this post was submitted on 18 Oct 2023
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If I had any programming ability above the level of a sloth I’d make a blocker called “Muffler” that basically separated out all the adstreams and made them think they were viewed and played in real time, but invisible to the user.
Shouting into the void, and nothing to be done about it as they’d look like they were being played.
Sounds like what adnauseam is doing. It loads ads hidden and clicks on some of them but I am not sure if it does that with YouTube ads or just blocks them.
So does this cause advertisers to lose money since their ads are being clicked but never viewed by human eyes? Because if so, I'll install ad nauseum asap
I thinkk the main idea behind ad naseum is to drown out any information you leave behind. Basically it hiides your data in a pile of useless and fake data that becomes useless.
Not for AdSense ads, like what YouTube uses. Click-Through Rate (CTR) is only used to determine how much of a cut Google gives to the ad hosts, the advertisers just bid for the spots. The advertisers can see the CTR metrics, and so they might be willing to bid more, but that's not guaranteed.
So google makes money either way, and the advertisers spend money either way. The only difference is that your favorite websites and youtubers get paid too.
Hmmm well for some reason I was under the impression that ad nauseum can be used alongside uBO, but I see now that it can't so I guess I'll keep uBO since I've got a ton of custom filters, but this was insightful so thanks.
Yep, advertisers are paying for ad clickthroughs that no human ever sees.
In a vice versa way, that's pi hole. The website makes ad requests to the DNS and pi hole says:
I use pihole. Pihole does not work for sites that serve ads from the same domain, like YouTube
Like, downloading the video files with yt-dlp and then uploading them? Or streaming, like what Piped/LibreTube do?
I personally have my own piped server, and don't enter to youtube for anything. The only 2 things it can't do are post comments and see live streams comments. No ads, no tracking, i can do whatever i want without google's permission
Not a bad idea, but if possible, you want to skip loading the ad altogether, which is – to my understanding – what currently happens.
This is so inherently detectable, though, I'm amazed it worked for so long and that it's still working now. Likely a consequence of offloading as much of YT onto the client side as possible, because if you're doing anything server side how hard is it to require that the ad has at least downloaded before streaming the video?
The Spotify ripper "zotify" has an undetectable "realtime" mode that does basically what OP suggested. Instead of downloading every track as fast as possible, it pretends that it's actually streaming and listening to them. Obviously it takes a lot longer to rip a whole album, but it's a good idea.
I think Spotify ripping isn't big enough that it's actually needed at this point, but it's good that they considered the potential for it.
I always thought the reason they don't take any action, is exactly because adblockers would then work as the guy above described.
Companies posting ads would eventually become aware, that a not insignificant portion of viewers don't even see the ads they are paying for. I don't see how this won't cause a backlash... i guess youtube calculated that in and thinks it'll be worth it any way.
Good point, if you're counting ad impressions and billing accordingly then it's better to simply lose the impression than bill the customer for displaying a "ghost ad".
However this is exactly what's happening to sponsors with SponsorBlock, their section gets skipped and nobody knows (well, the channel owner knows from the watch stats, but does the sponsor demand those stats, do they only pay for clickthroughs on the referral link, I have no idea how the YT sponsor ecosystem works)
They don't need any other information than referral link clicks/signups and video views, one of which they have metrics on, the other is public information. A SponsorSkip user is equal in their eyes to a person who isn't interested in the product.
I'm personally not a big fan of spotify ripping, the audio quality isn't great and more annoying. If I were you I'd check out Soulseek or the alternative ui Nicotine+
There was an app that did that.
Google found it and killed it.
Piped is pretty much that.