I have to wonder if they never have due to fear that people will stop using the platform. I honestly will stop using it. I don't mind ads, but they always come on YouTube at the worst time, if you're watching something informative, they cut your brain off from that into some obscure that has no relevancy to your life.
I’d like to say that I don’t mind YouTube ads but I actually do much of the time because they try to sell me on an investment scam, some tactical doomsday merch, or fundamentalist religion depending on the theme of the video.
Many YouTube ads truly feel adversarial and it is hard to not mind that.
I got one that straight up told me my penis was too small to please my partner. I have to say that you'd think the supposed best and brightest that FAANG companies hire could come up with a bit more of a sophisticated pitch than "your peepee is too small".
I turned off personalization a while ago. I get ads for Mint Mobile, a local spa, an Internet fast fashion men's T-shirt company, dog food, and similar anodyne topics. It feels a little like watching 90s daytime TV.
I'm actually loving this whole debacle, because I managed to cut down my Youtube time from 1h/2h a day to almost zero, after I had a week of my Ad Blocker not being able to block ads.
If ads get too annoying people will start running a YouTube frontend and probably switch from on-demand video viewing to a DVR format where you pre-download videos from your favorite creators ahead of time. Maybe the frontend can pretend to have watched the full video and ads, I'm sure that'll go over wonderfully with advertisers.
>YouTube frontend [...] where you pre-download videos from your favorite creators ahead of time.
I think the post is saying the ads would be burned into the regular video stream such that even offline downloaders such as youtube-dl would also get the ads.
The current common behavior is the actual video and the ads videos are 2 different streams. The javascript in the web browser switches back & forth between the streams for dynamic ads insertion as it gets the next media fragment(s). The new behavior is to have just one indistinguishable stream that's more tightly embedded into the video media fragments.
If the above paragraph doesn't make sense, one can just load up a Youtube video while monitoring the "Network" tab in F12 Developer Tools to see the various media fragments being downloaded while it switches between the normal video and the ads.
You can strip the ads from the final video or have the player automatically skip the ads while playing. The client will probably have some way to distinguish sections. Worst case scenario you're just ending up in a DVR-style scenario where you have to press some button to skip +30 seconds in the downloaded file. And eventually someone will make a tool to filter out the ads or crowdsource a solution.
It shouldn't be that difficult for video downloaders to learn how to strip out in-video ads. They're going to be a sharp cut both in video and audio, for a specific, fairly-well-known length of time, then a cut back.
This is the kind of thing where people will put a lot of effort to engineer a good machine learning / AI solution to get rid of these ads. If it’s something that people hate they’ll put all their effort into stopping it. Google might’ve actually made their situation worse with this as it’ll force people to innovate and come up with new ways of countering their bs.
“Love, friendship and respect do not unite men as much as a common hatred for something.”
There’s going to be a split between premium and not watching YouTube. I’m not paying something like 2,000$ to per hour of advertising cut from my life.
I might click on a video I find elsewhere, but I’ve basically given up on using the YouTube interface for finding videos.
I already largely watch YouTube through RSS feeds to find the videos and yt-dlp to download them locally. Ads injected straight into the stream will be annoying, but still just as easy to skip as the sponsored content sections of videos. That said, the ads on YouTube have gotten more and more scammy and suspicious over the years, so I don't particularly appreciate being incorporated into the video feed itself. But it doesn't materially change much of how I watch YouTube anyway.
There already exists the comskip project used by most home-brew PVR software for broadcast TV. I wonder if it could be leveraged for this. See https://github.com/erikkaashoek/Comskip
Youtube ads have been on an impressively consistent path of aggression. Chromecasting went from no ads as recently as a couple years ago to 30+ second unskippable ads to. The revenue firehose I’m sure is incredible though. I run some online video campaigns for work (~$300k/mo) that compete with YouTube for budget and they have incredible performance stats… as indicated by GA4.
If you're used to dipping in & out of vids to find something interesting it is fundamentally unusable without working adblock. You end up watching more ads than video
That's the most annoying bit, they target you with an ad when starting just a 1-2 minute video.
They present the ad in the most intrusive and annoying way possible. It ensures that I will either ignore it, or never purchase that item or service out of spite. If you do this almost every time I play a quick video, it generates a very negative user experience.
If they focused on how to have ads coexist with the user experience and mesh better with the media being watched, they might not irritate every user by trying to make them impossible to avoid - and they wouldn't have to play this cat and mouse bullshit that eventually leads to their platform being irrelevant.
This sounds technically unfeasible, at YouTube's scale.
They'll have to re-encode videos at all permutations across countries, regions and locales. They'll also have to somehow account for ads that have been pulled down after the fact... then they'll need to cache this stuff everywhere so that the latencies are reasonable and the experience is good, whilst serving you different version of the same clip if you refresh or rewatch the clip... they'll have to do all of this continuously, since ads change with the times - despite the clips themselves being stale and static?
I can imagine they will have to limit this "feature" to a very small subset of videos with high view count/interest/revenue potential... maybe just to live feeds... otherwise, the costs to do this for every video on the platform would shoot through the roof.
They don't necessarily need to re-encode anything, encoded video has keyframes which don't depend on any prior frames placed at regular intervals to facilitate fast random seeking, and you can splice the video at those points very cheaply without having to re-encode.
EDIT: I didn't read carefully. Ignore the first sentence.
~There's already a tool called SponsorBlock which in conjunction with FreeTube or Invidious can automatically skip portions of videos tagged as sponsorships or ads.~ I don't see server injected ads being a long-term problem for people who use blockers or third-party players. It just shifts the problem to the "analog hole".
If you read the linked thread this is causing issues with the offsets SB currently uses. That aside YT will have the ability to inject ads dynamically based on region or whatever other signals they use for targeting. Consequently no two copies of the same video are guaranteed to have the same length.
Random ad injection is easily defeated by services like that. They’d just need to fingerprint ever N second window of the video, and then drop stuff that isn’t included across multiple plays.
I wish video distribution would move to self hosting or some other decentralized model though.
Finally, YouTube is going to heal my addiction! I'm so happy about this. I have found that none of the videos really helped me to learn anything. They just push a ton of interesting stuffs onto my stack but I don't have 10 life time to complete them, so better know nothing but complete everything.
Readit News
Many YouTube ads truly feel adversarial and it is hard to not mind that.
I think the post is saying the ads would be burned into the regular video stream such that even offline downloaders such as youtube-dl would also get the ads.
The current common behavior is the actual video and the ads videos are 2 different streams. The javascript in the web browser switches back & forth between the streams for dynamic ads insertion as it gets the next media fragment(s). The new behavior is to have just one indistinguishable stream that's more tightly embedded into the video media fragments.
If the above paragraph doesn't make sense, one can just load up a Youtube video while monitoring the "Network" tab in F12 Developer Tools to see the various media fragments being downloaded while it switches between the normal video and the ads.
“Love, friendship and respect do not unite men as much as a common hatred for something.”
I might click on a video I find elsewhere, but I’ve basically given up on using the YouTube interface for finding videos.
That said, the predictable next step would just be for Google to turn on DRM on Youtube videos.
If you're used to dipping in & out of vids to find something interesting it is fundamentally unusable without working adblock. You end up watching more ads than video
They present the ad in the most intrusive and annoying way possible. It ensures that I will either ignore it, or never purchase that item or service out of spite. If you do this almost every time I play a quick video, it generates a very negative user experience.
If they focused on how to have ads coexist with the user experience and mesh better with the media being watched, they might not irritate every user by trying to make them impossible to avoid - and they wouldn't have to play this cat and mouse bullshit that eventually leads to their platform being irrelevant.
They'll have to re-encode videos at all permutations across countries, regions and locales. They'll also have to somehow account for ads that have been pulled down after the fact... then they'll need to cache this stuff everywhere so that the latencies are reasonable and the experience is good, whilst serving you different version of the same clip if you refresh or rewatch the clip... they'll have to do all of this continuously, since ads change with the times - despite the clips themselves being stale and static?
I can imagine they will have to limit this "feature" to a very small subset of videos with high view count/interest/revenue potential... maybe just to live feeds... otherwise, the costs to do this for every video on the platform would shoot through the roof.
Nope. Just inject them right before a full keyframe, that can be done pretty much on the fly.
~There's already a tool called SponsorBlock which in conjunction with FreeTube or Invidious can automatically skip portions of videos tagged as sponsorships or ads.~ I don't see server injected ads being a long-term problem for people who use blockers or third-party players. It just shifts the problem to the "analog hole".
I wish video distribution would move to self hosting or some other decentralized model though.
I don't feel that way about current YouTube ads!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qDO6iNafSek