YouTube has been spotted testing server-side ads, which could pose a problem to ad blockers.
I would settle for something that simply turns the screen black and turns audio off whenever ads play. I don’t care if YouTube gets paid for it, I just want to decrease the value of ads and prevent myself from seeing them.
I don’t care if YouTube gets paid for it
Legally, YouTube have to detect if ads were blocked and and mark the impression as non-billable. They can’t charge advertisers for blocked ads.
They can only tell that something is blocked because the ad wasn’t loaded from a server. If it’s not loaded, then they can’t count it as “viewed.”
If the ad is just blacked over, it is still loaded, and they wouldn’t know.
Well they also infest the client side since they likely developed the main part of your web browser, so they can still know there’s a black cover in the DOM.
If the ad is just blacked over, it is still loaded, and they wouldn’t know.
If it became a common thing, they’d have to add detection for it. Not necessarily to stop people doing it, but to ensure advertisers aren’t charged for invalid impressions. Practically every major ad network has adblocking detection; they just don’t always make it obvious (e.g. they might silently log it).
If they were effectively able to detect it they would be able to block you watching the rest of the video.
I already put my phone down on my desk and turn the audio down whenever an ad pops up, they can’t tell it isn’t being viewed.
Have a sneaking suspicion that google is doing the classic spend 100 dollars to save 1 cent type scenario, cause all the money they’ve dumped into this anti-adblock shit? theres no way its less than what they’ve not made from adblockers.
Especially when all this money could have been spent on improving their ad service so people don’t have to view 2 hour ads, or malware laden bullshit, or just blatant pornographic advertising.
but why spend money moderating their own service, when they can spend 10x the money trying to force their open septic tank of a service on everyone.
If only there were hundreds of other sites on the Internet that stream video. If porn sites can make it work, anyone can make it work.
This is where AI would come in handy. Start scrubbing the buffer as it’s coming in to identify the difference and jump past it.
It becomes an AI war. They will use AI to make ads to get around the AI blocking. The ads will end up looking very similar to the content.
Ad: “Hey guys. It’s ya boy, NordVPN, here today to tell you about the dangers of using the internet without my VPN…”
Then you start using ai to put in anti ads that point out all the bad stuff about the usual ad subjects, I’d say get as code to libel/slander as possible without risking a lawsuit
I’d be watching a car accident compilation and a Buick starts trying to tell me to ask my doctor about Cymbalta. You know… I might actually watch that.
Whatever happened to ad placement lol
Aren’t they legally required to indicate that an ad is playing? Should be almost trivial to detect and I don’t know how they’d get around that.
I’m the US? I think only if the content is targeted at children.
And that’s when I moved to Invidious and haven’t looked back
Considering I can’t get Invidious to serve me a video in a higher res than 480p, no thanks.
Those ads do look good in 1080p!
What makes you think they won’t block them or force ads to them as well?
You do know that Invidious is still YouTube, right?
It’s an open source front end to youtube, yes. So no ads on the sidebar, no bullshit about logging in, no garbage algorithm to be harassed by.
And no commercials yet. If YT streams the ads and invidious doesn’t block them and adblocker doesn’t block them and PiHole doesn’t block them, I will not watch them.
Death to Advertisement.
I’ll download it so I can skip the bullshit if it comes down to it.
I don’t think YouTube cares if you refuses to watch their videos on another platform or not.
They probably prefer if you didn’t. You only cost them money with no revenue whatsoever.
They are still a metric they can peddle to their advertisers to show “how many people see this ad in a month.”
You don’t think they know how many watch their videos with adblockers or third party clients?
I highly doubt they accept views from third party clients as valid ad views or probably views at all since that would likely make abuse easier.
It still goes to active user counts though. There will still be a footprint left by any view and that can be marketed as “we have X million users daily!”
I doubt the really big advertisers (the only ones that maybe can negotiate) think that’s enough statistics.
Sounds good. It’s a waste of time anyway. Maybe I’ll do something else like go outside or create something of my own.
I mean I’ll settle for the ad being blacked out and muted while I wait for the content. Or have it play elevator music while I wait.
or do some back end trickery where they can buffer the video for longer than youtube allows, then selectively clip out the ad parts so you can continue to seemlessly watch.
I wonder if the server throttles that ads so you can’t 2x the playback speed. Sounds like a good way to detect when the ads are being served.
Watch how quickly I drop your fucking platform lmao. Please give me a reason
Yeah they risk making their platform obsolete to many users.
And where will users go? There are no alternatives. Other platforms don’t have as much content, require you to pay, or both.
I can’t vouch for others but I’d rather just stop using the service all together if I can’t do it ad free. I’m not inclined to pay for YouTube either, already pay for too many services. People existed just fine without Youtube. They can again.
Pornhub, or touching grass. Either order really.
I’d been paying for premium YouTube for a few years, the family plan had a massive spike in price and I’d had enough from there. Been using Grayjay for the past few months only watching a couple of channels, but if this goes live it will kill the platform for me.
The bundled YouTube music sub really doesn’t sell it for me either, sure it’s got some more niche music compared to other platforms but it’s not a drop-in replacement (especially for the better half).
All and all I’m probably one of the few that will tap out of the platform, will be interesting to see the fallout.
Have you considered paying for their ad free service?
Yes, and it took less than a minute of googling to find “I’m paying, why do I still see ads?”. There’s also someone in this thread complaining of the same.
Premium also has lots of ads in your feed (disguised as product videos) and videos include sponsorships ads.
YouTube: creates the problem
This guy: have you considered paying them for the solution?
If you pay me MORE money, I won’t shit on your lawn
If you pay me more money I’ll shit on your lawn less often
Like many other business they offer an ad funded service and a paid service. I understand this is Lemmy, and people love getting things for free. But if you don’t like ads, have you thought about paying for the service?
They had a service I paid for. I paid for youtube without ads. Just that. And then they changed prices and made me pay for something that I did not need, YouTube Music. So I canceled.
They had me as a subscriber, they just wanted more money and lost me.
And I block ads. Not specifically for youtube, but for all sites and apps that I can. I use Blockada and most days the number of blocked tracking cookies goes over 1000. Laat 24 hours it is 3426 trackers blocked. Is it really necessary that I am being tracked that much?
I don’t think so, and I am not even talking about malware, or crypto ming scripts that will be loaded as ads. Most ads are not checked properly so I have no idea what malicious bullshit I can get on my systems without even asking for it.
If I find something that I use a lot and adds value, I will donate some money. For example, I support some creators on Patreon.
And ads always do their best to be loud and intrusive. And if I have a guest at my house that is loud and intrusive, they don’t get invited back. The same with ads.
Remember when ads were just a small rectangle on youtube? You clicked it away and that is it? That was the way. Serve ads in a normal, non intrusive way and I can handle them just fine.
they offer an ad funded service and a paid service
Just because they offer a paid service doesn’t mean it’s reasonable for me to pay for it. For example: if the cost was $1000 a month it would not be reasonable to respond with “why don’t you pay for it?” Because that’s not a reasonable price.
If a person doesn’t find the price reasonable then it is reasonable for them not to pay.Watching ads is also a cost. It costs time. Each person has a threshold of how many ads they are willing to watch before the cost is too high, at which point it is reasonable for them to no longer pay that cost.
YouTube is constantly increasing the ad time trying to find that point just before people get sick of it.
if you don’t like ads, have you thought about paying for the service?
I remind you that the person you originally replied to said they were done watching YouTube. Not that they were insisting on getting it for free. They find the ad cost too high, and the paid service cost too high, so they will not use the service. That is a perfectly reasonable response and a response of “why don’t you pay for it” is not helpful, irrelevant, and shows you aren’t listening to what is being said.
For the record: If I believed there was even a chance that my watching YouTube with an ad blocker caused the tiniest noticeable amount of loss to YouTube’s finances, I would set up a tab streaming YouTube 24 hours a day on mute. So no, I also will not be paying them for premium either.
I agree with all your points, not using the service is absolutely an option. I suggested paying for premium because that was the option that made the most sense to me. I hate ads and love YouTube. For me, the value I get from a subscription is much higher than other services I pay for. I’m subscribed to probably 500 YouTube channels and probably watch between 50-100 hours of content per month.
What’s the Lemmy equivalent of /r/hailcorporate?
That’s funny, but I love content created by individuals and small teams, especially the maker/engineering channels. I’ll take that over corporate produced media any day, even if it means paying a corporation to serve that content to me.
They also have one of the best business models for creators, meaning people producing content can do it full time and make a good living off of it, instead of doing it as a charity and producing mediocre quality videos.
The problem with that is they will eventually introduce ads to the paid service as well.
Or just one more thing to add to the open seas of piracy. Or start supporting nebula?
Although this would be the case for piracy, as a better means to support artist, because I pirate my music. I do attend more live music venues which gives more revenue directly to the artist
When the YT apps stopped working a few days ago, I just continued watching on Nebula until the apps were fixed. Only went back onto YT to read discussions in video comments
I give it 5 hours from mass release before ad blockers catch up.
I find it fascinating how media companies evolved their usage of ads over time. Used to be that the purpose of showing someone an ad was to get them to buy your product. Now, though, the companies who make the ads are paying to have them put on media networks who use the ads to annoy you into paying for a premium membership so you don’t have to see them. It’s double dipping.
Not sure how I would feel if I made an ad, and YouTube was saying to their users: “Yeah, you like that fucking ad? Super annoying, isn’t it? If you don’t pay me more money, I’m going to cram that annoying bullshit down your throat every time you want to watch a video. I’m going to put ads at the beginning of videos. I’m going to sprinkle them throughout the middle. Hell, I’m even going to make you watch ads after the video ends! You like that, you little bitch??”
It’s the evolution of the premium cable model. HBO, Showtime, etc. The upgraded cable tier has ad-free content and exclusives.
Yup. I’m old enough to remember when the selling point of cable TV was that it was ad-free. Then, of course, they started adding ads. And then they sold us premium channels that didn’t have ads. Now those have ads, too. You just can’t get away from them.
Gotta make that line go up somehow
You just can’t get away from them.
Now i want Pirate Bay to play the theme of pirates of the Caribbean every time i load it up.
It’s been seven years, and this sketch is just getting more and more fitting each day.
Next article…UBlock has designed AI to detect ads and blackout/mute video until it is done. Even better, it can buffer queued videos ahead of time and just remove ads.
what ai have they designed? I have not heard about this and am skeotical
It was a /s commentary on the neverending war of ads vs ad blocking. Soon we will have to buy advanced anti advertising AI servers for our houses so we don’t get them beamed to our walls from space lasers.
Maybe if they cleared out the scams and served more than 3 ads on repete, I wouldn’t feel the need to block them. Yes, no one likes ads, but I get its to pay for the content I’m watching for free.
I would rather pay an add-block company a monthly subscription than give it to YouTube in blackmail. This will just be another salvo in a never ending war.
I used to pay for youtube premium. My logic being that I was using an adblocker anyway, and I wanted the content creators I watched to get some kind of revenue for my watchtime. Youtube stopped taking my money a while back, and I can’t be bothered to figure out why. These days, there’s so little content that I find interesting that I spend more time scrolling than I do actually watching videos. It’s only a matter of time until I just stop regularly going to youtube.
Too Much engagement slop being pumped into the feed and you can’t block offenders on teevee app…
WTF I lay for this. If I don’t want to see some clown, I should be able to block.
I report them for misconduct and it seems to reduce the spam but they come back in few weeks amyway…
Like no I don’t want linus, I don’t want brownlee apple whore… Just stop.
I paid for it until they basically doubled the price.
I paid for it before they removed Google Play Music. I was on one of the plans that was $8 for both Google Play Music and YouTube Red.
Imagine what YouTube could be if they spent all this cash on improving their service instead.
The moment they fix the search, fix their recommendations, stop wasting money on junk projects like games and allow me to completely disable Shorts, I will resubscribe to YT Premium.
