What I don’t understand is why doesn’t Google just insert the adverts into the video stream from the main video itself. Default to current, if the user goes over a certain time without playing an advert, insert it.
With SponsorBlock, blocking such ads on YouTube is already a solved problem for sufficiently popular videos. Unless YouTube goes further and disables seeking during the portion of the video with ads. Then we're back to ad blockers removing some page functionality (the Javascript that disables seeking).
Right, but that’s just a problem with not inserting it in the same places for everyone. Don’t even need JS to disable syncing, the events can be tripped but the service can just ignore them, it’s one video stream
They can switch to HLS and dynamically insert ad segments randomly in the video duration. Of course it costs them to build such a system, but if the adblockers are already costing them money to begin with...
The argument I've heard against this is its much harder to report views this way. It basically becomes an honor system between Google and the advertiser, when today its the user getting the ad, so it's easier to verify.
Google is big enough where they could eventually do this most likely, but smaller sites won't have the 'credit' to pull this off.
An easier way would be to do what Twitch does and not send video to the client while an ad is supposed to be running(also not buffer video when an ad is due). That way even the best adblocker can only show a blank screen while the ad is supposed to be shown.
Couldn't you theoretically show the video 30 seconds later to the user so that if there are a total of 3 ads in the video, you can automatically detect when they play and then skip it? Idk how to explain this better since English isn't my main language.
It’s more work since that’s switching from shoving bytes over a network socket as quickly as possible to knowing where in a stream they can start inserting new frames, and they have to have versions of the ads in each format and resolution, but I’d be surprised if they haven’t already built that so they’d know exactly where the threshold is when more ad views pay for the additional hosting costs.
We developed and used that technique in production in the 00s, it's surprisingly easy with HLS, and doesn't cost more. On the contrary, being able to segment that way costs less as you only need to cache hot segments on the CDN and sequence/assemble on the fly based on server side ad inserts and client side player controls.
We didn't try it with VP8/VP9 (previously On2 / Duck TrueMotion) or whatever Google seems to prefer to push instead of the emerging "standard" challenging Flash back then, so I can't comment on that particular flavor.
Much more difficult if you're trying to support multiple types of streaming to multiple eras of clients (e.g. legacy TVs and handsets with earlier YouTube clients), as they surely still have to.
If you want to serve different ads dynamically you'd have to reencode every stream on the fly or find a way to dynamically insert segments into the existing encoded stream. Not sure the second is feasible with current codecs.
You can do that with m3u8 files. This is done for example by Pluto TV. Sure it is easily circumvented by simply stripping out these URLs, especially if they are marked as ads (And removing a m3u8 tag)
But in the end it would be again an arms race of adblockers and Google, so it would change basically nothing.
Re-encoding is probably too expensive. And storing the same variant for everyone would effectively double the storage requirement (for ad-free users) and will be quickly defeated with Sponsorblock
Re-encoding is difficult but you don't necessarily have to do that. As far as I know it's possible to just splice segments of video between "key" frames without otherwise re-encoding the full video.
YouTube already re-encodes every uploaded video into multiple formats; it would be possible for them to develop a "smart" encoder to be aware of the visual content of the video in order to place "key" frames at natural breaking points of the video, such that subsequent ad insertion would be semantically correct and not too jarring.
That sounds like it would take way too much processing power. Google is not like Twitch where relatively few streams are served to many millions, it's more like many millions of videos to many millions of users.
Is there any legit data about how much revenue loss is resulted from adblocking users?
From my years of experience commutiny and knowning non-tech savvy users(majority of my circle and beyond), most people just mindlessly wait for the video ad to display the skip button and then continue watching.
I would assume that only a very minor segment of users use anykind of adblock. And if anyone is using adblock, it means they are extremely hard customers to sell anything and probably can spot all the scammy things those ads are promoting. And to add insult to injury, now even 5 minutes of videos include at least 3 minutes(exaggerated but not too much) of promotions by the creator.
If, YT is suffering from this already hard to convert people using adblocks, I'd say they need to look at their business model.
Also, unlike may be 2-3 years ago, most people during my daily commute to work no longer watch YT, rather the frequent stuff are FB/TikTok/Instagram reels/shorts(or whatever those are called).
Also, I'd pay for a subscription if getting YT premium means my search for things wouldn't turn up a video where someone is typing something or doing 10 promotions(on top of obnoxious Dior or whatever adverts) before sharing the actual information at last 1-2 seconds or no useful info at all even. Recently, when I seek for something, the top 10 results are frequently click-baits, promoting lots of garbage with no useful info at all (ala recipe sites w/ huge history and tradition blurb before giving the recipe).
I run a media site on the low end of popularity (about 200k MAU). In 2015, we were able to make 36k a month with merely 2 banner ads per page, and one sponsored link. Now, we make 7k.
Adblock usage has always been high on desktop, but the problem now is that users are using Adblock on their mobile devices as well, and our mobile site has feature parity with our app so there’s no point in using the app.
Our users trend young with more than 70% being under 25.
Currently we are only able to survive because our older members joined the subscription service as they aged out of the sub 25 age range. If we were starting this site today, it would be impossible. In fact, most of our completion is people who are hosting for “free” on Cloudflare before their site dies when they get forced to pay bandwidth bills.
That revenue drop isn’t necessarily correlated with adblockers. Across my sites, adblockers have only been present in 20-30%. Ad engagement little changed. Only CPC/RPM has fallen. My data goes back to 2012 or so.
Advertisers are paying less because ads are overvalued.
Even if the user is not running an adblocker, any number of things could cause an ad to fail to load, load slowly, etc. Ad blindness is also a huge issue. That last part is why so many are turning to Amazon affiliate links.
The best decision I ever made was implementing a low cost subscription. The subscription revenue pays 3X as much as ad revenue. I charge just a couple bucks a month. The subscription removes ads, enhances privacy, and gives early access to content. I don’t woory about adblockers at all. I tried fighting them years ago and the 5% of additional revenue did not pay for the time invested. I don’t even pop up an anti adblocker popup.
YT ads didn't bother me that much in the past. But 2-3 years ago something happened on YT. They became incredibly frequent and even more obnoxious. So I stopped seeing YT ads :)
But I saw one yesterday by mistake. A scam trying to sell me some sort of infinite energy device.
The claim is that ad blocker detection scripts violate.
Member States shall ensure that the use of electronic communications networks to store information or to gain access to information stored in the terminal equipment of a subscriber or user is only allowed on condition that the subscriber or user concerned is provided with clear and comprehensive information in accordance with Directive 95/46/EC, inter alia about the purposes of the processing, and is offered the right to refuse such processing by the data controller. This shall not prevent any technical storage or access for the sole purpose of carrying out or facilitating the transmission of a communication over an electronic communications network, or as strictly necessary in order to provide an information society service explicitly requested by the subscriber violates.
Detecting if a request to Google's servers for an ad fails is not the same thing as gaining access to information stored in a user's device.
They're running a javascript on the device that is not needed to deliver the service. And that script accesses attributes of the browser. That's illegal without user consent.
If they would detect this server side it wouldn't be illegal.
You just declared a bunch of stuff illegal without even knowing a thing about them.
Scripts are continuously accessing browser state. It’s what web sites do. She. You visit a site you give consent to the site to run its code on your system. You can’t have a website without this.
Under your silly assertion loading any website ads or not would be a violation.
If people succeed in codifying 'their right' to block ads, how would the internet not be doomed to die as is, or at best aggressively centralize even more.
You'd have to pay each website you consume, and obviously people won't have 50 individual subscriptions.
YouTube even offers a premium plan, so people are essentially arguing they're entitled to consuming content for free with no exchange.
People seem to forget the web existed before widespread advertising. Ads are not necessary for all content on the web and, personally, I'd be fine if every last ad supported site on the internet disappeared.
It would actually be a significant improvement, as SEO affiliate blogspam would lose its economic incentive, making it easier to find authentic sites again.
This comment prompted me to think of some website that I rely upon that uses such adware to survive. I can’t think of a single one! Most things I use either dont have ads, ask for donations, or use a paywall/subscription system.
> People seem to forget the web existed before widespread advertising
They haven't forgotten anything. This claim is so barely true it's not worth considering.
The web both became accessible to ordinary users and gained support for inline images with the release of Win/Mac Mosaic in August 1993. In October 1994 the first banner ad appeared in HotWired, the online version of Wired magazine.
Given that that web went only one year between gaining support for images and people starting to use them for advertising, the idea that the web existed before advertising isn't really true. There have been ads for as long as there has been web content created by paid professionals, as is to be expected.
> I'd be fine if every last ad supported site on the internet disappeared.
You are of course welcome to create a list of websites that don't advertise and then only browse those, although recall that HN obviously wouldn't be usable by you as it is supported by ads. The rest of us will get on with living our lives.
Why should people not have the right to block ads? It's my client and my device. If your content can only exist if you have to force feed people advertisements for some corporation to profit, maybe your content is not that important
By and large, we don't especially feel the need to block ads that aren't interfering with us. Back when Google's ad business was fairly new, they did simple text ads that stayed out of the way, and they made plenty of money on it.
If that was what the vast majority of ads were today, I probably wouldn't even bother with an adblocker.
But these days there are pop-ups, and pop-overs, and pop-unders, and autoplaying videos that follow me as I scroll the page (and which, on mobile, hide about 1/3 of the content I'm there to see).
And even if I could deal with those annoyances, there are vast swathes of ad networks today that need to be avoided at all costs, because they host drive-by downloads, page redirects, and every other kind of spam, scam, and malware you can imagine.
We didn't start this war. The ad industry did. If they had been content to make a decent profit while enabling other websites to do the same, we wouldn't be in this mess. But they just had to try and squeeze every last drop of attention and money out of us.
So, we will fight for a right to block ads. And if giant chunks of the web end up being financially unsustainable because the ad business collapses entirely, that is not on us.
Accepting payments from users can make the site have to deal with sales taxes or VAT in every jurisdiction that it has paid users in.
A reasonable way for sites to deal with that is for the site to not sell directly to users. Instead they sell to some third party aggregator and the aggregator sells to users. Basically the same model we see with app stores--people in 20 different countries buy your iOS app through Apple's store and it is Apple that deals with the 20 different tax authorities.
I think we'd end up with a very small of very large aggregators, because generally a bigger aggregator is more efficient than a smaller aggregator.
But then we probably won't need micropayments for this. Nearly everyone will be using the aggregators enough that an occasional normal sized payment to maintain a credit in their accounts will work.
We could always use this same logic however, saying there are barriers to some business with some law. Turns out certain barriers are good. We decided if your business model relies on unpaid or child labor to be profitable, its no longer a good business model, and enforce that with legal barriers. Likewise here, we are starting to realize this slimy attention seeking advertising model is also not a sustainable business plan. If businesses fold as a result, so be it, what remains will be the stronger business plans that don’t need to resort to such low and morally dubious tactics to survive.
Google's "Web Integrity" and Microsoft's mandatory TPM in Windows are working hard to save the day!
What Google servers send is what your browser will render. Guaranteed integrity, end to end. Though not "your" browser technically. And not really "your" machine anymore, but nevermind that. Just sit back and enjoy your YouTube.
In many ways that is the problem, and it is created by the video streaming industry which demands it's pound of flesh. Eventually they will run out of steam and a more friendly means of streaming will emerge. At the moment it feels like a stand off, which none of us want.
not sure what you're talking about. i've been on the internet long before ads became ubiquitous and forced, and it worked just fine. youtube is highly profitable for google already. my device, my rules.
Or maybe it would just be decommercialized? People did stuff online for fun and wrote things before it was all about money. I wouldn't mind going back to those times.
I fail to understand the economics behind this. If google cant show ads, and people dont want to pay for a subscription, how are they going to be able to keep youtube up and running? It’s not a public service, they have to monetise somehow.
I think there are two aspects to this which are worth challenging.
First and foremost is the issue of companies trying to dictate what you are allowed to do on your own computer. If Google sends you the data, who are they to say how your computer decides to interpret it? What's next? Mandatory camera access so they can monitor your living room to make sure "unauthorized" people aren't watching? They would if they could get away with it.
Two is the business model of offering a free, useful service until people are hooked and then squeezing people for money. It's dishonest, it's extortion. Especially something like YouTube where the site itself is meaningless without the content creators who all largely started out as volunteers. It's the digital equivalent of a time-share sales pitch. Trap your audience. It perverts the normal operation of markets because everyone made decisions to use YouTube based on false economics, and now they are such a behemoth that moving to other platforms is not realistic for many. Had they not been allowed to do that, then the competitive landscape would look much different.
The internet before huge conglomerates started stealing and monetizing people's content through forced network effects would have absolutely blown your mind then.
Yes YouTube employees literally steal people's content. They break into the houses of hard working creators and riffle through their collection of USB sticks looking for videos to steal.
The bad faith hysterics of some of the people who block ads is really something to behold.
They are free to make it a paid subscription service, no legal challenge there.
What they cannot do is access your device without your consent. So scanning for adblock extensions is illegal in Europe if you didn't ask permission for it.
It’s still to be decided whether that’s illegal and the most likely outcome would be a switch to a fail safe approach: don’t detect an ad blocker, validate that the ad played. That’s not perfect of course but they have billions of dollars to fund it.
Use of adblockers has been pretty constant over time and YT has existed through that entire time. There doesn't seem to be any danger of this scenario actually happening. "Normies" just don't care enough to install adblock.
I want YouTube to become just one in the many competing video hosting services with various business and ownership models. I mostly like how nebula.tv runs their business (being owned collectively by the authors themselves, flat fee, no ads). Maybe we can have more of those instead?
Google has enough cash and is big enough. I want it to be smaller and less powerful, the economics of this is that we are tired of superpowerful Google.
How does Netflix make money? HBO Max? Apple TV? Amazon Prime Video?
Google wants to have their cake and eat it too by having a "free" platform but also controlling exactly how people view it in their browser. If you want to actually control content you need to have a real paywall. There are ways they could implement ads that would not be blockable (with a logged in user), but they don't want to do that for some reason.
Well, Netflix DOES control how you view video in your browser, however. Open a video in Firefox? No 4K for you. Hardware DRM is also used. Don’t have an HDCP-enabled display/GPU/Driver? Low bitrate welcomes you.
> how are they going to be able to keep youtube up and running
The very same way that they’ve been doing so far. YouTube/Google/Alphabet is definitely not short on cash, so that means that even with ad blocking they’re doing just fine.
Isn't that the whole premise of capitalism? If one business can't profitably exist (or can no longer exist due to changing market conditions or regulation) then something else will take its place if it's able to deliver the same service for cheaper?
And EU would have to cave after people complain that YouTube, tiktok, every news site, reddit, the entire internet becomes nothing more than a pay wall to them.
Or maybe more likely, consume content from unfriendly countries who will simply ignore the regulation, and force a continuous game of whack a mole with their domains.
Readit News
Google is big enough where they could eventually do this most likely, but smaller sites won't have the 'credit' to pull this off.
We didn't try it with VP8/VP9 (previously On2 / Duck TrueMotion) or whatever Google seems to prefer to push instead of the emerging "standard" challenging Flash back then, so I can't comment on that particular flavor.
Much more difficult if you're trying to support multiple types of streaming to multiple eras of clients (e.g. legacy TVs and handsets with earlier YouTube clients), as they surely still have to.
But in the end it would be again an arms race of adblockers and Google, so it would change basically nothing.
YouTube already re-encodes every uploaded video into multiple formats; it would be possible for them to develop a "smart" encoder to be aware of the visual content of the video in order to place "key" frames at natural breaking points of the video, such that subsequent ad insertion would be semantically correct and not too jarring.
Is there any legit data about how much revenue loss is resulted from adblocking users?
From my years of experience commutiny and knowning non-tech savvy users(majority of my circle and beyond), most people just mindlessly wait for the video ad to display the skip button and then continue watching.
I would assume that only a very minor segment of users use anykind of adblock. And if anyone is using adblock, it means they are extremely hard customers to sell anything and probably can spot all the scammy things those ads are promoting. And to add insult to injury, now even 5 minutes of videos include at least 3 minutes(exaggerated but not too much) of promotions by the creator.
If, YT is suffering from this already hard to convert people using adblocks, I'd say they need to look at their business model.
Also, unlike may be 2-3 years ago, most people during my daily commute to work no longer watch YT, rather the frequent stuff are FB/TikTok/Instagram reels/shorts(or whatever those are called).
Also, I'd pay for a subscription if getting YT premium means my search for things wouldn't turn up a video where someone is typing something or doing 10 promotions(on top of obnoxious Dior or whatever adverts) before sharing the actual information at last 1-2 seconds or no useful info at all even. Recently, when I seek for something, the top 10 results are frequently click-baits, promoting lots of garbage with no useful info at all (ala recipe sites w/ huge history and tradition blurb before giving the recipe).
Adblock usage has always been high on desktop, but the problem now is that users are using Adblock on their mobile devices as well, and our mobile site has feature parity with our app so there’s no point in using the app.
Our users trend young with more than 70% being under 25.
Currently we are only able to survive because our older members joined the subscription service as they aged out of the sub 25 age range. If we were starting this site today, it would be impossible. In fact, most of our completion is people who are hosting for “free” on Cloudflare before their site dies when they get forced to pay bandwidth bills.
Advertisers are paying less because ads are overvalued.
Even if the user is not running an adblocker, any number of things could cause an ad to fail to load, load slowly, etc. Ad blindness is also a huge issue. That last part is why so many are turning to Amazon affiliate links.
The best decision I ever made was implementing a low cost subscription. The subscription revenue pays 3X as much as ad revenue. I charge just a couple bucks a month. The subscription removes ads, enhances privacy, and gives early access to content. I don’t woory about adblockers at all. I tried fighting them years ago and the 5% of additional revenue did not pay for the time invested. I don’t even pop up an anti adblocker popup.
But I saw one yesterday by mistake. A scam trying to sell me some sort of infinite energy device.
If they would detect this server side it wouldn't be illegal.
Scripts are continuously accessing browser state. It’s what web sites do. She. You visit a site you give consent to the site to run its code on your system. You can’t have a website without this.
Under your silly assertion loading any website ads or not would be a violation.
You'd have to pay each website you consume, and obviously people won't have 50 individual subscriptions.
YouTube even offers a premium plan, so people are essentially arguing they're entitled to consuming content for free with no exchange.
They haven't forgotten anything. This claim is so barely true it's not worth considering.
The web both became accessible to ordinary users and gained support for inline images with the release of Win/Mac Mosaic in August 1993. In October 1994 the first banner ad appeared in HotWired, the online version of Wired magazine.
Given that that web went only one year between gaining support for images and people starting to use them for advertising, the idea that the web existed before advertising isn't really true. There have been ads for as long as there has been web content created by paid professionals, as is to be expected.
> I'd be fine if every last ad supported site on the internet disappeared.
You are of course welcome to create a list of websites that don't advertise and then only browse those, although recall that HN obviously wouldn't be usable by you as it is supported by ads. The rest of us will get on with living our lives.
Most of YouTube is just clickbait anyway
By and large, we don't especially feel the need to block ads that aren't interfering with us. Back when Google's ad business was fairly new, they did simple text ads that stayed out of the way, and they made plenty of money on it.
If that was what the vast majority of ads were today, I probably wouldn't even bother with an adblocker.
But these days there are pop-ups, and pop-overs, and pop-unders, and autoplaying videos that follow me as I scroll the page (and which, on mobile, hide about 1/3 of the content I'm there to see).
And even if I could deal with those annoyances, there are vast swathes of ad networks today that need to be avoided at all costs, because they host drive-by downloads, page redirects, and every other kind of spam, scam, and malware you can imagine.
We didn't start this war. The ad industry did. If they had been content to make a decent profit while enabling other websites to do the same, we wouldn't be in this mess. But they just had to try and squeeze every last drop of attention and money out of us.
So, we will fight for a right to block ads. And if giant chunks of the web end up being financially unsustainable because the ad business collapses entirely, that is not on us.
Accepting payments from users can make the site have to deal with sales taxes or VAT in every jurisdiction that it has paid users in.
A reasonable way for sites to deal with that is for the site to not sell directly to users. Instead they sell to some third party aggregator and the aggregator sells to users. Basically the same model we see with app stores--people in 20 different countries buy your iOS app through Apple's store and it is Apple that deals with the 20 different tax authorities.
I think we'd end up with a very small of very large aggregators, because generally a bigger aggregator is more efficient than a smaller aggregator.
But then we probably won't need micropayments for this. Nearly everyone will be using the aggregators enough that an occasional normal sized payment to maintain a credit in their accounts will work.
Google's "Web Integrity" and Microsoft's mandatory TPM in Windows are working hard to save the day!
What Google servers send is what your browser will render. Guaranteed integrity, end to end. Though not "your" browser technically. And not really "your" machine anymore, but nevermind that. Just sit back and enjoy your YouTube.
Don’t tell me what to do with packets on my network, either. If you want to use a broken business model that is on you.
In many ways that is the problem, and it is created by the video streaming industry which demands it's pound of flesh. Eventually they will run out of steam and a more friendly means of streaming will emerge. At the moment it feels like a stand off, which none of us want.
This problem is largely solved for audio.
First and foremost is the issue of companies trying to dictate what you are allowed to do on your own computer. If Google sends you the data, who are they to say how your computer decides to interpret it? What's next? Mandatory camera access so they can monitor your living room to make sure "unauthorized" people aren't watching? They would if they could get away with it.
Two is the business model of offering a free, useful service until people are hooked and then squeezing people for money. It's dishonest, it's extortion. Especially something like YouTube where the site itself is meaningless without the content creators who all largely started out as volunteers. It's the digital equivalent of a time-share sales pitch. Trap your audience. It perverts the normal operation of markets because everyone made decisions to use YouTube based on false economics, and now they are such a behemoth that moving to other platforms is not realistic for many. Had they not been allowed to do that, then the competitive landscape would look much different.
The bad faith hysterics of some of the people who block ads is really something to behold.
What they cannot do is access your device without your consent. So scanning for adblock extensions is illegal in Europe if you didn't ask permission for it.
Google wants to have their cake and eat it too by having a "free" platform but also controlling exactly how people view it in their browser. If you want to actually control content you need to have a real paywall. There are ways they could implement ads that would not be blockable (with a logged in user), but they don't want to do that for some reason.
The very same way that they’ve been doing so far. YouTube/Google/Alphabet is definitely not short on cash, so that means that even with ad blocking they’re doing just fine.
Or maybe more likely, consume content from unfriendly countries who will simply ignore the regulation, and force a continuous game of whack a mole with their domains.
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