Business YouTube looks to be testing server-side ad injection to counter ad blockers

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YouTube’s crackdown on tools that block advertising continues with server-side ad injection.


The developer of SponsorBlock, which is a crowdsourced extension to skip sponsored segments, shared today that “YouTube is currently experimenting with server-side ad injection.”

At a high-level, this should mean that the ad is now part of the video that’s being streamed to your device instead of being delivered separately to the desktop web or mobile client. That current approach allows ad blockers to intercept and not show the advertising. Going forward, the ad should be indistinguishable from the video.

In the case of SponsorBlock, “all timestamps are offset by the ad times.”

For now, I set up the server to detect when someone is submitting from a browser with this happening and rejecting the submission to prevent the database from getting filled with incorrect submissions.
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Server-side ad injection is a broader problem for full ad blockers, which YouTube has been working to counter through various means in the past year. After browser extensions, Google targeted third-party clients, which are popular on mobile. As always, users are encouraged to subscribe to YouTube Premium.

This is currently still in testing, with some users already encountering the problem. However, it’s not yet widely rolled out. YouTube will presumably not detail what’s happening behind-the-scenes, but it would be interesting to know how the insertion is handled and what changes YouTube had to implement to its ad-serving infrastructure.

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I don't trust Google's spaghetti coding pajeets to actually be able to manage to make this work. Anyways, I think Twitch tried to do something like this but it's still distinguishable enough from the stream it's injecting into that it can still be filtered out, even if it's a bit buggy to do so. Could be wrong and that they've found a way past it, regardless all this does is generate more ire towards Youtube. I'm not saying a proper alternative will actually rise up, most people are unable to leave what's basically a walled garden due to all of the legacy content that'd have to be exported, but it does them no favors.
 
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Rate me MATI but, fuck off already Google, I would not pay shit for sponsors and mid-roll ads or paying for offline videos outside of my country. Pajeets these days are more massively greedier than Jews, especially conglomerate ones and tech support scammers. They will do absolutely anything just to make it barely usable on mobile and desktop. I would still have uBlock Origins, SponsorBlock and other extensions to block greedy street shitters to force us to subscribe to their ponzi schemes.

full sapport and sabscreption saar
 
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This is one war I am looking forward to. The war to wipe out ads and other intrusive shit wasting your time. Because there is a delightful arms race of code happening here.

On one side, a bunch of greedy Jeets... and on the other, a bunch of pissed off autists sick of seeing ads.

My money is on autism.
 
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Toolbox said:
basically a walled garden due to all of the legacy content
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A shit ton of stuff that I used to enojoy got nuked and I know that down the line a lot more is about to get removed in the future too. So this "excuse" will soon be a meme.

If you make videos on the internet you need to embrace the "don't put all your eggs in one basket" mentality and upload on Odysee, Bitchute, Rumble and so on in parallel to Youtube for the worst case scenario. I honestly have no sympathy for retards who cries about their "internet career" if they got some issues with Google, since they have had the last 4 years to learn that it can be rug pulled at any moment nowadays. I'm actually pretty optimistic about an alternative will rise up, maybe not with 4K support etc, but good enough to replace Youtube as your "go to" site for videos.
 
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Google injects unblockable ads, people begin dropping the platform. A new streaming platform is adopted, years pass, the cycle repeats.
This is the ad cycle from which everyone runs away. From radio, to TV, to cable TV, to the internet, so on. Marketing pod-people have asked themselves how can they make their shit unavoidable, and targeted ads was their go-to "solution". We know must make do with what will surely follow.
 
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Toolbox said:
I don't trust Google's spaghetti coding pajeets to actually be able to manage to make this work.
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Speaking from personal experience pajeets do write functional code... just the most rushed, ineffective and sloppy code you've ever seen.
Personal horror story here, we outsourced some code to Indian... what I saw was a for loop filtering an list of items into another list, then another for loop right after that one processing the items in the filtered list. Good lord that's some dumb shit written by someone who doesn't think good.
 
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We'll find a way, and in any case I can still make a script that will blank the video and mute the audio when the ads play.
Toolbox said:
most people are unable to leave what's basically a walled garden due to all of the legacy content
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LOL a bunch of my saved videos are now blanks thanks to all the nuking, and most weren't even controversial/illegal shit.
 
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Fuck intrusive all of YT ads. I don't need them at all.

Google is really trying hard to win the "asshole corpo of the year" every time.
 
I honestly don't know why they didn't do this years and years ago. Seems like an obvious solution to imbed them into the video seamlessly, or at least force a blank screen that can't be skipped if it detects a blocker. I haven't watched many ads in general for so long, since the early days of DVR's at least that it would make me outright boycott anything advertised intrusively.

Google's search engine did the same thing though. Went from actually getting what you wanted in the first page to having the first several pages being paid for.
 
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