this post was submitted on 13 Jun 2024
620 points (98.4% liked)

Technology

60033 readers
2990 users here now

This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.


Our Rules


  1. Follow the lemmy.world rules.
  2. Only tech related content.
  3. Be excellent to each another!
  4. Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
  5. Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
  6. Politics threads may be removed.
  7. No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
  8. Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
  9. Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed

Approved Bots


founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
 
  • YouTube is testing server-side ad injection to counter ad blockers, integrating ads directly into videos to make them indistinguishable from the main content.
  • This new method complicates ad blocking, including tools like SponsorBlock, which now face challenges in accurately identifying and skipping sponsored segments.
  • The feature is currently in testing and not widely rolled out, with YouTube encouraging users to subscribe to YouTube Premium for an ad-free experience.
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 23 points 6 months ago (2 children)

I honestly wondered why they haven't done this yet for years

[–] [email protected] 16 points 6 months ago (2 children)

It's quite likely that the cost actually outweighs the gains. Adblocking really isn't all that prevalent across Internet users as a whole. I think the stats are something like 10% or lower.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 6 months ago (1 children)

And yet Google is investing all this time and money into trying to block the blockers. It's really quite stupid.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 6 months ago (1 children)

Well, most of their efforts have been relatively low cost on their end. Stuff like manifest v3 isn't actually particularly expensive to do. Just requires you to have near total capture of the web browser market.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 6 months ago

Stuff like manifest v3 isn't actually particularly expensive to do.

Oh yes, a complete overhaul of the way their browser engine works is absolute child's play and doesn't cost a thing. 🙄😒

[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 months ago (1 children)

But it's always been their server. It's not like Geico provided that video snippet

[–] [email protected] 6 points 6 months ago

Yes, but server-side injection, if I understand it correctly, means you have to actually remux the videos into a single stream. That's additional processing load, which is basically their main cost of business.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 6 months ago (2 children)

It's costly; either you prepare encodes ahead of time with different ads and serve that appropriately, or you splice ads live for each request, which is also costly in resources. You can't get away with just a few variation; ads are usually targeted. It also come with other issues, like, it is mandatory in a lot of place to clearly identify ads, so there should be an obvious marker somewhere. If it's in the UI, it can be detected and replaced live by a video of kittens for the duration of the ad, so I suppose they also have to handle any signal in the video… (It's speculation, I didn't get any of these yet).

I'm curious to see if this will hold, and how we will run around it in the long run.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 6 months ago

So much effort, dev time and resources just to fight users to make the experience worse and push them to alternatives to squeeze out the tiniest margin of extra ad money. Plus I'm sure this'll be countered almost immediately. I'd be shocked if ad blockers took more than a few days to find a way to detect and neuter these ads.

This is some accelerated enshittification.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 6 months ago (1 children)

Other ramifications aside, it wouldn’t be that costly to splice real time.

YouTube has standard profiles of video and audio quality levels. As long as the video stream is the same quality, the stream can basically be concatenated one after another without any meaningful over head. Try it: ffmpeg -f concat -i files.list -c copy output.mp4 for two files with same codec (audio and video) was processed at over 900x speed for me with just CPU.

So all YouTube would need to do is transcode the ads they’d intend to splice in into the standard formats they’d offer the stream at (which they’d already have the video transcoded into), and splice the ads they’d want to show in realtime at request time.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 months ago

Yes, it is doable. But it also implies keeping track of individual sessions, to make sure you serve the right ad at the right time to the right people. Nothing impossible, but definitely more work to do per individual player, and on the scale of youtube this is quite a lot.