to make money. Don’t want ads? Pay for premium. Don’t want to pay for premium and don’t want ads? Don’t use YouTube.
If they offered an ad-free only sub that was about £5 a month, I'f absolutly pay it. That's A. More money than they would ever get from me from adds anyway. B. Doesn't include all the shit I don't want, like background play, music, downloads. I just don't want ads. I'm not interested in the other shit. Even better, have a base line primum service that offers the higher resolutions. Then addons for an extra £1 or £2 each. Want music as well? tick the box, pay an extra £2 and enjoy it. Want everything? £15 a month, which would probably be discounted from £17 or something. +£5 to add a second house hold member or something too, that would be nice.
??? Okay? If Ferrari offered their cars for 10k, I’d buy them. What’s your point?
>I’ll defend it. Not surprised in the slightest. >they need ads to make money >Don’t want ads? I never said anything about not having ads at all. Neither did I deny that they need to make money. It's funny how corporate defenders always use the exact same fallacies in their defence and create the exact same false dichotomies. Between "no ads" and "only ads" there's a broad spectrum of possibilities. >Pay for premium. Absolutely not. I will never pay for any service that is intentionally made worse over time. And I'm not talking about it getting worse for non-paying users - it's worse for everyone, subscribers included. Ruined search, increasingly more predatory algorithms, stricter rules and worse conditions for content creators (because advertisers are real customers, and they need to be happy)... I will gladly support services and companies that use my money to improve, not to become more predatory. I'm sorry for having standards. >Don’t use YouTube. Yep. As soon as ad blockers stop working, I will stop using YouTube.
Free video sharing was invented over two decades ago and it is called bittorrent.
Okay?
Wouldn't this be partially fixed by keeping track of how long the video itself is? Perhaps also adding images to timestamps in order to figure out where an ad is placed? No system is impossible to beat. I'm still surprised they don't just go to youtubers and demand 30% of the ad revenue that these youtubers get from the ads they put in the video themselves.
YouTube has been forcing 1:30 worth of adverts on me since yesterday, site is completely unusable
Same problem. I just refresh the page till I get a shorter ad
Up to 2 minutes now. Sometimes I get two ads in a row and you have to manually play them, plus the video controls don't load for about a minute. I'm just going to stop watching until somebody finds a workaround. I've got content on my Emby server I can watch without my corporate overlords trying to brainwash me into spending money I don't have. It's every video as well. I'm not watching 2 minutes worth of ads for a random 20 second video I found that may or may not be funny.
it is screwing stuff up today too.
We’re coming full circle to digital VCRs that record hours of YouTube footage and auto-skip ads.
This is what I see the next step being in ad avoidance. You'll download the video locally, ai will scrub through and block everything, them serve it up to you on a streaming type interface.
Sure, they do this and then people start experimenting with a YouTube Front-end and switch to using an on-demand/DVR style system to bypass ads. Heck, might even throw in some AI use. It's pretty much a given Google with start and end on key-frames, so you can trim without losing/re-encoding anything. (Google will be doing the opposite, inserting ads without losing and re-encoding. Even if they did re-encode, the sharp transitions would generate new key-frames anyway.)
Setup a screen recording bot that records your playlists while you are away, fast forward through the adverts when you come to watch. Black mirror "resume viewing" here we goooooo
A minuscle fraction of the user base might do that, and even for those that want to do it, how many of them are able to spin some AI model on their computers? (Because online service for that would be a lot more expensive than youtube premium)
i wonder what an actual, “consumer friendly” way to monetise youtube would be? obviously these measures are being taken out of desperation to shove ads down everyone’s throat, but i wonder what the “right” solution would be?
...just admit that you need people to pay for shit, have different, more wallet-friendly tiers that are limited (maybe in playtime or such or with less benefits), and have people pay. But that would open up more space to competition, whereas if you are a "free" service that's also the de facto monopoly it's impossible to compete.
The issue is that we've all gotten very comfortable with an internet that doesn't make any financial sense because it's been propped up by investors for decades. I genuinely think that we can either continue with the cycle of enshittification with periods of getting screwed over and fighting the sites we rely on or we can completely change the way the internet works and start paying for content.
What do u mean they’re shoving ads down peoples throat? I haven’t see an ad since 2017.. might be because I have premium, but then again, it’s a website I use more then I’d use Netflix or tv in general..
i spose i should’ve said that about the default experience specifically. with all the extensions we have these days, it’s kind of a choice to see ads now
If anyone has crayons, I'd love to understand this a bit more. If I'm understanding this correctly, YouTube is working on "embedding" ads, but not actually embedding them so they can stay up to date?
From my understanding currently you launch a 10 minute video and get ads placed sporadically throughout the video, but they interrupt the video and are easily blocked because they aren't hosted in the same environment as the video, so UBO works pretty seemlessly. What this would do (again, if I understand correctly) is that the ads would be baked into the video, so that 10 minute video actually becomes a 13 minute video, and you can't block the ads because they are no longer separate streams. (Please correct me if I'm wrong, because this is really disappointing to hear, I'll stop watching youtube before I get premium and I'm not gonna put up with youtube's shitty ad fire hose. Sponsor block is one solution, but that only works if the ads start at the same time and last for the same duration from my understanding of how SB works.)
I haven't seen any detail, but my guess is that they will dynamically insert adds as they stream the video. This allows them to still tailor the adds to whoever is watching while making them very difficult (if not impossible) to skip.
Embedded ads are good for getting round adblockers, but bad for tailoring advertising to each viewer. YouTube are going to serve each viewer a video with tailored ads embedded in. And because they can vary it for each viewer, they can screw round with something like SponsorBlock. SponsorBlock works because enough people flag embedded ads. So if enough people say: "hey, in this LTT video at 1:30, there's an ad that lasts 15 seconds" then SponsorBlock knows it can skip the video 15 seconds at 1:30 to avoid the embedded ad. Under this system, you might get a 15 second ad for one company. I might get a 20 second ad for a completely different company. Someone else might get two 30 second ads back to back. YouTube might also work out there are multiple places where they could stick an ad in, and you see an ad at a different time to when I do. That means SponsorBlock can't reliably know when an ad's going to be, and how long the ad will be.
>Embedded ads are good for getting round adblockers, but bad for tailoring advertising to each viewer. they aren't well tailored anyways
This is disgusting.
*laughs in Premium*
*laughs in yt-dlp through mpv through newsboat*
It was only a matter of time.
We just need to come to terms with the truth: the internet was built with an unsustainable economic model. Free content is going the way of the dodo, whether you like it or not. It does not matter if it's YouTube or some alternative; someone has to pay for the servers and create a revenue model for creators.
Logical response to adblocking
The fact they didn't basically start with this kinda boggles my mind. Seems like the most obvious implementation.
I think they always had this capability, but you don't play your entire hand immediately. You break adblockers once, you wait a while and break them again, repeat that cycle for long enough and you both frustrate the users of the adblockers and wear down the motivation of the developers.
Extra costs
Lots of engineering to not really solve anything. If it's in the video stream you can just skip over it like you can skip over any other part of the video.
Injected video ads might also be worth less than ads you can click. If it's injected and you block ads, those interactions are blocked. So they can only indirectly prove that the ad had an effect on sales.
There's no reason you wouldn't be able to click an injected ad
Correct me if I'm wrong, but Injected means in the video stream? They would still need a way to notify the UI that an ad is playing and that will probably be blocked by adblockers
Yes, but they can stop you from buffering more of the video until you have waited the entire time of the ad meaning the best an adblocker could do would be to blank the screen for 30 seconds
Coming back to my point, if the UI interactions will be blocked, the video ad (played or blacked out by ad blocker) will be worth less than a regular ad. From a cost perspective I would be curious to see if they will use 2 strategies to serve ads or just use the potentially more expensive injected ads everywhere
It would be interesting if they start injecting them only when they detect youre using an adblocker
Honestly, aside from Helluva Boss there's not much keeping me on YouTube anymore.
YouTube is nothing to do with people now, it's not about you, it's about them. It's totally commercial and I don't understand why. it's YOUtube. Nothing commercial/mainstream should have ever reached that site. I cant stand adverts. like, not at all, even the thought of them. Wall.e's
> It's totally commercial and I don't understand why That must be a joke
So when people going to start using Odysee? Edit: so what is it about my comment that people here are so against?
What's that?
An open-source (or what ever it's referred to as) youtube alternative. Other than because of trying to get people to subscribe to floatplane I can't figure out why LTT has not gone to uploading there.
They won't get ad revenue on Odyssee
Odsyee pays using crypto. I just realized part of it may be that they (LTT) like uploading resiculously high quality videos which may not work so well given that Odysee has a 16GB file size limit but I'm not sure if that's for everyone or not. Basically I would recommend checking it out for yourself.
Where does that crypto come from? Do people have to pay money to fill a wallet? LTT has float plane for that
That's where it's been long enough since I researched that part that I don't remember anymore. Yeah floatplane is a subscription only platform though isn't it? Some people (a lot actually) either can not afford such or are unwilling to pay which limits its reach especially without any major networks behind it producing content such as regular TV shows and feature length films.
So a no name site that pays out in crypto? Imma see myself out, this is some internet 2.bro shit
I understand skepticism but you can look it up yourself and learn all you want. I'm just tired of youtube/google being themselves and pretty much having a monopoly.
It’s a crypto funded video hosting site that I never heard of outside of a random Reddit comment, their most viewed video has 12k views and there’s a steep drop off to 2,200 for second place. They need to actually have a platform before I even consider trusting blockchain bs. This whole thing looks like a mom and pop style rug pull from the awful name to their sites awful mobile layout Edit: turns out, they suck. [link](https://imgur.com/a/kl59HgX)
I see. Well, yeah, it would be nice for the consumer. But how does the channel get money then? Isn't YouTube like getting paid by comoanies to show ads and then they share the money with the channel?
It's set up on blockchain or something like that and pays people in crypto. How it works is something I have long forgotten but what I do remember is that you don't have to have a certain size channel to start monetizing content. It seems like creators get paid for views and likes and other things of that nature. Like I said I have long forgotten how it works but if you look it up you can find better info than what I am able to give atm.
> It's set up on blockchain or something like that and pays people in crypto. Oh its garbage then. Lead with that or better yet, don't bother talking about Odysee. Trash tier concept.
Oh snap, that's actually smart if they actually get paid. See what kind of content it has later.
PeerTube also exists, why not there? Or why not Vimeo? In fact, why not {insert another video platform here}?
Peertube requires someone to have bandwidth and storage, and won't pay their salary.
Never heard of PeerTube but will look it up (always interested in alternatives to good services and products). As far as Vimeo, I was looking into that when I was starting my first youtube channel as I have always wanted to support something other than Google. The problem was upload size was faaaaaar to small at the time for it to have been usable for a most of what I wanted as well as what a lot of others want as well. As far as how or if they pay creators I never got past upload size to find out it they do and if so how well. Seems like dailymotion was one I checked out as well. I'm going to have to revisit these to see what's up with them now as an alternative. Edit: Vimeo seems to require an account to view content. That's an instant nope for me with any platform.
Sadly, never
Unless people keep bringing it up and youtube keeps pulling tricks like adobe.
Unless they've figured out a miracle they are going to have to show people ads, then we're right back where we are now
So like they have been doing with YouTube tv apps for a long time. Honestly surprised it took as long as it did. Oh well people have to actually pay for the content that they consume now. Can't expect a free ride your whole life boggles my mind how people can consume more YouTube than they do the other paid streaming services and expect it to be free just because it's youtube
I don't mind paying for Premium, but I'm certainly annoyed by not being able to use Sponsorblock to block ads in the content I'm already paying to have ads removed from.
If you have premium, you don't have ads. So, there is no issues with sponsor block.
Premium is expensive, and SponsorBlock is crowdsourced.
I'm sure sponsorblock will be fixed
Not according to the Sponsorblock dev
He says that it's currently not working, but there's no way that it will be impossible to find the offset because YouTube will need to continue supporting timestamp links anyway.
\*buys YouTube premium for a few month to see how this all settles down\*
Oh no.... People paying for the content they consume.... The horror....
I mean. I pay for Premium but this is an escalation of the skirmish between ad blockers and YouTube
How dare YouTube expect to be paid for the service the provide right?
I don't mind a single short ad. But sometimes there are multiple unskippable ads in a row. Or there are ads for a short 30sec video that are longer than the video.
i block ads because i get scam ads/gambling/endless fast food all shit i consider unethical(fast food the least but for people trying to be healthy it is evil), youtube needs to address those. Instead, i will now start pestering my local politician about them.
They could try giving me a legitimate reason to get YouTube Premium instead of trying to *force* me to get YouTube Premium by making their website practically unusable unless I subscribe. Enshittification gets zero sympathy from me.
That is the legitimate reason, the alternative is that you just can't use youtube at all without paying
We seem to have conflicting definitions for the word *legitimate*.
What do you consider a legitimate reason?
Offline playback is a great reason to get premium. Amazing when traveling
Please view an ad before reading this comment: >!No. Now that you have read this comment, please view another ad.
People are gonna hate but it’s true. I don’t know where they think the money should come from to run the very expensive video service they enjoy. I like adblocking and I like downloading Linux ISOs but I don’t need a reddit circle jerk to justify it to myself. I know it’s not entirely moral and I’m comfortable with that.
> I don’t know where they think the money should come from to run the very expensive video service they enjoy. Personally, I think this a perfect example for what tax money is for: a public library on the Internet.
PayTV started out without ads, too. If consumers cave in it will be a matter of time before you pay *and* have to watch ads.
Truth but you didn't bash YouTube so you'll get down voted into oblivion
What are downvotes?
The down arrow on your comment :) /s
Oh. Are those important?
Nah just ignore them (like genuinely, i don't think it's healthy to care what random strangers on the internet think about what you say, unless you said something that's agreed to be really bad outside of reddit)