Inside the 'arms race' between YouTube and ad blockers / Against all odds, open source hackers keep outfoxing one of the wealthiest companies.

Ads are effective, sadly. And why so much money is poured into them. I believe there are a few effects at play but the direct, see and ad and want to go buy it now is only one ofbhem that mostly only affects some people, or a lot of people occasionally.

I think a bigger effect is familiarity. You are far more likely to pick a product you are familiar with or have seen before over something younjave never heard of. Even if you have only ever seen it on advets and completely forgotten that you have ever seen ads for it. So even if you don't think they work on you they likely do without you realizing, at least enough of the time on enough people that make them worth while running.

ABP has always been a shitty adblocker because it's meant to make money rather than actually block ads effectively. They've been accepting money from ad networks to allow their "unintrusive ads" (an oxymoron) for over a decade now, and I'm sure Google is paying for this to happen now.

AdBlock Minus

Why do you think they were pushing so hard for WEI? They did try to fundamentally change how the internet works.

I'm not that optimistic. They could implement some sort of aggressive DRM. In the US, all they have to do is label protection as DRM and then it becomes illegal to even have any discussion of how to circumvent it. The overwhelming majority of users aren't going to bother with any ad blocking. In the end, this could end up hurting Google if people build decentralized Youtube alternatives and then they could take viewers away from Youtube.

Here is an alternative Piped link(s):

RESUME VIEWING

Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.

I'm open-source; check me out at GitHub.

It's how we did it with MythTV and over the air or cable tv. The algorithms will just save a file in post, that has the ads removed. And that was 15yrs ago.

And if Google went nuclear and starts embedding the ad into the videos themselves?

YouTube's end game is baked in ads. There are streaming services that already do this so it's not impossible. It would not surprise me one iota if YouTube isn't working on this now.

Once this happens, I suspect that the last round of people that have been holding out to subscribe to premium will either cave and do so or people will simply abandon YouTube.

Twitch has increased their ad blocking techniques for the last 3 years or so. Twitch has been a lot more advanced and aggressive with their method. Yet, there are still ways to subvert the ads on twitch. If I didnt read lemmy, i wouldnt even know youtube was doing anything. I have just basic adblocking ublock

Although every once in a while, twitch will release a new technique and it might take 24 hours to solve.

Wow that's full on antitrust surely? Or was this before the regulatory precedents were set for Internet providers?

That's a big if though. Unless an actual creator-exodus happens, it's not going to happen.

I went through a period of de-googling a couple of years ago. Swapping browser, mobile os, search engine, storage, maps, music, video purchases, voice assistant and even email service was relatively simple, there are alternatives out there which do the job just as well if not better than what Google offer.

The only exception is YouTube, yea there are individual sites that occasionally offer some of the videos I want (often with a subscription attached), there are some federated systems like NewPipe which have some videos but there is no one offering remotely the quantity or quality of what you can get on YouTube for free.

As the article states, it’s basically a monopoly at this point without a viable alternative.

That is and big if though. Yeah you, me and half the people here might leave over this, but we block ads already and so are not highly valued to YouTube or a lot of the creators and are only a small drop in the ocean of viewers.

YouTube is betting on more people turning off ad blockers then those that leave. And i am glad to see that it might be having a small effect on more people actually discovering ad blockers instead. Which I bet is something YouTube did not expect to see.

Exactly, I had people tell me that we should support YouTube, because it costs money and if we don't it will disappear.

I would celebrate the day it would happen, YouTube is actually the reason we don't have much competition there. They used their position and Google monopoly in other areas to establish this monopoly.

Why would creators leave? They only earn money from users that watch ads or use premium. Ad blocker users leaving doesn't affect them.

And if you "just leave", guess what? You just saved them a few bucks in bandwidth. It's a win-win for them.

It's YouTube, they don't need "exposure". They are out to make a profit.

They ditch the "do no evil" motto years ago when seeking military contract to help them kill people

How many assholes do you have?

Not really. There are lots of protocols and such that haven't been broken in any meaningful ways. Attackers have advantage is a weird thing to say.

I was gonna say, the Internet wouldn't be what it is today without those so-called open source hackers. They're the giants that Google and all the rest are standing on the shoulders of.

Google could implement Widevine DRM for all videos.

Or (If you have the storage), yt-dlp.

What's this?

For some reason I'm getting:

        Unable to extract uploader id; please report this issue on  https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp/issues?q="  
    [ytdl_hook] youtube-dl failed: unexpected error occurred 
    Failed to recognize file format.



  

Seems weird.

I refuse to use it.

newpipe is just a client for accessing youtubes servers, yes, so if youtube went away we would need to use vimeo or something else (maybe peertube, open source yt alternative?)

Vimeo: "Today is the day!"

There's no need to look for conspiracies when the truth is simple enough. Current YouTube CEO Neal Mohan was senior vice president of display and video ads at Google. Ads has been his wheelhouse for quite awhile.

Google = biggest advertising company in the world

Youtube = biggest money drain for Google

Adblock = a direct obstacle to the longterm feasibility of Google's ability to ever reconcile the money drain against their primary product (advertising) and end up in the black

The current state of Youtube's profitability is a long way off mattering for anything. For all it costs to run, it can be sustained indefinitely without much issue. This will remain the case until Youtube advertising reaches saturation. Given how much stuff like TV ads still cost, we can safely say this is still a long way off, regardless of the potential rise of competing platforms.

The landscape of youtube & adblockers is unlikely to be the same then, and restrictive measures taken now aren't really representative of what it'll be like. The actions taken now are for 2 reasons: maintenance of consumer expectation, so that it doesn't feel like site monetization is changed substantially when the money faucet gets switched on. And market research.

I have no doubt that a primary intent behind recent actions to do with delays or slowdowns was to measure the blowback, using it a yardstick for further actions not yet taken, which will eventually culminate in some action which actually meaningfully changes Youtube's monetization. But this may not be for many years.

None of us here are really experiencing problems, we have only heard of them and are discussing them. When something new happens, you'll hear "what else is new? they've done [something similar to] this many times before", with those people ignoring that the historic actions were totally mitigated everytime. And in the process, we the vanguard of the internet keeping Google's advertising monopoly restrained by engaging with adblockers, become conditioned to yield to advertising and a Google-controlled internet.

Because that's the only way they can win. Barring serious pro-Google changes to privacy laws around the world, the ultimate means to force advertising simply isn't available to them. Their best hope is to try and convince us that blocking ads is just too much of a hassle, ideally without ever actually making it so in a way that causes some mass migration away from Youtube. That's not a hard line to tread

You look from a position of a tech-savvy user.

You know how Firefox is built different from Chrome. You know what Manifest V3 is. You know how Ublock Origin is different from other adblockers, etc.

The fact is, we are the minority. Most people would just keep using Chrome or Chromium-based browsers and won't know any better. They'll end up (and already end up) in a trap that's super easy to escape, they just don't plan to/don't know how.

And for us Firefox geniuses they prepare quite a few surprises, like the recently found artificial delay of 5s when your user agent reports you use Firefox on some experimental users. This will drag on, and while we absolutely know what to do to fuck them up, normal users, who are the majority, don't.

They probably believed there were easy things they could do that wouldn't result in an "arms race" that would net them a larger profit than the effort they put in. Once you promise x% more revenue they won't let you take that back so they keep pushing.

Because YouTube doesn't want you to skip ads? If the ad was just another part of the show, you would just fast forward past the ad.