To provide some clarity on this, it likely isn't targeting specifically non-Chrome browsers.
Disclaimer: fmr Googler, used to work on YouTube
Likely, this isn't necessarily targeting Firefox/Safari/Etc, but rather is using the UserAgent as part of a tuple with other factors. It _is_ however an anti-adblock measure meant to determine if the video is automatically getting skipped forward.
The reason on why changing your useragent "fixes" the problem, is that you're changing the tuple and the anti-adblock system won't serve the code-at-issue until it determines whether you'd be a good candidate for the experiment.
Secondarily, YouTube has no financial incentive to actively punish non-chrome useragents. They make money in their division by serving ads, regardless of the useragent.
> YouTube has no financial incentive to actively punish non-chrome useragents. They make money in their division by serving ads, regardless of the useragent.
Google has big financial incentives to punish non-Chrome user agents.
First, we've seen that Google pays a large amount of money to be the default search engine in competing browsers. A big reason for funding Chrome development is so that Google doesn't have to pay someone for the majority of its search traffic. If Google is paying out 30-40% of search ad revenue from non-Chrome browsers, that's many billions of dollars if they can get more people to use Chrome. If non-Chrome browsers are a bad experience on one of the most popular sites on the internet, that pushes people to use Chrome.
Second, Google is altering Chrome so that ad blockers won't be as effective. If they can push people to use Chrome, they'll get more ad revenue since ad blockers won't be as effective.
Google has been pushing Chrome because people using Chrome makes them billions of dollars. Maybe YouTube itself doesn't have a financial incentive, but Google definitely does.
If Chrome vanished tomorrow, Google would then face steep fees when their deals with Mozilla and Apple were up for renewal since they'd be dependent on traffic from Firefox and Safari. Instead, Google can keep paying Mozilla less and less money over time as more people use Chrome instead of Firefox.
I mean if it is "is using the UserAgent as part of a tuple with other factors" in a way which causes Chrome UAs to get preferential treatment, isn't that specifically targeting non-Chrome browsers?
Making Chrome the dominant browser has been a huge focus of Google since Chrome's inception. You may not know this, but Google owns YouTube.
To provide some clarity on this, it's not specifically coded into the system to prefer one particular browser over another, but rather, it's independent of all browsers and using the useragent as a string as part of a group.
Chrome could equally be as effected by this as any other browser.
> To provide some clarity on this, it likely isn't targeting specifically non-Chrome browsers
It's not targeting non-chrome browsers, it's just a before penalty that only applies to ... non-chrome browsers?
> Secondarily, YouTube has no financial incentive to actively punish non-chrome useragents. They make money in their division by serving ads, regardless of the useragent.
With Google's ongoing desire to break ad-blockers in Chrome, and make tracking a mandatory web specification via essentially monopoly browser status[1], Google has a _very_ strong financial incentive to punish non-chrome UAs - anything that pushes people to Chrome over browsers that they don't control is a win for them.
[1] let's be real: the only reason many sites work in browsers other than chrome is iOS safari, that's it
To provide some additional context and clarifying points that I see in the lower comments:
>> Regarding financial incentives:
Google is an insanely large organization, and the priorities and KPIs of one org (Chrome) largely don't impact another org (YouTube).
Additionally, YouTube is a regarded as a red-headed step-child within Google and is generally outside of the general interactions with other orgs.
That's based on years of working on that fine line.
>> Regarding Useragent Targeting:
The targeting scheme treats the useragent as a string, rather than a distinct value that the useragent is set to. Chrome is likely to hit this bug as much as any other browser vendor.
> Secondarily, YouTube has no financial incentive to actively punish non-chrome useragents. They make money in their division by serving ads, regardless of the useragent.
Nonsense. A Google controlled browser runs plugins Google allows with privacy settings Google creates. More data and no ad blockers is worth many billions of dollars to YouTube in the long run.
They directly benefit from people thinking Firefox is slow.
They already use their dominance in one platform (android) to achieve dominance in another (chrome), the exact same way Microsoft have been found guilty of years ago.
If the US govt wanted to sue google for it, they would have years ago.
Sure, but I think this particular case is would be more clear cut.
If a person can measure the time the page spends loading with a complete break down across a number of different browsers both on the same machine and on identically-specified machines together with a an external running stopwatch, then they would be able to show that which browsers are being slowed down.
There is less hand-waving here with questions like, "Well, does bundling Chrome on Android really affect the browser market?" . We know that slower load times is a worse user experience, and if this claim is true, then YouTube and Google are squarely to blame.
It's pretty trivial to write a yt-dlp one-liner to batch download all your subscriptions. You can even have it slice out sponsor segments using the SB API automatically. There's also projects like TubeArchivist which give a web ui to download and play youtube videos. There are also projects that provide alternative UIs for Youtube. The world is drowning in solutions to this problem, yet people keep whining and complaining about it.
It is obvious that anyone who still uses YT while complaining about these measures should quit their BS learned helplessness and take an afternoon to figure out an alternative.
Yes and no. While there are ways to circumvent the issue ( including the ways you mention ), the issue itself a little more complicated than that. Some of us don't like to play cat and mouse game. At certain size, company has to realize that their decisions that attempt to extract maximum amount of dough may draw close scrutiny of regulators. And its not like Google is not in their crosshairs already.
I am definitely not going to wait for the regulators fix up YT, but rather quit watching. We already have a family premium account because my partner couldn't stand the ads. I refuse to pay them. YT music is also shit quality. I bought a new pair of headphones and thought they were defective until I listened to my own ~160 kbps opus encoded content. Yes, it's that crappy, possibly 96 kbps or below. However I still listen to it because its bundled and paid for and still sounds better than FM radio. Totally not worth even half of what they're asking for.
Step 1: Buy a VPN subscription. It's about $3/month
Step 2: Run script
I'm a lot happier to pay for VPN and hard disks than for Google's bait-and-switch games. Youtube and Google became popular based on a social contract where I gave them by content, and now that it's a near-monopoly, they're breaking that social contract. That's not illegal, but it is sleazy, and I feel dirty giving money to support sleazy.
No. Of these mechanisms, the ones I have personally used (yt-dlp and TubeArchivist) do not rely on signing in with an account. They could ban my account on IP association alone, but that would result in massive false positives and backlash (everyone behind a VPN would be screwed for one).
For all that is good, do not do this on an account that does anything else! Run it in the cloud, if you can on a separate IP, and stream it from there.
I've had my Google play store account locked down for "fraud" (they never told me what it was) that caused all of my Google services to be stopped (googlefi, gmail, google domains, etc) and I could still always use their SSO to log in to things. I also make youtube comments with zero hesitation to harass Trump fans and am frequently suspended on youtube and it just stops me from being able to comment.
My NAS has been using yt-dlp to download various Warhammer 40k videos from youtubers for 3+ years, I'm around 10TB.
My working theory is there is no way to actually get banned from using google services permanently unless perhaps you do a charge back or something I haven't tried.
I also do everything I can to not use google services after my "fraud" lockdown. I've made longer comments about it here before in my history if you want the full story.
It depends on ones experience, but a script which runs yt-dl shouldn't take much time. And as a side note I'd argue that constantly counting your time as money loss may lead to neurosis. Some digital housekeeping can be pleasantly distracting from work, while also making your computer environment more comfortable.
I already have docker / docker-compose installed for development purposes, so in my case it was literally running git clone ..., then docker-compose up -d.
Considering this is about losing 5 seconds lost for every video being watched on youtube, I am pretty sure this time investment would amortize in <1 month of yt watching.
Do you show the same concern for how cheap the time is for the people spending their time bitching on reddit / HN / twitter about this issue for weeks on end?
Get a little dopamine hit everytime one remembers what a sweet deal or setup they have. Conversely, feels bad to pay for convenience on conditions one objects to. It's like when deal hunters spend undue effort to save some money on frequently used items or services that will get used for years. Does dollar equivalent in effort to save get amortized over time? Frequently, but not always. But the satisfaction of knowing you got one over the dealer keeps on paying for itself.
A lot of people seem to think so, consider how they will spend hours trying to avoid paying $30 a month or whatever to get rid of the ads and support the creators.
If they weren't cheap about it they would just serve a video that has the ads built into it. Instead they try and play them separately because that is cheaper. It would also be a better user experience because there wouldn't be these sharp edges between playing the ad and the content that are separately buffered.
Youtube doesn't produce the videos. Are you suggesting they should re-encode them with the ads inserted into that particular video file? That seems worse, with little gain. Plus think about all of the additional storage and streaming cost required for that, because you'd have to duplicate that ad in all the videos now. Meaning each 15sec ad would add a tiny bit to each of 1B videos, instead of just being a separate 15sec video all by itself. And separate cached in all the places where that video is cached.
I'm fairly certain you could inject ads directly into the video stream at the protocol layer (HLS/DASH) without too much difficulty. Both operate by sending self-contained chunks of encoded media at a time. The real issue there is then preventing the user from skipping those parts of the video.
There are hundreds of reasons why this wouldn't work, mainly the fact that almost nobody watches the same ads, meaning you're just rendering 100,000+ different versions of the same video depending on who watches it.
You don’t need to render the whole video, just the frames between the last keyframe of the content and the first keyframe of the ad. The rest can just be cached as is.
Yeah, I'm not sure this is a technical problem for them. Twitch embeds ads into the stream so they can't be blocked.
Honestly, I think YouTube/Google is doing this to setup an argument that ad-blockers are piracy tools so they can be legislated away. Much easier than investing time into a technical solution.
Google crossed the line and pissed off users who were previously willing to watch ads, by implementing NEVER-ENDING ads that require the user to continually press Skip to herd the program along... over and over and over, while they're trying to do something else (in my case, it's usually cooking, with stuff all over my hands).
I watched YouTube ads when they were normal blocks of short ads. But now they aren't, and I watch YouTube with no ads at all. This punishes content creators, and the blame lies firmly on Google.
Per societal norms today, the perpetrator of the offense is now whining about people fighting back. And in doing so, Google has popularized ad blockers among people who would never know they existed. Morons getting what they deserve.
The number of ads is getting pretty bad now. I use the YouTube app for Apple TV (so no chance for an ad blocker) and it has been slowly increasing the last two years. I even get surveys asking "How is the Ad experience?" and I always answer the lowest.
I frequently get 30 seconds of unskippable ads multiple times in a video. One set at the beginning and following sets at approximately 3 minute intervals.
At least some mid-rolls are skippable but they are totally random. Like, maybe a set of 2 ads where the first is 15 second and the second is 15 seconds that is skippable after 5 seconds. The combination of length and skippable is confusing.
More annoying is the tendency to sneak a 3 minute ad in there that is skippable. So unless I am in the room and near the remote it will just play the whole thing. I've had ads that are up to 15 minutes long.
If they would offer me a sign-up deal I'd probably just get YouTube premium at this point.
I once had the whole AMD event revealing a new Ryzen generation and some GPU as an ad, like more than an hour. The fact that you can just put whatever as an ad is wild.
I had an ad that was 30 minutes or an hour long at one point, it was for a watch.
The unfortunate thing was, the ad itself was actually interesting, going into a lot of manufacturing details but I didn't have time to watch it them and there is no way to find it.
I went through a (short) period where they were serving me ads that close together. Logged in too. Sometimes I would get one in the first 30 seconds (on top of the pre-video ads). I started to close the page immediately on getting an ad I thought was too soon and not looking at Youtube for the rest of the day. The schedule went back to being more reasonable. I have no idea if my tactic really worked personally, or whether it was just general testing that was scheduled to finish anyway.
Same experience for me. The first video I watched after my premium sub expired, I was given two preroll ads. Then, 30 seconds into the video, an ad. Finally, at the end of the 5 minute video, another ad.
It was jarring. But I’m also not sure complaining is fair. Hosting and serving video is expensive. I definitely don’t expect to receive it for free.
That seems to vary by video. I never log in, and some videos I found had zero or few ads, while others get an ad every few minutes. I am not sure how much of that is controlled by content creators[1] and how much of that is pushed by advertiser demands[2].
I think this underlines the misconception by YT of who the customer is.
Is it the advertiser who buys ad-space, is it the content creator who makes videos, or the viewer subscriber? Satisfying all three parties at scale is incredibly hard.
now i am curious how much the slowdown is for adblockers compared to the slowdown through ads. at that rate i suspect even with buffering the adblocker version is still faster, at least at lower bandwidth.
Readit News
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38345858
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38363114
YouTube blames ad blockers for slow load times, not the browser - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38363114 - Nov 2023 (220 comments)
YouTube slows down video load times when using Firefox - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38345858 - Nov 2023 (459 comments)
Disclaimer: fmr Googler, used to work on YouTube
Likely, this isn't necessarily targeting Firefox/Safari/Etc, but rather is using the UserAgent as part of a tuple with other factors. It _is_ however an anti-adblock measure meant to determine if the video is automatically getting skipped forward.
The reason on why changing your useragent "fixes" the problem, is that you're changing the tuple and the anti-adblock system won't serve the code-at-issue until it determines whether you'd be a good candidate for the experiment.
Secondarily, YouTube has no financial incentive to actively punish non-chrome useragents. They make money in their division by serving ads, regardless of the useragent.
Google has big financial incentives to punish non-Chrome user agents.
First, we've seen that Google pays a large amount of money to be the default search engine in competing browsers. A big reason for funding Chrome development is so that Google doesn't have to pay someone for the majority of its search traffic. If Google is paying out 30-40% of search ad revenue from non-Chrome browsers, that's many billions of dollars if they can get more people to use Chrome. If non-Chrome browsers are a bad experience on one of the most popular sites on the internet, that pushes people to use Chrome.
Second, Google is altering Chrome so that ad blockers won't be as effective. If they can push people to use Chrome, they'll get more ad revenue since ad blockers won't be as effective.
Google has been pushing Chrome because people using Chrome makes them billions of dollars. Maybe YouTube itself doesn't have a financial incentive, but Google definitely does.
If Chrome vanished tomorrow, Google would then face steep fees when their deals with Mozilla and Apple were up for renewal since they'd be dependent on traffic from Firefox and Safari. Instead, Google can keep paying Mozilla less and less money over time as more people use Chrome instead of Firefox.
Youtube does experiments based on user-agents. I think this is well known and if not, a former Googler just let you know.
In any case, for those who are complaining, it's their website. Either pay or stop using it?
Making Chrome the dominant browser has been a huge focus of Google since Chrome's inception. You may not know this, but Google owns YouTube.
> rather it is using the User Agent
This is literally the most common method of targeting browsers.
Chrome could equally be as effected by this as any other browser.
It's not targeting non-chrome browsers, it's just a before penalty that only applies to ... non-chrome browsers?
> Secondarily, YouTube has no financial incentive to actively punish non-chrome useragents. They make money in their division by serving ads, regardless of the useragent.
With Google's ongoing desire to break ad-blockers in Chrome, and make tracking a mandatory web specification via essentially monopoly browser status[1], Google has a _very_ strong financial incentive to punish non-chrome UAs - anything that pushes people to Chrome over browsers that they don't control is a win for them.
[1] let's be real: the only reason many sites work in browsers other than chrome is iOS safari, that's it
>> Regarding financial incentives:
Google is an insanely large organization, and the priorities and KPIs of one org (Chrome) largely don't impact another org (YouTube).
Additionally, YouTube is a regarded as a red-headed step-child within Google and is generally outside of the general interactions with other orgs.
That's based on years of working on that fine line.
>> Regarding Useragent Targeting:
The targeting scheme treats the useragent as a string, rather than a distinct value that the useragent is set to. Chrome is likely to hit this bug as much as any other browser vendor.
Until Chrome can no longer block ads... ?
Nonsense. A Google controlled browser runs plugins Google allows with privacy settings Google creates. More data and no ad blockers is worth many billions of dollars to YouTube in the long run.
They directly benefit from people thinking Firefox is slow.
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If the claim is true, then Google is using dominance in one platform (videos - YouTube) to achieve dominance in another (browsers - Chrome).
If the US govt wanted to sue google for it, they would have years ago.
If a person can measure the time the page spends loading with a complete break down across a number of different browsers both on the same machine and on identically-specified machines together with a an external running stopwatch, then they would be able to show that which browsers are being slowed down.
There is less hand-waving here with questions like, "Well, does bundling Chrome on Android really affect the browser market?" . We know that slower load times is a worse user experience, and if this claim is true, then YouTube and Google are squarely to blame.
It is obvious that anyone who still uses YT while complaining about these measures should quit their BS learned helplessness and take an afternoon to figure out an alternative.
Do you do anything to avoid that?
Step 2: Run script
I'm a lot happier to pay for VPN and hard disks than for Google's bait-and-switch games. Youtube and Google became popular based on a social contract where I gave them by content, and now that it's a near-monopoly, they're breaking that social contract. That's not illegal, but it is sleazy, and I feel dirty giving money to support sleazy.
My NAS has been using yt-dlp to download various Warhammer 40k videos from youtubers for 3+ years, I'm around 10TB.
My working theory is there is no way to actually get banned from using google services permanently unless perhaps you do a charge back or something I haven't tried.
I also do everything I can to not use google services after my "fraud" lockdown. I've made longer comments about it here before in my history if you want the full story.
Considering this is about losing 5 seconds lost for every video being watched on youtube, I am pretty sure this time investment would amortize in <1 month of yt watching.
Do you show the same concern for how cheap the time is for the people spending their time bitching on reddit / HN / twitter about this issue for weeks on end?
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This is a bad idea.
Honestly, I think YouTube/Google is doing this to setup an argument that ad-blockers are piracy tools so they can be legislated away. Much easier than investing time into a technical solution.
I watched YouTube ads when they were normal blocks of short ads. But now they aren't, and I watch YouTube with no ads at all. This punishes content creators, and the blame lies firmly on Google.
Per societal norms today, the perpetrator of the offense is now whining about people fighting back. And in doing so, Google has popularized ad blockers among people who would never know they existed. Morons getting what they deserve.
I frequently get 30 seconds of unskippable ads multiple times in a video. One set at the beginning and following sets at approximately 3 minute intervals.
At least some mid-rolls are skippable but they are totally random. Like, maybe a set of 2 ads where the first is 15 second and the second is 15 seconds that is skippable after 5 seconds. The combination of length and skippable is confusing.
More annoying is the tendency to sneak a 3 minute ad in there that is skippable. So unless I am in the room and near the remote it will just play the whole thing. I've had ads that are up to 15 minutes long.
If they would offer me a sign-up deal I'd probably just get YouTube premium at this point.
I once had the whole AMD event revealing a new Ryzen generation and some GPU as an ad, like more than an hour. The fact that you can just put whatever as an ad is wild.
The unfortunate thing was, the ad itself was actually interesting, going into a lot of manufacturing details but I didn't have time to watch it them and there is no way to find it.
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It was jarring. But I’m also not sure complaining is fair. Hosting and serving video is expensive. I definitely don’t expect to receive it for free.
[1] https://support.google.com/youtube/thread/233723152
[2] https://support.google.com/google-ads/answer/12400225
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