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this post was submitted on 18 Oct 2023
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How exactly "can" they? They've been trying pretty hard for quite a long while now and nothing has ever worked. It's also pretty logical why they can't: they don't control your device, you can do anything with it. Whatever they implement, you can always fake being a normal user. Which is exactly why no one using Firefox + uBlock sees anything of what's mentioned in this article (as long as no other addons/settings trigger the adblock detection).
Only the environment they do control is affected, which is essentially like "controlling your device": Chrome.
My pessimistic opinion is that they'll lobby ths shit out of governments to get laws written which make it illegal to circumvent this stuff somehow. I'm not sure that's even possible, but it's my irrational fear.
If it does happen, I'll convince myself that I don't care about any of the content on YT. Let's face it - 99% of the shit on there is emotionless-face-with-open-mouth-and-red-arrow/circle hot garbage. Sifting through that sewage is so exhausting.
A surprising number is videos don’t even need the video component. Just go for a walk, and leave your phone in your pocket while you’re listening to whatever you would normally watch. Try that out and you’ll realize that there’s hardly any reason to see what’s on the screen.
Delaying the video stream for the ad length would do most of the work. Since they manage that server side there is no way to request the video sooner. Blocking technically works, but you would have to stare at a blank screen for the ad duration.
Twitch started embedding ads into the stream video feed. So if you blocked the ad you also blocked the stream.
It’s been really effective at getting me to watch less twitch. I’d love to see statistics on how many people click away immediately after an ad starts.
A streamer I was watching was playing PUBG, made it to a 1v1, and then an ad played.
A good 99% of the chat was just 'WHAT HAPPENED?!' and we came back to an empty chair, with the streamer in the background.
I haven't watched since.
(The streamer won with an insane pan-throw over a small hill, so it wasn't even a lame win)
I open a stream, get a 45 second ad, close the stream, and go do something else. Congrats, you just killed any enthusiasm I had about your platform.
Preroll ads never made any sense.. those first few seconds are when you're deciding whether to watch that streamer or go elsewhere. An ad makes me go elsewhere without the streamer even getting a say.
Some streamers never use ads, but I think the bigger ones are contracted to do so.
Yeah they definitely have an X amount of minutes of ads per hour in their contract.
100% of the time I do the same thing. I subscribe to 1 streamer max per month and get ad free there, and pretty much don’t use the platform outside of it
Staring at a blank screen is better than watching an ad IMO.
To be honest, I'd take that over ads. I'd use YouTube a lot less, but there's some content from creators I like that's not available elsewhere.
Netflix is able to only serve paying customers.
Sure, granting view credits for ads is a little more complicated, but definitely within googles scope.
So they can block everyone, unless you either pay or watch ads. Unpopular, sure. But they have a huge library and a constant stream of new content, so enough people would put up with it. They can also start soflty, and only tighten the screws later. Lets start with one ad per day.
How exactly? What stops someone from creating a program that behaves like a normal user earning view credits for ads, but never showing that to the actual user, only letting Google think the user is legitimate? Afaik nothing.
Yes, turning it pay-only like Netflix would technically work, but YouTube itself only works because it's "free", so yeah.
There are audits that try to determine if the view credits are legitimate. They'll cross reference a selection of data (what segments did they fetch, what was the timing like, did each ad checkpoint get crossed, etc) because companies don't like paying for ads that arent watched.
That can all be faked, just grab all the segments at a timing that would match playing it. This is why Google wants to do that trusted client thing, because there's no way to guarantee that a user is watching something on their own device unless the software and hardware on that device prevent it and the server makes the user prove they are running that software and hardware and nothing else.
They can easily embed ads into the main stream, so ad blockers will have nothing to block. Not sure why they haven't done so already.
Because those can also be skipped. They are required by law to label sections of ads. This labeling can be read to figure out how long the ads are and thus be skipped. That's how twitch ads are blocked.
The label can be a part of the stream as well. There are no issues to stream everything and make it non-blockable.
Then how hard would it be to use some pattern-based image recognition to detect this label? Not very hard, I have a friend that does something similar at work.
Lol, good luck with that!
You're doubting the ease of implementation, but it's really not hard. It'll have to be a fairly predictable pattern from YouTube's side, which is one of the easiest to accurately detect.
Nevermind that though, it'll never be embebbed in the video stream, because it has to be accessible as well as readable. It's impossible to guarantee it to be readable without actually rendering the text in whatever client it's being viewed in. Imagine a 240p video, the text would have to take up half the screen to be readable with that low resolution.
There's literally no problem to render a text in a video stream.
If they did that then they'd have to re-encode videos for each veiwer (which would require an insane amount of processing power), or give up on tracking and have contextual only ads.
Their only real option is to have ads as separate files and then use the magic JavaScript to tell your computer to play one file then the next, which is where adblock comes in like "naw, let's not do that".
Not really. That's not how modern streaming works. No one sends plain files like it's 2000.
I didn't mean like they just strait up embed video.mp4 on page for the video, but as far as I understand on their backend they still have actually video files of various resolutions and such that they serve to you.
Even if the page isn't giving you a copy of a strait up file in the way it might in 2000, the player is still pulling a copy of a pre processed video file stored on YT's servers, and in order to have the ads as part of that same file in order to make adblock very hard to implement they'd need to re-process it any time they want to show an ad that hadn't been already inserted into the video.
I could be completely wrong tho, I don't work at YouTube and haven't built a video sharing site before.
That's not how it works. I don't know exactly what YouTube is doing, but it's not serving files at all. There are several options available today, perhaps the easiest one to look at is HLS.
In short, the streaming server splits video files into small chunks. Then instead of sending you one huge file, it sends you a HLS playlist. Your browser reads the playlist and starts playing small video chunks one by one. If you want to navigate somewhere inside the video, you don't wait for the whole file to be downloaded, instead the browser will simply skip lots of chunks in the middle until it lands on the one you want to watch. That's also how changing video resolution works - the browser doesn't re-download 4K video after downloading 1080p video, it just stops at current chunk and switches to a higher res one for the next portion of the video.
So, few important things:
This means that YouTube can create a new HLS playlist on the fly, send you 10 chunks of the your video, then send 3 chunks of the ad video, then 42 chunks of your video and 5 more ad video chunks. There's no need to decode/encode anything. And you will never know what the next chunk holds. They can also add ad chunks at random moments, so you won't be able to auto-skip them like you do with sponsor segments.
The real question is why Google is not doing it already.
Thanks for the breakdown and the link, cool to learn about the new (well new to me) tech, sad to see it's gonna probably bit us in the butt at somepoint.