YouTube has been spotted testing server-side ads, which could pose a problem to ad blockers.
www.youtube.com##+js(json-prune-fetch-response, playerAds adPlacements adSlots playerResponse.playerAds playerResponse.adPlacements playerResponse.adSlots, , propsToMatch, /player?)Click on uBO icon > ⚙ Dashboard button > Add the filter(s) in “My filters” pane > ✓ Apply changes > Open new tab and test again.
from the reddit page idk if it works but most comments say it does
and if it does, that’s fucking hilarious
this will have taken a team months of work and one ublock dev just threw it in the toilet within an hour
This worked for me. Thanks!
So in theory… can reVanced come up with something like this,
NewPipe works, so I’m sure reVanced can/could do it as well. SmartTube (Android TV exclusive) also implemented it weeks ago, I never have seen a single ad.
ok, so i added this code to my ublock origin filter list, then went to youtube, and the injected ads were still showing up in about half the vids. closed firefox, reopened, same. rebooted my win11 machine, now the injected ads are NOT showing up any longer. not sure if youtube switched it off because they’re still beta testing this bullshit or if the code is working but it SEEMS to be working. if it stops i’ll come back to edit this comment. thanks for the tip man!
The ublock origin guys are wizards, I tell you…
I am amazed how they didn’t spell like others did in that market.
Prolly should donate.
I stll haven’t get any ads with just stock ubo but when it does I’ll try this filter, thanks
Thank you!
Do I need to add this filter or are the uBO devs going to update the extension to include it ootb?
i’d be shocked if they didn’t update it but i just timed myself doing it and it took less than 10 seconds
👑
I would rather pay an ad-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.
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.
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.
All of these issues have reportedly led to an increase in ad block uninstalls, leaving users with the choice of YouTube Premium or sitting still until that “skip ad” button appears.
Oh yes, I totally believe that people are opting to delete their ad blocker, that works on not just YouTube but the entire internet, simply because YouTube has become obstinate and difficult. Who the fuck wrote this article? And how much are they getting paid by Google? Do they really think we’re going to buy into this bullshit and follow suit?
it’s total bullshit. For example if you use ublock origin every now and again sure you might get ads that pop up, but AT MOST that lasts for a day, generally it’ll last a couple hours as the team at ublock update their lists to block ads again. There’s no need, literally zero need, to remove it from your extensions. and at worst, like I got yesterday, you’ll just see a black screen that buffers for a bit before the video plays. the ad is still blocked.
you can also circumvent most of this if you use freetube. OR if you just want music the youtube-dl script on linux. I also ditched spotify for youtube-dl as I can also download entire playlists with it.
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Just FYI I have a user driven plugin that skips self promotion in videos, wirks like a charm most often. I bet someone will make one that detects and skips ads even if they’re added randomly.
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It’s illegal not to disclose when something is paid promotion. Worst case scenario, the ad blocker blacks out your screen while it detects the ad notification and auto skips when it can. We’ll never actually be forced to watch the ads.
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.
Rumble and PeerTube
EDIT: I’m already paying YouTube with personal data and privacy.
YouTube tests server-side ads to make
your coveted blockerYouTube obsoleteftfy
I’ve been a premium user for a while now and the platform has never been shittier than now. I pay for premium but I see integrated ads in videos and nowadays YouTube sneakily includes actual product videos in your home feed as if that’s not an ad. Recommendations have sucked for so long that I don’t remember the last time I watched something good on it. Inclusion of yt music was the thing that kept me on the subscription but shit man
Let’s go full guerilla: Plugin that lets you select the first and the last frame of an ad, thus allows to report the beginning and length to a synced database. When that frame is found in the buffer, skip X frames ahead.
For ergonomics, the plugin should be able to spot cuts in the video so you can easily select the correct frames.
For resilience, maybe settle for similar frames. Thinking about anti-abuse, maybe require a minimum number of reports relative to the views (and ofc allow to not skip stuff).
Due to legal reasons, and to keep advertisers happy, YouTube is forced to display the “Advertisement” mark and a link to the advertisers website. With these, all the required information exists to allow an adblocker to skip any ads embedded in the video stream. No community flagging of ads is required.
YouTube is forced to display the “Advertisement” mark
They’re forced to identify that it’s an ad, but they don’t have to do it in a machine-readable way. There’s many different approaches to show an “Advertisement” or “Sponsored” label that appears to users but that blockers can’t easily find.
If they don’t link to the advertisers page, they’ll lose advertisers, which is the last thing YouTube would do. Legally, a video-embedded “Advertisement” indicator could work, but the link to the advertisers page remains.
That sounds very much like the idea of SponsorBlock (but might need a bit of refinement to work for different ads of different length). You should definitely check out Piped for watching YouTube videos without any tracking/ads/dark patterns, I am very sure they will do something to remove server-side ads as well (hopefully).
And if it is just five seconds instead of 15, it would be way better!
Let’s go full guerilla: Plugin that lets you select the first and the last frame of an ad, thus allows to report the beginning and length to a synced database. When that frame is found in the buffer, skip X frames ahead.
This would fit in well with SponsorBlock, which already does the same thing for different parts of videos (eg sponsored segments, intro and outro animations, non music segments in music videos, etc).
I suspect YouTube will find ways around this, like running ads of differing lengths, add random amounts of padding at the start of the video or between ads, etc.
It actually already did break sponsorblock for a bit because user submissions would include the wrong timestamps, due to the ads changing the duration of the video.
This would be hard to implement, but I personally would be happy to donate more to fund the development costs for such features. Adblocking is the largest consumer boycott in history and I won’t let a corporation try to crush it again.
The challenge is that videos will have a varying amount or type of ads based on the client’s country/demographic and simply on the timing of ad campaigns.
Not baking-in ads was the advantage of Youtube and other streaming platforms over the likes of traditional TV. That’s why they were client-side in the first place. I wonder how much the extra effort, bandwidth, and processing will cost Youtube to achieve server-side ads. Would be funny if it simply ended up being too expensive for them.
They have a LOT of compute power… They could have several baked in ads per geographical area / demographic and only store them on servers in / close to the relevant country. There’s definitely associated costs but I wonder if it’d amortize well given their viewer count.
Let the games begin.
For ergonomics, the plugin should be able to spot cuts in the video so you can easily select the correct frames.
This shouldn’t even be too hard, I doubt YouTube is completely rerendering every video with ads, they’d just insert the ad in before an I frame in the video. So each ad will start with an I frame, and the video will resume on an I frame, meaning just let the user select all the I frames, no fancy cut detection algorithm is needed.
I have no idea how to do this from JS though.
Also I mean video I frames, not HTML iframes.
Oh. I like this. Sponsor block but network wide basically xD
Watch how quickly I drop your fucking platform lmao. Please give me a reason
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
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.
YouTube: creates the problem
This guy: have you considered paying them for the solution?
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 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.
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.
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
The problem with that is they will eventually introduce ads to the paid service as well.
Premium also has lots of ads in your feed (disguised as product videos) and videos include sponsorships ads.
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.
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.
Server side ads sound more expensive for Google to me. I’ll just use some future plugin that blacks out the screen or whatever if it comes to that.
Sounds like a price increase is coming our way!
They are coming your way for sure. Cause I’m not paying a dime 😉
Wouldn’t sponsorblock be enough?
No, the ad timings will vary
In fact, it’s likely that it might fuck over SB in general, if they don’t compensate for it
they cracked down on adblockers, adblockers got better.
They’re trying to get around adblockers again, adblockers will get better again
I will pay for an adblocker before I pay for an ad provider to stop harassing me
Chad uBlock Plus dev doesn’t even want our money.
Chad Raymond Hill who refuses to accept donatoins or sponsorships of any kind.
That being said the people that maintain the filter lists I believe, don’t quoute me on this, you can donate to a few of them. Really depends if they mention it on their githubs though and you pretty much have to go about finding them on your own as there’s no real centralized list of all the people that contribue to the filter lists.
That’s correct. uBlock Plus’ Github says he won’t accept donations but give instead to the unsung heroes maintaining the lists on which his software depends.
YouTube shell company running highly effective subscription based ad blocker! Hahaha I could see it.
adguard for windows, which is also available on CrappleComputers and I think it’s also on linux
If anything, adblock taught me about pi-hole, which brought me into the raspberry pi world.
And id rather spend money on that.
I’m not so sure. Once they are embedded in the video they become hard to block. Twitch is like this now.
I’m holding out some hope, since twitch is live but YouTube is pre-buffered, but they could still block loading past the ad on a timer or a key computed from hashing the decoded frames of the ad, idk
And yet there are userscripts you can use to block out twitch ads. I haven’t seen one for months now despite not being a subscriber.
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.
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.
