YouTube Has Started Blocking Ad Blockers - Slashdot

YouTube Has Started Blocking Ad Blockers

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• The ad blockers can not show the ads, but Google can choose when to stream video.

  If they implement it correctly, the best you can do is block out the ad while still having to wait for it to end.

  • If they implement it correctly, the best you can do is block out the ad while still having to wait for it to end.

    (a) That's still a significant improvement given how bad a lot of the ads are.

    (b) Google still don't get the ad revenue unless they're willing to lie to advertisers about how many people really saw their ad. And by deterring viewers who were never going to watch ads voluntarily anyway they might (might) reduce second order effects that help to promote their best and most profitable content. So it seems like a strategy that can't really win but could really lose.

    I doubt there's any way you can beat the blockers sustainably just by trying to detect them. As with piracy, the optimal strategy to make money from video ads might be to acknowledge the reality and try to make doing what you want easier than working around it. Plenty of relatively popular channels on YouTube feature product placements or have the host openly acknowledge their commercial sponsors as an integral part of the presentation. YouTube's problem is that they haven't found a good way to take their cut of those kinds of ad revenue.

    • As with most piracy strategies though, they don't need to stop everyone. As long as they can make it significantly hard for the average user to use an ad blocked on YouTube, they have accomplished their goal. Yes, you will never be able to stop a really dedicated person willing to code their own blocker, but if mom and dad can't keep up with the blocker of the week that works, they are going to give up, and that is who they really care about.

      • Exactly. Spotify is fine despite the pirate bay existing. If anything pirate bay use plummeted as streaming of movies/tv and music became available at a reasonable price. You don't have to stamp out piracy, just make it more difficult for most people and make paying for it the least annoying option.
        
        I didn't use youtube at all until they had an adfree model. Now, I use it all the time.

        • Re:

          I hit the mute button on my keyboard when the ads starts. If it's Youtube, I look at stuff on my other monitor until the ad ends. If it's Spotify, I wait for the progress bar to stop going so fast. It works for me.

          • Re:

            I am going to sound self-righteous, but I have had a YouTube subscription for a number of years. Partially because it is actual money... far more than Google would ever receive in ad revenue. Same with Spotify, although I don't use that these days -- I download stuff via Bandcamp (streaming gives zero revenue to the artists), stuff that into my collection, and go from there.

            Nothing wrong with blocking ads, but it might be wise to consider going for a sub if you can afford it, if only because it helps get

      • Its not hard once a use a bypass once its implemented, it is really about how many ads are shown. If you have a few ads then that is fine most people won't even bother installing an ad blocker, but as youtube has gotten more ads and benefit ratio of ad blocker changes and people start installing it. If google didn't litter youtube with ads most people would just watch them. Once they start using an ad blocker then its an effort to remove them.

        I am not against ads, I understand they are necessary, I am against excessive ads. The question is who is in the right position to determine what is excessive I don't think its google since they will always want to make more money. It probably isn't the viewer since 0 is the optimal number, however I don't mind a few, but 33% of the time in a show like it is on TV is excess.

    • "given how bad a lot of the ads are"

      It's worse than "bad"... so many of the ads on YouTube are for outright scams. Free energy generators, potions that will cure cancer, RC jets that turn out to be crappy little tin toys, etc, etc.

      No matter how many times people report these scam ads, YouTube just keeps on showing them -- proving that, despite what they claim, the *only* thing YT is interested in is *REVENUE*.

      example (and read the comments for proof) [youtube.com].

      • • Re: This will fail

          Lots of advertisers seem to target the household. So, she might get ads based on your presence. I know I started seeing lots of women's fashion ads after my gf moved in.

    • Re:

      They do lie. Advertisers know it, and deal with that by trying to measuring how much a particular ad affects sales. That is ultimately what matters.

  • The ads wouldn't be so bad, except that: web ads often have malware; youtube ads can be excessive in number sometimes; they have ads before movie previews (ads before ads); asinine ads.

    That said, I see the ads when using the TV, there's no way to block them there. On the PC I block them; it used to just have a long delay before the video started, now the videos are starting immediately (possibly adblock caught up, given time google will catch up, it's just part of the mutli decade long episode of Hungry Games).

  • That's still an improvement in some cases. Years ago there was a (I think) Navy ad that was in full 2k and apparently ONLY 2k. My internet was too slow to play it live and YT would just stop trying to play my actual video playlist when the ad stuttered too much, so I could either refresh to hopefully get another ad or pause the ad and let it buffer enough to hopefully play through. So shortly after that experience I enabled AdBlock. I *wasn't* against watching ads to pay for the service but they had simply failed to provide something usable. In fact if AdBlock stops working I might pay for premium, which wasn't even an option when I first starting blocking them.

    • Plenty of people have download caps, so they too are directly paying for every byte of video, even the ads. I remember when cable TV came to my country, first there were no ads, because you were already paying for the content. Then there were ads between shows, because that didn't interrupt the show. Now there are ads during the show, and even cuts to the show's running times so they can squeeze even more ads in. It seems like Youtube is doing the same, with an added helping of tracking and datamining that cable companies could only dream about.

      I have no objection to advertising and would happily accept a static ad on the side of a page (or, you know, just PAY for content. I have no problem with this). But advertising companies have consistently proven themselves to be greedy, dishonest, and irresponsible (ads for illegal products/services, scams, serving up malware, trackers and spyware,ads covering content, pretending that the ad IS the content etc). So fuck them. Block all the ads.

  • Re: This will fail

    Which basically puts us back to using the mute button during commercials on broadcast or cable TV... Not good
• but it's really not hard to stop ad blockers. You just serve the ads from the same servers as the video. And you don't serve up the real content until the advert has played. Best case you can black hole the adverts and add a long delay.
  
  The reason Youtube didn't do this is they were afraid of competition. They're not anymore. Nobody is even pretending to enforce anti-trust law, so they're free to do whatever they want with zero risk of competitors. If one shows up they'll just spend a bunch of money from their Search business to undermine them until they go out of business. And there's squadoo you can do about it because we won't stop putting people in charge that won't enforce laws against mega corps.
  
  If you don't like it, change how you vote. It does mean you'll have to give up some things, mostly culture war nonsense and moral panics. But it's tough to give those up because they're designed to push your buttons. You need to be aware when your buttons are being pushed.

  • Re:

    If voting actually did anything maybe I would.
    But all the options I get when voting aren't good enough. So no voting for me and I am left really annoyed that congress can sell their vote but I can't. I want $20. That is a decent dinner for a change.

    • I have family alive today because a Democrat

      gave them health care. So yeah, voting matters. And there are women all over the country suffering through miscarriages. So far none of them have died, but sooner or later one of them won't be able to make the drive to another state for medical treatment. So again, voting matters.

      • • • Re:

            Capitalists. Politicians. Same difference.

  • Re:

    Then I'll just have the videos buffer, strip the ad and go get the soda while it loads and buffers. YouTube thinks I watch the ad, instead my system is downloading and buffering the stream, stripping the ads as they come and serving me what I want to see.

  • • The GOP took the house and Facebook stopped worrying about anti-trust law enforcement. You do the math.
      
      But hell, I would settle for you nominating slightly less crazy Republicans at this point. Their budget has been shown to be *worse* for the US economy than a default. And a default would be disastrous.
      • yeash the GOP is so Pro Google and ilk.... Read the news

        • They aren't anti Google

          It's culture War bullshit. They're attacking Google as being a woke or politically correct or whatever they're calling it this week corporation to push your buttons. They're doing that so they can do a 22% cut across the board to the Federal budget and pocket that money for themselves while crashing the economy you live and work in (whether you're American or not if you're US economy collapses will take the rest of the world with us right after we go to war with anyone that's not a nuclear power and maybe s

          • Re:

            They're doing that so they can do a 22% cut across the board to the Federal budget and pocket that money for themselves...
            
            Now here, I have to call Bullshit! You're entitled to express your opinions, but you should at least try to make your wild claims plausable. Either show me some citations for that absurdity or admit that you have no evidence to back up the claim that the Republicans are planning on all of the money saved by a budget cut.

            • • Re:

                I see that I should have been more specific. I wasn't asking about cutting 22% of the budget, I was asking about your claim that the Republicans were planning to pocket all of that money, a claim that you very carefully avoided discussing in your reply. Either provide citations or admit that you were lying. Again.

• Re:

  Not if they start splicing the ads into the video on the fly.

  • Re:

    The CPU time to encode that on the fly would cost more than the ad is worth.

    • Re:

      You don't have to re-encode the whole thing. Most codecs have some sort of "group of pictures" concept, implied or directly supported, where a chunk can be played without reference to any other chunk. So it's just a matter of inserting the ad chunks in the stream at the appropriate moment, adjusting the metadata so it's not easy to detect when the ads start and finish.

      As long as the coding parameters (codec, bitrates, resolution, etc) stay the same (and all of this is under YT's control) there should be