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Inside the 'arms race' between YouTube and ad blockers / Against all odds, open source hackers keep outfoxing one of the wealthiest companies. (www.engadget.com)
submitted 2 years ago by [M, B] to c/technology@lemmy.world
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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.

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[–] 29 points 2 years ago (4 children)

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.

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  • [–] 24 points 2 years ago (4 children)

    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.

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  • [–] 16 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    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.

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  • [–] 7 points 2 years ago* (3 children)

    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.

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  • [–] 6 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    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.

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  • [–] 2 points 2 years ago

    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.

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  • [–] 9 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    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.

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  • [–] 1 point 2 years ago

    They would then also need to implement a new (and much less intuitive than 4m20s) way of referring to specific timestamps, since with ads at random points the timecode would be dynamically changing for each viewing.

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  • [–] 4 points 2 years ago (2 children)

    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.

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  • [–] 11 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    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.

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  • [–] 4 points 2 years ago

    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.

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  • [–] 3 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    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.

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  • [–] 2 points 2 years ago

    I guess we will have to compare the last video frame and/or audio sample of every segment to the first frame and/or sample of the next segment or something like that?! Maybe the effects of "the loudness war" in ads will help us detect ads solely by the loudness change within the audiostream?

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  • [–] 12 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    Wouldn't SponsorBlock be a way around this?

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  • [–] 11 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    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.)

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  • [+] 7 points 2 years ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 child)
    [deleted]
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  • [–] 1 point 2 years ago

    If ads are inserted at random time stamps and the client reports the watched intervals, then the server doesn’t need to communicate which intervals are ads.

    That could still be bypassed by building a library of ads in the ad blocker, then examining the video feed when an ad is encountered, looking it up in the DB, and automatically jumping ahead as many seconds as its expected duration, but that would be a substantially heavier operation than what uBlock Origin currently does.

    It also wouldn’t enable forcing users to watch the ads, since the client wouldn’t know to enforce an unskippable segment from 1:38 to 2:08. And that’s probably the real reason it won’t be implemented - an executive probably has “must preserve these features” as a constraint, so an engineer wouldn’t even propose this feature to them.

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