• Margot Robbie@lemm.ee
    45·
    6 months ago

    It’s times like these that online advertisements need to get creative to get ahead in this never ending adblocking arms race, just like the very subtle advertisement in the car chase scene in the Academy Award nominated film, “Barbie”, now available on Blu-ray and select streaming services.

    • Foggyfroggy@lemmy.world
      21·
      6 months ago

      I know right? The other day I was drinking a coke and wondering about side effects of weight loss drugs such as Ozempic, and it occurred to me that advertising could be a lot more creative and subtle.

  • Melody Fwygon@lemmy.oneEnglish
    44·
    6 months ago

    So we have:

    • Ad Blockers
    • ‘Ad Blocker’ blockers
    • ‘‘Ad blocker’ blocker’ blockers
    • ‘’‘Ad Blocker’ blocker’ blocker’ blockers
    • ‘’‘‘Ad Blocker’ blocker’ blocker’ blocker’ blockers
    • ‘’‘’‘Ad Blocker’ blocker’ blocker’ blocker’ blockers’ blockers; and finally;
    • ‘’‘’‘‘Ad Blocker’ blocker’ blocker’ blocker’ blockers’ blocker’ blockers; with;
    • ‘’‘’‘’‘Ad Blocker’ blocker’ blocker’ blocker’ blockers’ blocker’ blocker’ blockers

    in development.

    • cRazi_man@lemm.ee
      311·
      6 months ago

      They have infinite resources. They’re making gestures to dissuade normies. I suspect this will get them most of the result they want. They’re also wasting time, effort and resources of adblock programmers (and that is a far more limited resource).

      • Mubelotix@jlai.lu
        11·
        6 months ago

        Sure but as long as there is a least one dedicated bearded dude hidden in a dark underground room behind his screen, they will be defeated. No matter how much they spent on the new technology. What I mean is that devs might burn out, they will still be replaced by others. And we get such people faster than youtube is able to burn them out

      • zarathustrad@lemmy.world
        1·
        6 months ago

        They don’t need to actually unblock everything. They just need to convince their advertisers and stock holders they are.

    • reddithalation@sopuli.xyz
      31·
      6 months ago

      nah, if they embed the ad into the video stream (they were testing this for some users!), the only adblocking option will be to blank out the screen and wait through the ad (or download the video in advance and edit the ad out automatically), both of which would make it a lot more annoying to adblock than currently.

      • skulblaka@sh.itjust.works
        7·
        6 months ago

        This is actually one of very few valid cases for an LLM, to help sponsorblock determine ad segments by analyzing the word choice and speech patterns in segments of the video.

        • reddithalation@sopuli.xyz
          3·
          6 months ago

          you can skip through sponsor segments, but these are ads from youtube, not from the creator, and youtube will not let you conveniently skip through the ads. if implemented correctly, youtube could ensure that the ad is fully played, which would need downloading and automatic editing to counter.

          • Tlaloc_Temporal@lemmy.ca
            3·
            6 months ago

            How would they determine if the ad is played without trusting the client? I guess they could screw with the buffer, but that would really piss of people with poor internet, and most people would prefer an ad-length black screen to whatever attention wrenching dark pattern manipulative brown noise wants to infect your mind today.

            • zarathustrad@lemmy.world
              2·
              6 months ago

              Don’t worry, I have been using the powerful technology of “the mute button” and “doing other stuff” since before cable TV existed. We always have alternatives.

            • reddithalation@sopuli.xyz
              2·
              6 months ago

              That is an interesting question. From what I know, youtube has every video in chunks that they serve to the client, and so server side ad injection is just serving some ad chunks before the video. I think you’re right with the buffer thing, it seems to me like the only way to make sure the client can’t skip it would be to make the buffer shorter, impacting some people (although seems like only really people with internet thats fast enough for streaming some seconds, but not other seconds, which is an odd catagory)

              Ultimately it would be a tradeoff for youtube, but the fact that they put the effort into doing mass testing of the idea at all shows that clearly there are some good incentives, and it may eventually be implemented.

      • Mubelotix@jlai.lu
        31·
        6 months ago

        No, you just need to skip the ad. Sponsorblock has been working for years now, solving pretty much the same problem

        • Zwiebel@feddit.orgEnglish
          3·
          6 months ago

          Sponsor Block relies on the ads being at the same timestamp for all users

        • reddithalation@sopuli.xyz
          11·
          6 months ago

          nope, the ad time varies unlike a sponsor segment, and also youtube would not let you skip through an ad while streaming it, whereas sponsors you can, hence the download and edit out with LLM or whatever algorithm works best

            • reddithalation@sopuli.xyz
              2·
              6 months ago

              yes, but if youtube only serves you the real video chunks after your client plays through the ad chunks (all in the same media stream to the client), theres gonna be some waiting involved, not like adblocking today where it is instant.

              • Mubelotix@jlai.lu
                1·
                6 months ago

                You could trick youtube into believing you are ahead in the video so that it fills the buffer earlier

  • webghost0101@sopuli.xyz
    341·
    6 months ago

    What this? I cant hear you over my high definition yt-dlp content.

    Where i am going I haven’t needed a google account in over a year.

    • SkyezOpen@lemmy.world
      2·
      6 months ago

      Dunno if I’m not updated but occasionally ads will actually load or at least try to load and completely restart my video. Usually only happens when I wake the computer up and it has a YouTube video midway through.

    • SolidGrue@lemmy.worldEnglish
      3·
      6 months ago

      Blocker
      Blockers
      Blocker 3
      Blocker Resurrection
      Blocker vs Inline
      Blocker vs Inline: Requiem
      Revanced
      Blocker: Covenant
      Blocker: Romulus

      • CeeBee_Eh@lemmy.world
        3·
        6 months ago

        The new timeline reboot:

        • Blocker: The beginning
        • The Blocker Returns
        • The Dark Blocker
        • Blocker Homecoming
        • Rise of the Blockers
        • Dawn of the Blockers
        • War of the Blockers
        • Kingdom of the Blockers

        And to bring it full circle:

        • Planet of the Blockers
        • yngmnwntr@lemmy.ml
          3·
          6 months ago

          I truly hope the new planet of the apes franchise is building to an actual planet of the apes remake. Time traveling astronauts and shattered statue of liberty. I feel like they’re already sowing the seeds for human mutants living underground worshipping an unexploded atomic bomb. Man those movies were weird.

  • EmperorHenry@discuss.tchncs.de
    181·
    6 months ago

    Youtube’s crackdown on adblocker usage has created a huge Streisand effect. There’s a lot of people all over the world that would’ve never known about adblockers if youtube just didn’t say anything and didn’t do exactly what they did.

    Now, all the major adblockers and ad-blocking browsers have stepped their game up and made it so people can still block ads on youtube.

    There’s userscripts you can get from greasyfork…or is it greaseyfork that allow you to bypass all of youtube’s bullshit.

    100% of the videos that actually belong on youtube are almost always demonetized anyway.

    If you’re not constantly getting demonetized on every video you put out, despite bending over backwards to follow the rules, you’re doing something wrong.

    • bleistift2@sopuli.xyzEnglish
      9·
      6 months ago

      There’s a lot of people all over the world that would’ve never known about adblockers

      I see this sentiment a lot. Is there any reliable data to support it?

      • Somerefriedbeans@lemmy.ca
        4·
        6 months ago

        Not OP but in my personal experience I’ve talked to countless people that had no idea watching YouTube without ads is possible (without paying) and their minds were blown. With Google calling out attention to it like this, I’m sure many will get curious. Most people don’t use their electronics beyond basic functionality…

        And tbh you’re gonna be hard pressed to get real data of how many ppl are suddenly finding out about it.

    • Tlaloc_Temporal@lemmy.ca
      1·
      6 months ago

      Not to mention that Vanced-type apps and content mirrors are still going strong, and proper alternative platforms like Grayjay and Nebula are getting more attractive.

      I wonder how soon self-hosted video distribution will be feasible. Does ActivityPub support that yet?

      • theEmeraldM@lemmy.zip
        3·
        6 months ago

        I think Peertube fits that description: “PeerTube is a self-hosted ActivityPub-federated video streaming platform using P2P directly in your web browser.”

  • DNOS@lemmy.ml
    15·
    6 months ago

    YouTube can definitely afford a war ship and pay people to shoot…we may have enough people to operate a death star for free but can we afford one ?

    • madcaesar@lemmy.world
      21·
      6 months ago

      The image doesn’t quite work because youtube needs a MASSIVE solution that works, scales, doesn’t fuck up their infrastructure and on and on and on.

      Meanwhile on the user front, all your doing essentially is just skipping parts of a video, that will always be infinitely cheaper easier to do. Challenging for sure, but the solution can be small.

      Even something as stupid as delaying your video start by 1 min, pre buffering then skipping ads. It’s brute force and barbaric but the point is that Google can’t do shit against that.

      My ultimate vision is AI that preloads videos you want and detects ads / sponsor segments and just skips them / cuts them out on your device.

      • Bytemeister@lemmy.worldΕλληνικά
        6·
        6 months ago

        Another way to think about it… YouTube has huge amounts of compute resources, but per user it’s an extremely small amount. Your phone has orders of magnitude more power to dedicate to you than YouTube does. Collectively, we have more processing power than YouTube.

  • bykdd@lemmy.dbzer0.com
    13·
    6 months ago

    as a firefox user i cant give up and just installed freetube, exported everything from yt. its great

  • Roopappy@lemmy.mlEnglish
    12·
    6 months ago

    This just in: Google suddently discontinues support for popular and profitable ad blocker blocker blocker blocker, because literally all they know how to do is kill things that work.