Inside the ‘arms race’ between YouTube and ad blockers / Against all odds, open source hackers keep outfoxing one of the wealthiest companies.::YouTube’s dramatic content gatekeeping decisions of late have a long history behind them, and there’s an equally long history of these defenses being bypassed.
You know… in all my time upon this earth, I cannot look back and think of a single instance where I thought: “Gosh, this advertisement which has inserted itself in between me and the desired content has actually made me want to go purchase that product.”
Ads are effective, sadly. And why so much money is poured into them. I believe there are a few effects at play but the direct, see and ad and want to go buy it now is only one ofbhem that mostly only affects some people, or a lot of people occasionally.
I think a bigger effect is familiarity. You are far more likely to pick a product you are familiar with or have seen before over something younjave never heard of. Even if you have only ever seen it on advets and completely forgotten that you have ever seen ads for it. So even if you don’t think they work on you they likely do without you realizing, at least enough of the time on enough people that make them worth while running.
I think a bigger effect is familiarity.
Bingo. It’s not about making you buy something right now, it’s about brand recognition and such.
To wit, if you listen to podcasts, do a little thought experiment. Name a VPN company.
Was it “Nord VPN”? Ads work.
- Just because I have heard of NordVPN doesn’t mean I’ll necessarily use it (in fact I use
archmullvad, btw.) - Let’s see some numbers that ads work. You can’t just calculate how life would be without ads, but I wonder what would happen if ad expenses for all companies would be capped somehow. When cigarette companies were severely limited in terms of advertising they saved a ton of money. Of course people already knew their brands, but still.
I think ad space sellers wildly overestimate the effectiveness of ads and google has made it far worse with targeted ads. People have gotten used to saying things like “ads work” and “brand recognition” but does anyone know the numbers? Or is this just repeating some phrases you’ve heard?
I don’t know the numbers myself, but I’m quite skeptical.
Let’s see some numbers that ads work.
Companies have tested this. A DIY chain ran an ad and people complained it was annoying, so they stopped running it. Their sales started to decline. Started running the ad again and sales went up.
Probably you’re not the target audience and just collateral damage in the ad war, but for the population in general they work.
Just because I have heard of NordVPN doesn’t mean I’ll necessarily use it (in fact I use arch mullvad, btw.)
No it does not mean you will pick it. It means you are more likely to pick it. Given all else being equal you are vastly more likely to pick something familiar than something unfamiliar. And it all comes down to trends and statistics. The hope is that more people will go for your brand that leads to more sales then the cost of the marketing in the first place. You might not go for NordVPN for other reasons, but can you say that about every product you have been advertised to? If anything the more you know about a product the less advertising will affect you in the familiarity sense - these adverts are not so much meant for you as they are for people not familiar with VPNs at all.
But there are a lot of studies on the topic like this and this meta analysis that seem to conclude that advertising is effective. And there are a lot of studies on what various aspects of adverts make them more effective. I am yet to see any research that says adverts are ineffective overall, though I have not dug that deeply into it.
There used to be a business joke you’d hear in the ‘60s, often attributed to John Wanamaker, a pioneer in marketing:
“Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is, I don’t know which half!”
The joke highlights the dilemma many businesses face in evaluating the effectiveness of their advertising spend. It’s remained relevant in the advertising and marketing industries, reflecting the challenges in measuring the impact of advertising efforts.
You just became an ad for mullvad…
Good products are worth sharing to help shape future products. Grass roots only works if the product is worth using. Vote with your wallet to help shape future products. While the previously poster can be viewed as an “ad”, the post is same as a next door neighbor bringing it up. Mullvad doesn’t do affiliate marketing or pay influencers.
I used to use Mullvad but now I use a different service, but especially like to support open source products.
2 second google for some numbers: “In 2022, global internet advertising revenue stood at 484 billion U.S. dollars”
One of the metrics you measure when running ads is return on investment, and companies will soon go bust if you aren’t making money on your ad spend.
Except how is ROI estimated? I can imagine it being done both intelligently and stupidly and so I’m curious how well it is actually done.
Part of what I’m sceptical about is that it seems like a practice driven either by a lot of FOMO and vague thinking or a system where it only makes sense to run ads because everyone else is.
This is all measured and not really estimated. If you think that any substantial chunk of that 484Billion is being done ‘stupidly’ then you’re just making presumptuous incorrect guesses without knowing much about the industry.
Revenue (sales) - Investment (total costs) = ROI There is ROAS which similiar: Revenue - Ad Spend = ROAS You can measure things in more detail like CPA (cost per acquisition) to work out how much ad spend you have per sale, again this is a measurement not an estimation.
Where previously there was mass advertisements to millions of people like TV or radio ads which were only affordable to large companies. Advertisers now can target the exact type of person they’re trying to market to for their niche which is a lot cheaper and so more accessible to smaller businesses. To me that makes business sense to do if I can optimise to the right ROI, and nothing to do with FOMO or vague thinking.
How well are sales and ad spend correlated and how well are spurious correlations accounted for?
The fact that companies pour millions into ads means it works for them. Don’t assume that just because you and I (and probably most users on here) aren’t susceptible, it doesn’t mean the majority of the population aren’t too.
- Just because I have heard of NordVPN doesn’t mean I’ll necessarily use it (in fact I use
These subconscious effects are indeed the most effective ways for an ad to work. However, if an ad is obnoxious enough for you to remember, it can get you to actively avoid the advertised product as well.
It can. But the average impact is still positive.
Yeah, I like to think I’m immune to advertising until I see one that makes me think “damn, I haven’t had Burger Restaurant in a while.” The worst part is that I’m fully cognizant of what’s happening, and yet I still want some and it’ll make me think about it for a while afterward, simply because I’m familiar with the food and how it (usually) tastes.
But, joke’s on you, Burger Restaurant! I’m fucking broke, son! Now we’re BOTH having our time wasted
deleted by creator
Ads work. These companies wouldn’t spend millions in them otherwise. Consumer behavior is among the most studied psychological phenomenoms in the world. If you show an ad to one person it’s near impossible to tell if it had an effect or not but show it to a thousand people and you’ll see it.
That’s not how ads work.
Yeah I feel mostly this way too, but the data is solid, ads are effective. Even on me, very rarely. And I’m the type of person who doesn’t ever click ads, out of spite. Even if it’s exactly what I was already looking to actively buy. But every now and then they give me an idea that I pop open a new tab, research, and then buy.
That’s not really how they work, or that is not the only way. Their point is to put the logo, slogans, company etc into your memory. This way when you’re shopping for something specific, then the brand pops out to you because you’ve seen it and it gives you a sense of familiarity and hence, higher trust.
I have a couple times but every single time it turned out the ad was blatantly misleading or simply lying. Fuck ads and every person involved in that industry.
Likewise. I don’t think I’ve ever been moved or compelled to buy, check out, or even pay attention to a YouTube ad.
To be honest, I once fell victim on reddit to an add that promoted AFK-Arena. It turned out to actually be a decent game.
At least one popular ad blocker, AdBlock Plus, won’t be trying to get around YouTube’s wall at all. Vergard Johnsen, chief product officer at AdBlock Plus developer eyeo, said he respects YouTube’s decision to start “a conversation” with users about how content gets monetized.
Shitty AdBlock Plus.
ABP has always been a shitty adblocker because it’s meant to make money rather than actually block ads effectively. They’ve been accepting money from ad networks to allow their “unintrusive ads” (an oxymoron) for over a decade now, and I’m sure Google is paying for this to happen now.
AdBlock Minus
YouTube can’t win this race when they don’t control the platform you’re viewing it on. You can always install ‘something’ to get around it.
The solution to that is to control the platform using Chrome, Android etc.
YouTube’s end game is baked in ads. There are streaming services that already do this so it’s not impossible. It would not surprise me one iota if YouTube isn’t working on this now.
Once this happens, I suspect that the last round of people that have been holding out to subscribe to premium will either cave and do so or people will simply abandon YouTube.
Baked in ads run counter to googles entire ad philosophy though, to say nothing of the technical challenges that poses. Googles big selling point right now is targeted ads where the ads they serve you are based on your activities that they’ve tracked. With baked in ads every viewer of that stream gets the same ads, so while they could traget ads based on the contents of the stream, they would no longer be able to target the ads at specific viewers.
There’s also the problem that baked in ads are in many ways actually easier to skip. There are already extensions like sponsorblock that can skip specific segments of videos, and if it’s not served as a separate stream it will be more difficult to give special treatment to the ad portion of the video.
Baked in personalized ads aren’t impossible.
I can’t remember which streaming service it was (I want to say Tubi?) But they had baked in personalized ads. The technology isn’t far fetched and certainly possible with what youtube already has.
Sponsorblock only works on specific, known timed segments.
Say a video you want to watch has 8 places that YouTube can put up an ad (as determined by YouTube). Out of those 8 places, it decides to serve 5 ads. But the ads are of different lengths.
Sponsorblock can’t block those ads.
I’m not saying people won’t try but YouTube has all the information it needs to serve intrusive ads. And, I hate to say it, but they have the market dominance to pull the rug under premium subscribers feet because you know that in a year or two, they are going to start serving ads to those people too.
Sponsorblock only works on specific, known timed segments.
That’s not true though, sponsorblock is user reported, that’s why it works for sponsor segments and in-video ads of all lengths and locations in videos. If ads get baked into a video they can’t be taken out or changed, since that’s what getting “baked in” means in this context, and as soon as a single user reports the ad it will be blocked by sponsorblock for anyone who uses it. If it can be taken out or changed, then it’s not truly baked in and that can be exploited.
Ah I think we have a different definition of “baked in”.
What I mean is that the video does not change urls or sources when playing the ad and the video. So it looks like an unbroken video feed but on the back end, YouTube added the video between the designated time frames.
I get what you mean that if ads never change and are forever in the video file then sponsorblock will continue to work. But I don’t think this is what YouTube will do.
All they need to do is fuzz the time when the ad plays to defeat this.
The ads would be baked into the stream, not the source video. This is a fairly trivial problem, and I’m surprised they aren’t doing it already.
As soon as on user does it? Welcome, DoS attack!
This is completely wrong. You are serving video stream, you just substitute for the ad you would serve the user, at a randomized point in the video. YouTube doesn’t do this because they don’t want to reimplement the tracking and logging, but if it was financially necessary it wouldn’t be hard to do.
I have some background in tech but admit I’m a long way out of touch now. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if they’re working on back end stuff to have personalised ads “baked in”. I know the resource implications of this are huge, but it still wouldn’t surprise me.
The resource implications are the problem. The cost - in terms of compute time - to bake those ads eats into the profit earned from advertising as a whole. Since only a fraction of users adblock, they would probably lose more money than they gained.
They’ll consider it once the compute cost inserting the ads is low enough that it’s worth it. I have no idea if we’ve reached that point yet, but I’m guessing not, since otherwise they’d already be doing it.
Most of the formats served by YouTube are already chunked, which means they can easily insert different chunks of video (ads, etc) at various points in the stream by changing the manifest. This is trivial, computationally. The complexity lies in building the mechanisms to make it work.
The non-chunked formats are only used by older devices, and are lower quality. Those would require re-encoding to change, but few users see them anyway, and those users probably don’t adblock.
Platforms can now insert ads directly into the manifest file into totally random timestamps. The file chunks’ names follow the same pattern as the original video. You cannot filter or prepare for it. Probably that will be the future. (AWS MediaConvert can do this for example.)
And they only create the manifest file upon starting the stream so you can inject personalized ads too.
But don’t they do that on their tv app already, that’s why DNS blockers don’t work? I’m pretty sure they serve targeted ads on the tv app.
Wouldn’t SponsorBlock be a way around this?
Platforms can now insert ads directly into the manifest file into totally random timestamps. The file chunks’ names follow the same pattern as the original video. You cannot filter or prepare for it. Probably that will be the future. (AWS MediaConvert can do this for example.)
Meh, download the vid, then have software figure out where the ads are. It’s possible.
Hell, even just present a button for the user to hit when an ad segment starts.
A lot of people are saying this isn’t possible, theyre wrong. It’s called “Server Side Ad Insertion (SSAI)” and tldr it places the ads directly in the video itself. One of the popular streaming services uses SSAI, another uses SGAI. Theyre both something the CDN must implement alongside the client.
The technical explanation: SSAI, at least with HLS, places the ad segments within the media playlist. This means there is no additional and easy to block call to the ad server to ask for ads (that’s Server Guided Ad Insertion, SGAI). SGAI places markers where ads need to go in the media playlist, and the client asks the server for some ads to place there.
There’s also CSAI which is fully client side (the client decides where to place ads and how many) but I’d like to doubt youtube uses this. Doesn’t seem very smart.
Even if, lets say, youtube baked the ads into the content segments, it wouldn’t solve anything. There will still be markers and metadata to find where they are (the client needs these to notify ad partners you watched the ad, and to display the yellow “ad” markers, and to display a timer) which can be used to skip them client-side with an extension.
Overall YouTube probably won’t win because there’s always something to do to bypass ads. Some methods are easier to bypass than others, but they’re all enforced client-side in the end. The only thing they could possibly do to have even a fraction of a chance would be to block you from getting the next content segments until the ad duration has passed in real-time. That’s a last resort, however, because that will likely hurt QoS and client stability. There’s a reason it isn’t already done. Don’t forget, also, the developers who work on this stuff don’t like ads either. Nobody is going out of their way to prevent ad blocking beyond what the execs want, and the execs don’t know what they want.
Do note that although I specify HLS there is likely little to no difference with other streaming tech, I just want to be clear about my experience.
Twitch has increased their ad blocking techniques for the last 3 years or so. Twitch has been a lot more advanced and aggressive with their method. Yet, there are still ways to subvert the ads on twitch. If I didnt read lemmy, i wouldnt even know youtube was doing anything. I have just basic adblocking ublock
Although every once in a while, twitch will release a new technique and it might take 24 hours to solve.
You would be surprised how many people will just uninstall the ad blocker the third time YouTube isn’t working for 24 hours.
Every time YouTube or twitch make a change, a certain percentage of users give up, which means more revenue.
The reverse of this is every time I watch youtube without an ad blocker, their ads are SO obtrusive I go right back to “Nah fuck this, FUCK their ability to make money if this is how they go about it”
I have changed my programs because twitch won against its methods. I used to use alt twitch player to get around the ad system. The app creator didnt care to update anymore and twitch’s update broke the system.
All that did though was make me find alternative ways to ad block. If it came to it, if i was unable to block ads. I’d just never watch. Ads are usually full volume screaming at you, so its like an assault on you.
Either way, i think having more viewers is more important than getting an ad to EVERY watcher. IMO Youtube and twitch both lose money on offering their services to everyone. Some people will upload/stream to 0 viewers and i think that its like 50% of their creators. Thats a ton of wasted bandwidth and storage.
IMHO i think twitch could charge something like 3-5$ a month to broadcast a stream. Youtube could charge something like 10c an upload or something.
I get users needing to create content to grow viewerbase, but charge something extremely minimal to get back a little something.
I think you would see significantly less streamers if you did that and they need streamers equally as much as they need viewers.
I bet a lot of the current top streamers would have never given it a chance if they had to pay first.
More content creators are always good, but theres also people on there just wasting resources that will never be successful. Always stream to 0-2 people.
Idk, it’s a tough choice. Which is why they most likely would never use a pay to create style.
I think that’s a big part of why Google doesn’t fight (and in fact helps) the banking and streaming companies that want to lock down Android more. It’s harder to block ads if you can’t block them in the browser and can’t block them system wide via hosts file. (Yes you can use VPN + DNS, but it’s a lot more battery intensive.)
And I am fucking loving it. With this move, Google has effectively started an arms race between the team they have implementing this Adblock-blocking crap and the vast majority of the technically competent internet users in the world.
Unless the rules of how the internet works fundamentally change, Google is not going to win.
Why do you think they were pushing so hard for WEI? They did try to fundamentally change how the internet works.
Precisely.
“against all odds” lmao what. Anyone who’s been paying attention since the dawn of the internet would know that youtube isn’t winning this one. The odds were 100% in the favour of the hackers.
What Google seems to forget or simply not care about is I can always just… leave.
I used reddit a lot more than I use YouTube.
If enough viewers and content creators were to jump ship, they’d scramble to change their tune.That’s a big if though. Unless an actual creator-exodus happens, it’s not going to happen.
It will happen eventually. These kinds of adversarial arrangements between parties are inherently unstable. The enshittification cycle only ends when a site properly collapses. If you think they couldn’t get shittier, give it time. They’ll find a way.
All we need is for a good alternative to become more viable and for the site to have a few more exodus events and it’ll lose its critical mass. Ultimately I think most platforms are going to have to become federated, it’s the only way to avoid enshittification and still grow the network. Growing the network is important because it is the size of youtube and other centralised sites’ networks that gives them their stability and utility. It’s the network effect.
All we need is for a good alternative to become more viable
This is where the biggest challenge lies. Doing what YouTube does is not easy. I don’t think anyone could do it all. So it would have to be picking a choosing. Can anyone upload hours/days/years worth of video content? Are the people who put up those videos able to get paid without having to create their own relationships with advertisers or asking for viewer donations? How are copyright violations handled? Or more sinister video content?
I don’t disagree with you, I’m just saying that YouTube is nothing without both its creator and viewers.
A viewer-exodus and a creator-exodus would be tied together, they both feedback into each other.I even get why YouTube doubledown on catering to their advertisers over the creators and viewers, that’s just money talking.
I’m just saying I don’t owe them my time or attention.
They would hardly be the first Internet giant to fall, thinking they’re too big to fail, not that I see it happening soon though.
I went through a period of de-googling a couple of years ago. Swapping browser, mobile os, search engine, storage, maps, music, video purchases, voice assistant and even email service was relatively simple, there are alternatives out there which do the job just as well if not better than what Google offer.
The only exception is YouTube, yea there are individual sites that occasionally offer some of the videos I want (often with a subscription attached), there are some federated systems like NewPipe which have some videos but there is no one offering remotely the quantity or quality of what you can get on YouTube for free.
As the article states, it’s basically a monopoly at this point without a viable alternative.
What are you using instead for Maps and email?
I use Organic maps and K9 mail
k9 mail has a really poor rating on the app store. I hear Thunderbird will be revamping it though. Are you happy with where it is at right now?
Yeah, it works great. I haven’t had any problems
I’ve had good success with FairEmail its open source and on Fdroid appstore but google made it so it will only work if you download through the play store which is BS.
Definitely fair email, code is solid and so is the dev. Its got more features for customization than any other mobile email client. Super frequently updated too. And no ads even in the unpaid version.
Apple Maps and Fastmail.
Fastmail is paid but the 1Password and disposable email address system makes it worth it for me.
What FOSS mobile OS are you using?
Non-Google Android.
Not going to happen. Most of us, and the ones making the service profitable pay.
You have no value for Google and lemmy isn’t a population Google cares about in the first place.
That is and big if though. Yeah you, me and half the people here might leave over this, but we block ads already and so are not highly valued to YouTube or a lot of the creators and are only a small drop in the ocean of viewers.
YouTube is betting on more people turning off ad blockers then those that leave. And i am glad to see that it might be having a small effect on more people actually discovering ad blockers instead. Which I bet is something YouTube did not expect to see.
No one in the 90s could imagine the internet without AOL or Yahoo either, and yet…
Or the great Myspace collapse of 2008. Digg before that. Tumblr most recently.
Big sites go boom fairly often.
Now, watching Google go Boom, that’s gonna be like modules breaking loose of the ISS and rez-entering the atmosphere. Drawn out over months, as one wing goes, government breaks up another wing, class action lawsuits bankrupt another wing.
Alphabets circling the drain. And good. Fuck em. Fuck Apple, Fuck Meta, Fuck Amazon, Fuck Reddit.
Just a couple more years now and imma nominate Craig from Craigslist for all the years nobel prizes for officially winning the internet.
Specific niche forums, Craigslist and Wikipedia are the last bits of honestness and fun online. And ymmv with Craigslist people being honest.
In what world Craigslist is honest and Alphabet is circling the drain? They make billions of profit per quarter and they have majority control of the biggest two platforms worldwide (mobile and web). We are not in the wild west years of the early web. It will be decades before Meta or Alphabet collapse, in favor of TikTok or a similar, or even worse, competitor. Mastodon and lemmy are an exception and a niche, not a rule.
Wishing something very hard doesn’t make it true.
Exactly, I had people tell me that we should support YouTube, because it costs money and if we don’t it will disappear.
I would celebrate the day it would happen, YouTube is actually the reason we don’t have much competition there. They used their position and Google monopoly in other areas to establish this monopoly.
There’s creators out there running a non YouTube channel in parallel, mostly on Odysee. Good to see an alternative out there.
I just looked up Odysee. They use Google AdSense on their site, so really all your getting is a bad YouTube
Right enough. They’re also owned by Google! Probably not a good alternative then. PeerTube any good?
Fwiw, Google doesn’t own Odysee https://twitter.com/LBRYcom/status/1321862776780980225
They probably do smell.
I’ve heard of PeerTube, but haven’t looked into it yet
The only one I know of is Nebula, and I only know of it because of ads. Ironically, ads on YouTube.
Why would creators leave? They only earn money from users that watch ads or use premium. Ad blocker users leaving doesn’t affect them.
And if you “just leave”, guess what? You just saved them a few bucks in bandwidth. It’s a win-win for them.
It’s YouTube, they don’t need “exposure”. They are out to make a profit.
I donate to creators I like.
I remember the mini-war between AOL and third-party IM clients. There were days where AOL would send 15kB patches to AIM multiple times a day to break compatibility with the other apps. And they would then fix it within hours.
In the end, AOL gave up.
Wow that’s full on antitrust surely? Or was this before the regulatory precedents were set for Internet providers?
Well, not really.
So AIM was built on an existing chat protocol called OSCAR. The same protocol used in other services. So people eventually figured out how to make chat clients that could log into many different IM services on one app.
This was not sanctioned by AOL, but they allowed it at first. Then they decided you HAVE to use the official AIM client to talk to people on AIM. The third-party developers ignored AOL, so they entered into a tug-a-war match for a while.
Because AOL was using known software to make AIM work, there was only so much they could do to keep their client working while also blocking everyone else. Eventually it became too much of a hassle, so AOL relented and third-party clients kept working until the service was shutdown.
Ah I see. I thought the implication here was that they were doing this to ICQ and the likes
Never under estimate the outrage of a nerd.
They even made a series of movies about it.
Don’t be evil turned into straight up evil with Manifest V3. Already switched to FF as my primary and started shifting my use of Evil’s services.
They ditch the “do no evil” motto years ago when seeking military contract to help them kill people
I was suspicious the moment they said “don’t be evil”.
Non-evil people don’t need to say it.
“against all odds” my left asshole. This is always the way of hacker vs defense, it’s always an arms race and the attacking side always has the advantage.
How many assholes do you have?
A left one and a right one.
And a center one. Well, that’s what I call myself. The central asshole.
Against all odds
lol someone hasn’t been paying attention to how this stuff generally works…
Anybody who thinks this is “against all odds” doesn’t understand the Internet very well.
Against all odds? This is a game that’s been going on for year, hacker vs Corp, and the hacker always wins. Same shit as anticheat in games, it’s a constant arms race but the hacker is nearly always a step ahead.
“opensource hackers” lol
I believe this phrase uses the original, older meaning: https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/309252/has-hacker-definitely-gained-a-negative-connotation
Youtube is vying X for a internet death while holding the door open for a less greedy rival
Vimeo: “Today is the day!”
PeerTube would be preferable, all corporate monopolies turn out the same in the end.
