this post was submitted on 05 Jul 2024
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nah, if they embed the ad into the video stream (they were testing this for some users!), the only adblocking option will be to blank out the screen and wait through the ad (or download the video in advance and edit the ad out automatically), both of which would make it a lot more annoying to adblock than currently.
This is actually one of very few valid cases for an LLM, to help sponsorblock determine ad segments by analyzing the word choice and speech patterns in segments of the video.
No, you just need to skip the ad. Sponsorblock has been working for years now, solving pretty much the same problem
Sponsor Block relies on the ads being at the same timestamp for all users
They can be detected
nope, the ad time varies unlike a sponsor segment, and also youtube would not let you skip through an ad while streaming it, whereas sponsors you can, hence the download and edit out with LLM or whatever algorithm works best
It can be detected
yes, but if youtube only serves you the real video chunks after your client plays through the ad chunks (all in the same media stream to the client), theres gonna be some waiting involved, not like adblocking today where it is instant.
You could trick youtube into believing you are ahead in the video so that it fills the buffer earlier
YouTube Revanced already has a blocker for sponsor segments embedded in the video.
you can skip through sponsor segments, but these are ads from youtube, not from the creator, and youtube will not let you conveniently skip through the ads. if implemented correctly, youtube could ensure that the ad is fully played, which would need downloading and automatic editing to counter.
How would they determine if the ad is played without trusting the client? I guess they could screw with the buffer, but that would really piss of people with poor internet, and most people would prefer an ad-length black screen to whatever attention wrenching dark pattern manipulative brown noise wants to infect your mind today.
Don't worry, I have been using the powerful technology of "the mute button" and "doing other stuff" since before cable TV existed. We always have alternatives.
That is an interesting question. From what I know, youtube has every video in chunks that they serve to the client, and so server side ad injection is just serving some ad chunks before the video. I think you're right with the buffer thing, it seems to me like the only way to make sure the client can't skip it would be to make the buffer shorter, impacting some people (although seems like only really people with internet thats fast enough for streaming some seconds, but not other seconds, which is an odd catagory)
Ultimately it would be a tradeoff for youtube, but the fact that they put the effort into doing mass testing of the idea at all shows that clearly there are some good incentives, and it may eventually be implemented.