Submitted 4 months ago by downpunxx@fedia.io to technology@lemmy.world
YouTube has been spotted testing server-side ads, which could pose a problem to ad blockers.
Ad blockers are useful for more than just YouTube. So they are not going anywhere. However it will be a bummer if we can no longer block YouTube ads.
On android I have to endure the ads but on desktop I never see them.
I use revanced:
Revanced manager: https://revanced.app/download
MicroG: https://github.com/revanced/gmscore/releases/tag/v0.3.1.3.240913
You also get SponsorBlock and Return YouTube Dislike right in the app (+ many other ui and functionality modifications)
What’s hilarious about this article is that I’m actually getting YouTube premium for free as some kind of bonus to my phone service yet I’m still using ad blockers on it and everything else. I really don’t give a shit. If they want to get better at injecting ads I’m going to place my bets on ad blockers getting better at blocking them. Or just not using YouTube. Cause, quite frankly, most of my favorite creators are on Nebula anyway and I pay for that service.
Use newpipe on Android, no ads
I love newpipe except for one very annoying quirk: if you pause a video for more than a few minutes it “breaks” and skips to the end of the video when you hit play again.
For long videos this is very annoying, but I’ll gladly pay that “price” if it means I don’t have to hear 25261516 insanely annoying advertisements a day.
For some reason New Pipe just doesn’t work on my me device
I use Firefox and just use the web browser. You can even listen to YouTube with the screen off. Plus Firefox add ons/extensions
If you’re on Android, use revanced
Try LibreTube. Or Firefox Mobile with Ublock Origin. Or one of many other solutions. You don’t need to watch YouTube ads on Android.
You can use the brave browser on android. As of now it blocks youtube ads.
Added bonus it saves on your data plan because wouldn’t ya know it, the copious amounts of ads they shove in our faces uses a lot of data… that we already pay for. I’m not paying my cell provider for data just so advertisers can use it to try to get me to pay for more shit I don’t need.
Firefox with ublock origin also works on mobile
Or another alternative is the all grayjay
On iOS I have to use some niche app that lets me circumvent YouTube asking me for my ID
Does the ad restrict play back controls (such as disabling fast forward)? Trivial for an add-on to detect and if nothing else black out the video and mute the audio until playback controls are restored.
If it doesn’t restrict fast forward then everyone can skip the ad without an ad-blocker.
Also, now that ads are server side YouTube is more responsible for the content of them as they are hosting them.
I have no problems with this.
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.
fucking YouTube, am i right?
no seriously, havent used it in months, and weirdly dont Miss it. i used to watch YouTube the whole day.
May I ask what do you use for content instead of YouTube? A lot of certain people I follow are on YouTube and music that I listen to are often only on YouTube these days. Not even Spotify has the niche songs (mainly Arabic and Japanese songs).
well, i would never even think of using it for music (except downloading what i cant find) same with spotify (i hate streaming). I just watched regular videos, which I just suddenly don’t do anymore, I started binging TV shows instead, -no ads .
I just couldn’t bare the ads, they’re that bad. and when I think of stuff that makes me mad, I can’t do anything associated with it, I.e. watch YouTube -know there will be ads (or not, because i have an adblocker) the mere thought that there WOULD be ads is so annoying to me, that I cannot stand watching YouTube.
but yeah back to the point, TV shows, and books, especially books have been my replacement, and I must say, they are much better.
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.
Please do this! YouTube will finally be unusable and Google can finally start to die completely :3
Most normies I know watch YouTube with ads already. I sadly don’t think this will put much of a dent in YouTube.
That’s the thing, right? They’re fighting a very small minority of users blocking ads/tracking this hard
Commercial detection systems exist already although I couldn’t vouch for their efficacy. How they will integrate with streaming however is another question.
I for one am excited for this phase of the cat & mouse game, as solving this challenge means keeping the monkey off our backs for good while longer.
It might even be a bit simpler than that, as YouTube’s going to have to mark segments as adverts somehow so you can’t just skip past them.
Google Summer of Code 2015
Ah, the irony.
I’m so fucking sick of their greedy bullshit
No, I would rather quit watching youtube rather than to watch Japanese style animation porn ads.
Things look much better if I’m on a US VPN. But I don’t want to get bothered by those porn ads if it suddenly stops (yeah, it sometimes crashes for some reason) or I forget to turn it on. And yeah, I still don’t like Grammarly ads although it’s much better than porns.
Just asking for a friend: from what country do you get these ads?
I’m currently in Korea, and those ads appear even without being logged in.
The ads are based off your search history. Where are these porn ads so I can avoid them?
I’m currently in Korea, and those ads appear even without being logged in.
And that’s when I moved to Invidious and haven’t looked back
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.
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!
Rumble and PeerTube
Sounds good. It’s a waste of time anyway. Maybe I’ll do something else like go outside or create something of my own.
Honestly the shitter they get the more content creators will publish elsewhere.
Honestly idk why more don’t post to peertube already. It costs nothing to cross post if you already have the content.
Fuck youtube
Let’s develop an AI that can detect where ads in videos start and end. And cut them out client side. Anti corporate advertising AI :D
Sponsor block extension
God it sure would suck if there were trojan advertisements threatening to take down Youtube servers.
Aha! So this is how one snuck into a video I downloaded last night. Fuckers. At least with a locally downloaded file I can quickly skip ahead.
Or even trim it.
Way back in the day when I used SageTV to record live TV there were programs that would automatically identify commercials and skip them for you. Computers are way more powerful now so I doubt it will be long before there’s and app that automatically downloads your favorite YouTube channels and prescans the videos to skip the ads.
A few more years till they measure engagement via your camera
An ad will pause if you look away 👀
If you look away, you will have to watch another one
Arse has fallen out of their money printer so they’re getting desperate.
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.
There is no way for advertisers to know that their ads are actually shown. That is why an ad is a link to the advertiser’s website. If there is one thing I have learned from uploading to YT and watching, it’s that YT is terrible at transparency and this kind of logistics. I doubt this will work at all.
Yet another reason I’m glad I use youtube-dl.
If they’re truly server-side injected, then they would also appear permanently in any downloaded copy because the servere would be telling the client what pieces are available-including the ad pieces.
At least if still downloads them you can edit them out if it’s something you want to save.
At least I can trim those away if needed.
FUCK GOOGLE SO GODDAMN MUCH
My local invidious instance is borked too. Not sure if its related and I don’t have time to investigate now.
Guess I need something else for background noise.
use libretube or grayjay 👍
Using a different client won’t help if the ads are injected directly into the video stream.
ye but alt clients still better than youtube 👍
Won’t this totally break deep linking to time codes?
They can surely work around that… But if the client somehow knows where the ads are, the adblocker can skip them anyways.
But maybe also deep linking is less important than ads to them.
While the overall video would be a different length, video players often don’t count the ads towards the media time. So the deep links should be okay
But isn’t that because the ads aren’t part of the video? If players can tell when it’s an advert, presumably ad blockers could too.
(Although presumably they have to tell the player to disable video scrubbing)
I got the server-side ads a few weeks ago. Switched to another account and was ad-free again. I’d be happy to pay for Premium as it supports the creators I watch, but for ad-free alone it’s not worth the £13/mo. The other features jacking up the price aren’t much use to me.
Since it is server side, will this effect the alternative front ends?
Ive had no issues with Brave Browser on my Desktop, but NewPipe on Mobile has been all over the place the past few weeks.
Every other post about Ad blocking has someone pitching Brave.
Brave has experienced some controversies over time, including the CEO having problematic political views; alleged sales of copyrighted data for AI model training; auto-completing typed-in URLs to affiliate links that generate revenue for Brave; content creators receiving unsolicited donations they couldn’t collect; and automatically installing their VPN service without the user’s consent.
Brave is also, you know, run by probably one of the worlds most evil people.
Peter Thiel.
The guy who is part of a group of people who wants to hook you up (using bff elon’s neuralink) and use your body as a biofuel source instead of just killing you. As a “more humane alternative to genocide”
Pipepipe on f-droid is kept much more up to date in my experience. It’s a fork so basically the same
NewPipe had to deal with some thing YouTube did to break things. And they fixed them super quick. Last time I had a video not work, I visited the GitHub site and saw there was a new release from 11 minutes ago. Installed it and the video worked perfectly.
Oh no, Anyway - Invidious/Piped user
They then won’t need to break those anymore, right? … Right?
Mwa@thelemmy.club 4 months ago
yt is getting desprite
AnUnusualRelic@lemmy.world 4 months ago
Wait until it gets depepsi.
Kbobabob@lemmy.world 4 months ago
I prefer decoke