YouTube embeds ads into videos to beat ad blockers

[NegativeLatency]

I guess we're upping the ante on how to identify an ad.

The next ad-blocking arms race will be between perceptual ad blockers and the companies trying to embed ads that look like part of the content (ai vs ai).

https://arxiv.org/abs/1811.03194

[rpastuszak]

Hehe, +1 year ago I actually made a (half-serious, half-assed) project alluding to this possible future: https://butter.sonnet.io

The way this works: use LLMs to detect sponsored content in transcripts, then skip that during playback.

I can see an approach, let's call it "universal adblocker", where there's an app running in background, detecting ads (using a11y APIs or just screenshots) and skipping / masking them with a full awareness of how to control a given app. It could block different sections of the screen or just control the UI to skip past the crap.

[ztetranz]

Way back in the days of video recorders, analog TV etc, I remember hearing talk of trying to detect ads on broadcast TV to either pause recording or maybe provide some sort of skip functionality on playback.

I think they did something looking at the horizontal sync signal. The was a clear discontinuity when the station switched from program to ad and back again.

[zelphirkalt]

Or crowd source the recognition, by letting people mark video parts as ads and then sharing that data and the recognition tool with each other.

[stevenwoo]

Network television already has a couple of options with this with chirons on the bottom of the screen during programs and animated overlays moving across the screen as well. One has to wait for stuff to appear on DVD or other streaming services to get around those ads.

[yonatan8070]

We had a conversation at work yesterday about this, specifically in the context of TV, and potentially having a camera/capture card + microphone + ML model to identify and mute ads automatically

[bastard_op]

I'll assume someone will figure out a transcoder plugin to mux the video and remove the ads on the local system in-stream, which if you've got a hardware gpu that can, why not?

[amelius]

So it will be either watch the ad, or wait until the ad is over.

[usernamed7]

I really value youtube, but as long as google owns it I will never pay, never ever. Nor will I watch ads. But if youtube broke off one day and became independent like paypal did, i would gladly pay for it.

[edm0nd]

Pro tip, if you have a VPN provider and set it to Ukraine, YouTube Premium comes out to only ~$2.7x/month. Makes it way more enjoyable for a fraction of the price.

Once you buy it, you dont have to keep your VPN or anything, it will always rebill at the $2.xx price each month.

[jarjoura]

I'm interpreting your comment as you're using ad blockers and also not paying for a subscription.

If that's the case, it's probably true that robbing YouTube of the revenue to cover their R&D and data center costs is covered in whatever insurance and investment risks they manage.

However, also robbing the content creators you're enjoying of the revenue they need to fund their content, is definitely in some unethical grey area. Still true, even if the creator makes only a fraction of their total revenue through ad sense.

[judge2020]

Because Google <insert reason here>, you think you are entitled to accessing it for free?

[bdcravens]

Paypal didn't "break off": it was spun off by eBay. It's not like a division can secede and declare independence.

[mook]

I don't think I'm likely to pay for YouTube either, but for a slightly different reason: I'm afraid that if there are ever any account issues my whole Google account would be banned. I notice that I've been watching less as they ramp up advertisements.

Yep, a confusing case where a monopoly position actually managed to hurt the company…

[leptons]

>I really value youtube, but as long as google owns it I will never pay, never ever.

I really value youtube, and I do pay for premium. It's not expensive. We use youtube far more than any other streaming service, and it costs less than all the others.

[mustyoshi]

Clearly you don't value it if you don't want to compensate them or the creators for the content.

[squigz]

I'll say this every time this comes up: if YouTube wants money for their service, that's fine and their right, but they do not have the right to try to circumvent what my browser does. If they don't like that, they can block people who use adblockers. Simple.

[judge2020]

They do have the right to try to circumvent what your browser does. They're not even circumventing it by trying to disable stuff in your browser; they're just changing their delivery mechanism. It's semantics but in reality they're not actually messing with your computer.

The alternative is revoking your viewing privileges without having watched an ad for the video you clicked on, which they both morally and legally have the right to do if you decide not to pay for the service you're consuming.

[Freedom2]

> circumvent what my browser does

Are in-line ads inside sponsored videos (eg: YouTubers or podcasters advertising Squarespace) now considered circumventing your browser? I'm not entirely sure what YouTube is doing is different than those, at a fundamental level.

[patmcc]

Isn't that what they're doing here? Your browser requests the video stream, it gets one - and that video stream now includes ads baked right in. Doesn't mess with your browser at all.

[atorodius]

I don’t see how that is a logical set of sentenced. You try to circumvent their ads, they try to circumvent your ad blocking.

[xnx]

All's fair in attention war.

[novagameco]

Why do they not have that right?

[dvngnt_]

except in this case the parent company owns the most popular browser chrome and they've modified extensions in a way that adblockers are known to be less effective

[etchalon]

This is what I always expected platforms would do if blockers became ubiquitous enough – make it impossible to easily separate first party and third-party content.

Podcast platforms already have to do this – dynamic ad insertion is done within the file itself.

I suspect we'll start to see sites use proxy server solutions to mask third-party ads on the web as well.

[maxglute]

What's next? Maybe jump by youtube thumbails +/- seconds.

There's old project called timelens with youtube userscript that generates visual timeline like:

https://timelens.blinry.org/assets/images/youtube-screenshot...

Matching bands of colours signitures that maps to whats actually onscreen seems more durable than timestamps. Until youtube gets rid of preview thumbnails.

[BatFastard]

Sadly YouTube has become a NO GO site. I am willing to watch an ad for a video I want to see, but so often with youtube content I dismiss the video within 5 seconds of it starting. I am not willing to watch 2 minutes of ads to find out if I want to watch the video in the first place.

What alternate sites are there?

[frizlab]

None. That’s the problem.

My take is the video format is terrible and should not exist in the first place anyway, so I live happily far away from all the yt drama.

For instance it was the WWDC this week and all the sessions are video. Most of them could be articles instead and it would be much better/useful. (Thankfully they provide full searchable transcripts now, so at least there’s that…)

I do watch videos: TV Shows and movies. Which I pay other services to provide for me.

[tzs]

Two minutes of ads!?

On desktop most ads YouTube gives me allow skipping after 5 seconds. Most of the ones that don't allowed skipping at 15 seconds or less. In back to back ads if the first cannot be skipped the second almost always can be skipped after 5 seconds.

Ads are longer on my Fire TV Stick but almost never is the total time that cannot be skipped more than 30 seconds.

Now I'm curious what other people are seeing? Is what I'm seeing closer to what most people see or is what you are experiencer closer to the YouTube norm?

[pentagrama]

Not sure if the mention of the SponsorBlock browser extension in the article is correct.

To my knowledge, this extension doesn't block programmatic ads (off-stream) like regular ad blockers do. Instead, it "blocks" ads that creators include in their videos (e.g., "This video is sponsored by Squarespace") by automatically skipping these segments using crowdsourced timestamp data reported by users. It's similar to how you can manually jump ahead on the video timeline.

I believe this extension was affected by YouTube's recent changes because now some videos are longer due to on-stream ads, causing the timestamps to be out of sync for users watching these videos.

However, I could be mistaken.

[Bancakes]

Yes and YouTube wants to randomize these somehow

[jknutson]

Technically speaking, how do they accomplish this? Given the amount of advertisers they have, the amount of ads that each advertiser is showing, and the amount of variations of those ads that they’re showing (5s, 15s, etc), I think we can safely rule out the possibly that they’re just splicing together an infinite amount of permutations of ads and videos and saving them to disk.

They must be doing some sort of on-the-fly streaming of these ads? It cannot be the case that they’re trying to actually transcode / edit all those different ad possibilities together.

[ChrisArchitect]

[dupe]

Some more discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40657933

[lumb63]

They might be able to beat “ad blockers” referring to the software that blocks ads; I don’t think they’ll ever beat “ad blockers”, the humans that are looking to block ads. There is a certain breaking point where people will simply not watch the content anymore. I am astounded that this hasn’t happened already and a migration to some other alternative site hasn’t ensued.

[stvltvs]

I wonder how many of us there really are. Is it enough to make them change their ways? There are enough people with ad blocking software for them to make the effort to deploy countermeasures, but how far is each side willing to go?

[ugjka]

It has happened, it is called Tiktok.

[jodybruchon]

This should be easy to defeat. YouTube videos are usually delivered as DASH streams and an ad would just send down a different fragment. Loading the video multiple times will load injected ads in different places but the core video segments will always be present. The differences could determine what's an ad and what's not. Detected ad segments can be added to a known ad bloom filter, correct segments could be added to a known valid bloom filter, or both.

[zb3]

Note that the frontend code still knows that an ad is played, and bytes of the actual video are still pushed without any artificial delay, so for now ad blockers can deal with this using a custom script.

[xnx]

Important topic that has been posted a few times:

2 days ago. 87 comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40657933 2 days ago. 91 comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40666304

[nimbius]

This seems to cause playback failures in ublock from what ive seen. MPV doesn't appear affected though.

[beshrkayali]

Can still be beat with SponsorBlock I suppose, but someone will have to submit the segments to skip first.

[jsheard]

They're not just burning the ads into the video once, they're splicing them in dynamically, so the location and duration of ads can be different every time you view a video. The article literally quotes the SponsorBlock dev saying this breaks SponsorBlock because it assumes the ads will always be at the same timestamp.

[tmtvl]

I suspect that as Alphabet clamps down more and more on combating ad blockers the major competitors to YouTube (Tick Tock, Twitch, Odyssey, Nicovideo, Bitchute,...) will start gaining more and more traction until people start switching over en masse.

[1vuio0pswjnm7]

Is there really a belief that people who use ad blockers are worthwhile ad targets.

[Kim_Bruning]

Does sponsorblock block these?

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/sponsorblock/

[slimginz]

The dev actually went on Twitter[1] to say this currently breaks the extension and they disabled submissions from users with embedded ads enabled

[1] https://twitter.com/SponsorBlock/status/1800835402666054072

[jsheard]

No, the source of the information in the article is the author of SponsorBlock saying they currently have no way to distinguish the ads from the content for users who are getting these inline ads.

[bananapub]

Annoying, but fair. Unlike almost every other ad supported service, YouTube has an easy and fairly cheap way to eliminate these ads.

So it’s really just a test of whether people hate ads or just want everything for free.

[smallerfish]

Not that I like ads, but hopefully this will fix their stupid bugs integrating with chromecast, where the auto-switching to an ad sometimes throws to a different video in the playlist.