YouTube is currently experimenting with server-side ad injection. This means that the ad is being added directly into the video stream.
This breaks sponsorblock since now all timestamps are offset by the ad times.
For now, I set up the server to detect when someone is submitting from a browser with this happening and rejecting the submission to prevent the database from getting filled with incorrect submissions.
Jesus fucking christ YouTube really hates users
I miss the times when ads were just annoying gifs on the left or right side of a web page. Then they evolved, abusing javascript, to become pop ups that hid the URL bar and opened 3 dozen different pop ups while you didn’t close the mother popup. Then they started clickjacking: that close ad button? Just opens another ad. Ad infinitum.
Now, effectively editing the video to add an ad somewhere instead of serving it as a side file. The advertising industry as a whole feels like the absolute worst villains at a personal level, because they want to target you individually.
Google ads were originally a panacea for really bad popups of the early 2000s. Google had a strict list of dos and don’ts, and ad revenues were high enough that most websites only ran one or two.
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Wouldn’t this also completely break ad blockers?
Nah, it would just circumvent them.
Wow that’s very annoying. What does this mean for the future of adblocking?
Sponsorblock “just” needs to transition from timestamps to timestamps + image hash. Not easy, but not impossible.
It’ll be difficult for a while until someone figures it out and then it’ll be easy again. It’s just an arms race.
it would require government intervention. Where a regulation must declare that ads must clearly be labelled as ads, so that adjustments can be made by detecting when is the ad segment happening.
Sometime before the end of this decade I think we’re going to see the opposite - regulation that makes blocking ads illegal in the same way the DMCA makes cracking copyright protection illegal. They’ll package it with some kind of anti-CP thing and then call all the people who oppose the bill pedos.
The Ol’ Reliable.
If I recall correctly ads in the United states need to be labelled ads and is the reason #ad exists on Instagram
This one might be harder, if YT just sends the ad like it was part of the video file, generating it on the fly, it’s a lot harder to detect, and probably not too hard for them to do, but breaking timestamps is pretty bad for some types of videos, like tutorials.
I think the larger content creators will push back against this, precisely due to the timestamp issue.
The last time Google pulled out all the stops to fight ad blockers, I had to update uBlock Origin every now and then until the whole thing passed. That’s all.
So I’m not worried. But I am amused that they keep making ads more obnoxious, which pushes more people to use ad blockers. I didn’t even use sponsorblock until a particularly egregious bit of native advertising. They could probably gain ground by just making ads less irritating, but they absolutely will not.
Capitalism is in the end, fighting for monopoly. They rather lose money in foreseeable future, and probably ever, than allow adblockers do their thing for small user-base. Because they want max. control. I can only assume companies that do not go to arms race with their consumers are thee ones that aren’t public traded companies.
It might even be simpler than that. Capitalism just doesn’t care past the next quarter. And when ownership is disconnected from labor or even from customer, than it’s just a really rudimentary collective intelligence. The shareholders just want the line to go up, and everyone in the corporate structure is accountable to the shareholders, so they all do their part, big or little, to make that happen. It completely dispenses with personal responsibility, whether for negative externalities, direct harm, or even the future as close as months from now.
Advertising is poison.
We could just ban it.
People will say, “but then how could a website like YouTube exit at all?”
To which I say that we should retvrn to sharing funny videos via long email chains.
See Flash websites ripping each other off for five years on either side of Youtube’s introduction.
See Bittorrent moving more video than Netflix until like 2012.
See twenty years of web-based P2P experiments. Weirdos with fat hard drives (hi) will always be happy to seed.
Or - crazy thought - services could cost money. It would not take much. Youtube’s not getting ten bucks each time you watch a video. Bandwidth and storage keep getting cheaper. Nor are they paying for content, unlike Netflix and so on, and those fuckers are also considering ads.
I’ve got no problem paying money for a service that’s worth it. I still buy games on Steam even though I know how to pirate them because Valve’s service is so goddamn convenient it beats piracy in many ways.
Netflix used to be that good, and when YouTube Red rolled out I bought a year of it. But things have deteriorated significantly since then and the price has only gone up.
But think of all the people that would die because they didn’t forward those emails to 10 people they knew…
Is this why I’ve been getting constant buffering at the start of videos?
Do you use Firefox?
because Google intentionally nerfs loading performance on any non-Chrome browsers.I usually find if startup buffering takes more than 2-3 seconds on my home Internet, just refreshing the page magically makes it go away.
Yeah Firefox + Ublock Origin. It buffers for me indefinitely and the only way to fix it is to skip ahead 10 or so seconds. If I then go back 10 seconds it starts buffering again.
I wonder how that will interoperate with timestamps provided by users in comments or by the video creator themselves. Maybe those can be used to detect inserted ads.
The server must have to send some metadata to the client telling when it’s running an ad because there are other things that need to happen client side during that like adjusting of the time or making the ad clickable
I have actually been seeing some timestamps that are completely wrong lately, maybe this is why.
I’m kinda surprised they haven’t done this already. Twitch has been doing this for a while now, and the only reliable way around it is to use a proxy in a country that Twitch doesn’t run ads in.
I think Twitch has gone to shit lately, because of their decisions, but I don’t know the numbers. Do you have any info about this?
Oh, it’s been pretty crap for a while now. I constantly see viewers complain about
AIDSads and even content creators feel poorly about them.Looking at https://twitchtracker.com/statistics shows a relatively flat viewership base. Since January, they’ve seen a decrease of close to 15% viewers and concurrent channels. It appears that they had a large increase in viewers and channels in 2020, probably due to Covid, and since then they have been in decline.
Thanks Limewire, even though you used to put virus on my computer.
Yeah it sucks, ublock can’t block twitch ads.
Video length is incredibly important to The Algorithm and a LOT of content creators time their videos to the second. Taking away control of that (even if the end result ins the exact same length) is going to ruffle a lot of feathers and lead to a lot of people who want to “be a champion for the viewers who should like, comment, and subscribe and use my referral code for war thunder” as a result.
Surely The Algorithm will not know of the ads inserted, so that won’t influence the results.
Never underestimate the ability of a small change to completely break a system
If they are part of the video you cant just skip them like any other part of the video, right?
That’s what SponsorBlock already does. It however doesn’t detect the sponsor but instead it jumps over a part of the video marked with timestamp but with different people seeing different lenght ads, these timestamps no-longer match.
Different users would see unique ads. So your ad could be 12 seconds long while my ad is 30 seconds long. A timestamp based skip would no longer work universally.
Genuinely I’d be fine if someone made a thing that when an ad started a black overlay would go up and the spund would be muted.
At least it should still work with the hard coded sponsor spots that are actually part of the videos (like the “brought to you by Manscaped” or whatever).
Only if the ads are a fixed length and always in the same place for each playback of the same video.
Inserting ads of various lengths in varying places throughout the video will alter all the time stamps for every playback.
The 5th minute of the video might happen 5min after starting playback, or it could be 5min+a 2min ad break after starting. This could change from playback to playback; so basing ad/sponsor blocking on timestamps becomes entirely useless.
I think make ad run faster can circumvent this. wdyt? https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/video-speed-controller/nffaoalbilbmmfgbnbgppjihopabppdk?hl=e https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/nffaoalbilbmmfgbnbgppjihopabppdk?hl=en
How would it detect that the currently playing section was an ad then?
The state of whether it’s an ad has to be somewhere clientside as the ads can’t be skipped by the user.
I wonder if this is where AI might be useful where it’s used to filter out all of the megacorp ads, popups, and other random garbage?
- train LLMs on megacorp content and use it to filter out results
- sponsorblock adds this as a toggleable option just like the “skip segment” UI video overlay button
Sounds wasteful, detection of ads could be detected with regular software, no?
Even when you don’t know the language, you can judge if something is an ad just by an overly excited tone of voice. I wonder if someone has tried writing an ad detection algorithm already. It would still be a lot heavier on resources than SponsorBlock.
Often times that’s the case but some ads also use other tones. Trying to make a super emotional and sad story or something.
How?
By the way, yes, it is.
imagine using Gemini for this, would be peak irony.
Using AI to fuck the megacorps would be amazing. Using their own tools against them.
That would be cool.
I guess my AMD Bulldozer TV PC is gonna have to go in the ewaste bin though. Its already stretched to its limit running Linux Mint, Firefox, uBlock Origin and Sponsorblock as it is
They should still have to indicate that it’s an ad, the problem is that they’ll probably block you from seeking past an ad
- train LLMs on megacorp content and use it to filter out results
Yo OP, this isn’t piracy related
Where else would you post this?
A Boring Dystopia, or the Firefox or Technology communities (any)
Pirated content don’t have ads though.
