YouTube experimenting with server-side ad injection

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.

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 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.

yt has gotten very feisty all of a sudden.<p>If you&#x27;re used to dipping in &amp; out of vids to find something interesting it is fundamentally unusable without working adblock. You end up watching more ads than video

This sounds technically unfeasible, at YouTube&#x27;s scale.<p>They&#x27;ll have to re-encode videos at all permutations across countries, regions and locales. They&#x27;ll also have to somehow account for ads that have been pulled down after the fact... then they&#x27;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&#x27;ll have to do all of this continuously, since ads change with the times - despite the clips themselves being stale and static?<p>I can imagine they will have to limit this &quot;feature&quot; to a very small subset of videos with high view count&#x2F;interest&#x2F;revenue potential... maybe just to live feeds... otherwise, the costs to do this for every video on the platform would shoot through the roof.

EDIT: I didn&#x27;t read carefully. Ignore the first sentence.<p>~There&#x27;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&#x27;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 &quot;analog hole&quot;.

Finally, YouTube is going to heal my addiction! I&#x27;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&#x27;t have 10 life time to complete them, so better know nothing but complete everything.

I find the baked-in ads in my parents VHS tapes to be quaint and informative.<p>I don&#x27;t feel that way about current YouTube ads!

After they disabled the site for ad blockers I begrudgingly shelled out for YouTube Premium. I&#x27;ve now come around to being OK with paying for the convenience. Much of the content I watch wouldn&#x27;t exist without the revenue they get from ads or subscriptions. I&#x27;m sure some people will find creative ways to pirate content, but Premium is cheaper than Netflix and I watch more content on YouTube than Netflix so it seems reasonable to me.

Time to start pirating YouTube as well.

Online advertising is such a strange world.<p>Do I see it correctly, that half of the worlds&#x27; population (the ones without ad blockers) is paying the web for the other half (the ones with ad blockers)?<p>The amount of ads these days is so crazy that I think we might all be better off if there was a way to easily do micropayments instead.

Server-side ad injection is the endgame for the ongoing war between ad blockers and content sites.

How can Google defend the mobile app where they do not let you close the screen in YouTube unless you pay, so you get both ads and they screw your battery, which is not ECO friendly? Tons of batteries and phones are sent to the garbage bin faster and Google is allowed to do it and seems nobody shits on them and the google devs for this EVIL actions.<p>Makes you wonder if Google devs could intentionally make the app eat more battery or do other EVIL shit since they prove they are OK with this tactics. 2

If it&#x27;s accpetable to embed ads into the video file then as a video producer why not just negotiate with advertisers directly and cut out the Google middleman. Negotiate a deal with an advertiser and then have the advertiser send some ad video that the video producer can edit into her videos with ffmpeg. This allows the video producer to choose the advertiser(s) she wants.

I&#x27;m honestly surprised it took this long for them to do this. Knowing nothing about how ad delivery&#x2F;networks work (or ad blockers, for that matter) my guess is that something fundamental with how they are delivered (e.g., 3rd party domain for tracking?) also made them detectable via extensions? Makes me wonder how they are solving the problem now.<p>Twitch seems to do a good job of staying ahead of extensions.

I know mostly nothing about enterprise video&#x2F;streaming wrangling. Is Youtube rolling out something like an m3u playlist on demand with the video intermingled with ads or a single video with ads baked in, like a VHS recording from TV?

Honestly, I&#x27;m surprised it took this long.<p>A lot of ad tech is defeated simply because it is provided by a third party, outside the original request, and executed in the browser. So make it first party, use the main request, and build it on the server. It&#x27;s not as easy, but Google can do it. Make it fast (requires compute + infra) and charge a premium for the placement - after all, it&#x27;s going to be more &quot;effective&quot;. Again, definitely something Google can do.

Presumably this would also break timestamp links more generally?

Can someone explain like I&#x27;m 5? Will this affect DuckDuckGo embedded player ?<p>Edit: clarify that I usually go through Bing or DDG to play YT videos

Not only are the ads annoyingly long and frequent sometimes, and not only does the ridiculously expensive YouTube TV subscription I still haven&#x27;t talked my family out of not prevent ads on YouTube, but the _way_ it does ads is incredibly annoying: it&#x27;s easy enough to click the &quot;Skip&quot; button once it shows up if you&#x27;re sitting in front of your computer or watching on your phone, but it&#x27;s really hard to do when your hands are covered in water and dish soap…

Sounds like Sponsorblock will become the new AdBlock!

Eh, it makes sense. I use adblock because I can, but if it becomes too hard to block ads, I&#x27;ll just watch them or pay (begrudgingly).