Over the past few months, YouTube has been trying another round of anti-adblock measures. Currently the anti-adblock stuff is being A/B tested, and one of my accounts is in the experimental group. I wrote a filter that partially avoids one of the anti-adblock measures, fake buffering, on uBlock Origin (and Brave browser, since it uses the same filter rules). (It’s already in the default filter lists, you don’t need to manually add the filter.)
One thing that people have ran into is “fake buffering”, where videos will take a while to load due to a lot of buffering, but only at the very start of the video (there’s no mid-video fake buffering). As I’ll explain, the fake buffering is 80% of the length of the ads you would’ve seen, so even with fake buffering you’re still saving time using an adblocker.
↫ iter.ca
The battle between YouTube on one side, and users wanting a non-shitty experience without paying for YouTube Premium on the other, is unlikely to end any time soon. Your computer, your rules, so I’m on the side of the people wanting to block ads on YouTube – the same applies to OSNews if you don’t want to pay for our ad-free version – but I’m still intrigued to find out just how far Google is willing to go.
I sometimes see YouTube with ads at other people’s homes. It’s a nightmare.
I started paying for premium because it also gives me music streaming.
The YT Music app is terrible, but the combination of that and add-free YouTube is better than just Spotify or equivalent.
Plus, all my obscure punk rock that I listen to that doesn’t show up on any of the streaming services but has been uploaded to YouTube by a fan is also playable while I drive.
The ad experience on youtube has been really bad, especially when watching on TV via a Chromecast. They have too many ads now. I’d personally not have a problem if they were to show ONE ad prior to starting any video (and every 15 minutes if the video is long), unskippable, but only up to 7-8 seconds. I think that would be fair. But more than that is too intrusive. Right now, they show 1-2 ads, often as long as 45 seconds (if not skippable), and in some videos, there’s interruption every 3 minutes. That’s just too much!
I gave in and got YT Premium a few years ago, because I do most of my YT watching on a Chromecast, where you never could block ads. As I was already a YT Music subscriber, it wasn’t much more to get YT Premium. I hate the fact I’m directly giving Google money though…
I just flat out refuse to pay money to a company that’s built an empire off stealing peoples data.
For your smart TV there’s smarttube. For Linux, there’s Freetube. For your phone, there’s NewPipe (and now PipePipe). These all block 100% of the ads.
The experience is going downhill. Everyone agrees on that.
But my concern is being able to archive these videos offline. I occasionally use youtube-dl (and its modern fork) to make local copies of individual videos (or groups of them) as they would every now and then get delisted / removed for various reasons.
When I check my own playlists and “watch later”, about 10-20% of videos are no longer there. Being able to save them for future is an important need.
However, I’m pretty sure this “anti-adblock” filters will also catch up to these tools. And there might be a time soon where we can no longer archive videos.
Unlikely in the near future. They’d have to frog-boil their way up to requiring the degree of DRM that things like Netflix do.
…and, as downloader people said when they tried mixing ads into the chunk playlists, if the official player knows when to display ad-related UI elements like the skip button, then the downloader knows which chunks to skip.
It all goes back to the problem that DRM and DRM-like behaviours are fundamentally a problem of using cryptography tech to send a message from Alice to Bob while protecting it from being intercepted by Bob.
ssokolow,
Yes, I see you are looking from the DRM point of view, and we can see there is no “protected path” necessary for ordinary videos.
That is true, but…
There is also “captcha” route, or rather “human at screen” detection. I’m pretty sure they can do this pretty well, as in detection of “headless” mode as the usage patterns of `youtube-dl` will definitely not match their own UI, and of course it will not be running any JavaScript in the first place.
There are possible well known solutions… that comes back to your first point. Running a fully fledged Chrome instance with a virtual screen (recorder). That is already done with some stream recorders in Windows (for capturing Hulu, Netflix, etc). But that would complicate, and also slow down the entire process.
sukru,
IMHO captchas aren’t effective anymore. Cloudflare cranked up their “bot detection” on sites like stack exchange, but it very much degrades the web experience for humans. It is so frustrating to open several links in different tabs only to have cloudflare repeats the same interruption across all of them, adding a ~5-6s delay per page. It’s NOT testing HUMANs, it’s testing the BROWSER! A bot that fetches URLs directly can’t pass, but a bot that tells an existing browser to fetch the URL (ie webdriver) will have no issue mimicking a human using a browser.
I consider this a last resort. Capturing the output buffer and recompressing it is obviously much less efficient like you say and it’s much more ideal to intercept the content at a lower level than this. But the tradeoff is that this is generic/foolproof/futureproof and should work even under fairly rigorous DRM efforts. yt-download is very efficient and convenient, but if it came down to it and DRM broke these tools, they would/will ultimately evolve to emulating the full browser and even OS if need be.
Alfman,
That is why I put captcha in quotes. They don’t need to use a full on captcha, but just some basic methods to detect automated downloads.
1. The patterns would definitely be different. Requesting large number of chunks in parallel with not enough time to actually watch them, and so on..
2. Being able to add very basic javascript, maybe at “2 + 2 = 4” level in the download process. “chunk_number = calculate_id(1, 2, 3)” kind of thing, trivial to calculate but requires a javascript interpreter to do so.
Those, and similar very easy to implement methods can detect downloaders if they choose to do so.
Yes, I hope it does not come to that, but the current YouTube efforts are unfortunately moving in that direction.
sukru,
Maybe I should have put captcha in quotes as well, because what I am referring to isn’t technically a captcha, but instead cloudflare’s new “turnstile” bot detection feature. It fails to live up to the claims, it absolutely does slow down the web experience, and it can’t do anything to stop webdriver based bots that use a legit browser, regardless here is their pitch…
https://www.cloudflare.com/application-services/products/turnstile/
This is probably what cloudflare are doing. On stack exchange my normal workflow is to open many tabs before reading the pages. Maybe this parallel workflow is unacceptable to cloudflare because it is “bot-like” behavior. If I relegated my workflow to sequential processing the interruptions might be fewer? Maybe I have to unoptimize my workflow so that cloudflare thinks I’m human. :-/
BTW I do the same thing on youtube, but youtube never gives me a problem for it.
Sure, but webdriver bots that use real browser engines are nothing new and are impervious to browser based challenges. When the bots use real browsers, the viability of browser testing goes out the window and the “captcha” must fall back to behavioral heuristics, which are vulnerable to both false positives and false negatives. We can increase the cost to operate a bot by adding inefficiency and delays, but the same delays can and do frustrate humans as is happening with cloudflare.
If it does happen, we might end up with a return of a tivo-like time shifting products, only this time for the web. Streaming services will still be polluted with ads, but we will have software to record an entire stream and play it back later and skip ads at our leisure. Does this already exist in a refined package like tivo had? If it does I think I have a use for it.
It’s funny that tivo died off because internet streaming made it redundant, and but now we need tivo again because internet streaming is becoming as crappy as TV was.
It does appear to be the parallelism that does it, given how often Phoronix has CAPTCHA’d me for rapidly middle-clicking everything in my unread notifications since they switched on turnstile to try to beat back A.I. scrapers.
Alfman,
ssokolow,
Yes, you both touched an important point.
AI / bot “so called” detectors depend on efficient patterns. Things an average person cannot do.
That is why plagiarism detectors are the worst thing that happened to universities. Those “reliable” software mark texts like the Declaration of Independence or presidential speeches as “AI made” while letting all slop go. (Ironically you can ask ChatGPT to rewrite in a sloppy manner)
They will hurt the human race… to make us inherently less efficient (hidden AI uprising?, okay joking)
Anyway, for youtube downloads this is even much simpler, as you download video chunks much faster than you can watch them.
Say video is made of 1,000 chunks of 1 second long. If you download them in order (even if not in parallel) the entire download will finish in a few seconds. However youtube knows they would not buffer as much (maybe 20-30? seconds?). So this is extremely easy to catch. Especially if you do this in rapid fire manner.
Anyway good luck to us all…
sukru,
Yes, I understand your point that programs can download chunks way faster than realtime playback, but it’s also absolutely trivial to slow down the download in software even if it takes a bit longer..
I’m not sure if you meant “a few seconds” literally or just as an expression?
I tested it right now. An 11 minute 1080 HD 198MB clip took 40s, or or 39.6Mbps.
For the same clip to download in 4s, both sides would need to support 400Mbps service. It looks like youtube is throttling below that and sadly I don’t have nearly that much bandwidth anyway, speedtest is consistently reporting 58.5Mbps.
If ever they do try to verify that download speeds match real-time playback, hopefully they take into consideration the fact that sometimes users playback videos at 1.5-2X speed.
Alfman,
Hmm… perks of having a gigabit connection
(This was an 11 minute, ~660 seconds video)
The YT ads is why I spread the adblock gospel wherever I can. Had they stuck to 1 preroll, one post-roll and maybe 1 midroll, I’d probably have YT unblocked. Maybe even would buy Premium. But if they treat me like crap before I decide to pay them, they’re simply not getting paid, period. Neither in eye-dollars (by watching ads) nor real dollars (by me buying YT Premium).
Exactly, I was watching YouTube ads back when they had stuck to that format (I hated mid-rolls when introduced and stayed on the YouTube 1.x app for a while because it didn’t support mid-rolls), but hey, they have to pay the bills, I thought.
But the current trend of multiple mid-rolls and ads after ads is unwatchable and quite frankly feels like a trick to get you on Premium. So, uBlock Origin it is. I’ve largely stopped using my Asus Nexus Player.
Yeah, if the subscription was reasonable, and actually blocked ads, we could be talking, but I am not paying $20 a month for a service that still has ads, and doesnt pay their content creators enough.
I wouldn’t even mind the ads if they weren’t accounting for more time than the thing I’m watching themselves, it’s really not easy to stay focused when you’re cut 4 times a minute by a double 15s ad…
And on the other hand, YT Premium is way too expensive, otherwise I wouldn’t have minded paying.
So yeah, the fight is on ️*muscle emoji*
A few days ago they hit me passing thru uBlockOrigin but only on Chromium based browsers. On Firefox side of things, everything seems to be fine. But I turned on free trial of YT Premium anyway after discovering that they let me do it for the second time on the same account. Previously I ran free trial back in 2023.
If everything else fails I consider giving up, simultaneusly resigning from one media subscription redirecting the same amount of money for YT.
Been OK on Edge also from my experience. Don’t use the less popular chromium’s though, so just edge over chrome. (and use firefox and waterfox (had to switch from pale moon to waterfix due to compatibility issues with sites).
I grew up with Youtube, but there isn’t any content on Youtube that I watch anymore. Most of it is overproduced or fake reaction/review videos, and the people talk too slowly in some long build up to nothing, like one of those AI-generated “how to cook tom yum goong” articles where the AI author spends 80% of the time telling a story about life lessons from stubbing their toe as a 6 year old growing up in Bergen.
I tried Youtube Music as well because it has HD streams, but the community playlists are garbage, the algorithm is ass. Always trying to sneak some promo content in that I don’t want to hear, like the girl who sneaks a praise and worship song on a pop punk mixtape hoping it will win you to Jesus. I don’t think Jelly Roll is clever, I don’t want to hear the Beetles, so why did that stuff autoplay after I had some early 90’s alternative playlist going?
Youtube Shorts is trash, videos about how to comply with police if you get detained, videos about how protecting a certain country is justified by the Bible. Stupid.
It’s been over a decade since the good, organic content was there. Now it’s all corporate psyop Andrew Tate / Joe Rogan / if you see something say something trash.
Production costs are up, everybody Youtubing from their living room is really in a studio in a warehouse in New Jersey, someone has to pay the bills. Prices of production increase, so they need more corporate money to pay for it, so they need more ad revenue.
Either feed the beast, or don’t.
unix_joe,
I concur. There must be some faith groups pumping out thousands of these basic AI videos because so many of them have religious undertones. The AI is easily identifiable by the “fake 3d” and slow panning shots.I don’t how these would appeal to anyone because they’re so void of content, maybe religious tiktok scrollers, I don’t know.
Anyway, I think you hit a key point about youtube experiencing a race to the bottom, not just AI channels. So much content is fake/copycat/reaction videos now with absolutely minimal production value. I find it disappointing, but new generations must be eating it up because many of these channels rank highly. The “cheap content based on pre-existing content” problem is very real. Economically these cheap content channels may be more profitable than hiring experts and taking a long time to do a good job. I can see how AI exacerbates this but I don’t think AI caused this. It’s just part of the race to the bottom.
How timely, John Oliver just published a new piece about this very topic…
“AI Slop: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TWpg1RmzAbc
I think that says more about what YouTube’s algorithm sees your IP address and/or account cookie tolerating than anything else. What YouTube exposes me to is still quite good.
(eg. Want mystery content? Check out The Lore Lodge and The Missing Enigma for people who actually do pro-quality research. Want ancient history or mythology? World of Antiquity. ReligionForBreakfast. …both channels run by people with PhDs in the fields they cover. Want retro-tech with interesting diagnosis and repair videos? How about Adrian’s Digital Basement and Noel’s Retro Lab? Want tech-history? How about The Serial Port or Our Own Devices. Food History? Tasting History. Tornado-related stuff with a smattering of photo-heavy rare atmospheric phenomenon lists? Swegle Studios. Astrophysics? PBS Space Time. etc. etc. etc. …and that’s not even every good channel I know for each category I gave as an example.)
ssokolow,
If you log into any google services and/or don’t use blockers, you will get tailored content around your own view history. Those who delete cookies / block trackers get a very different experience . Turn on anonymous browsing and see how the type of videos recommended are totally unrelated to your interests. Of course this should be obvious, but it tells us a lot about the type of content that youtube is promoting to average users.
Yes, you can still find some quality content on youtube, but the ratio seems to be getting worse because they don’t seem to be keeping pace with the growth of cheap/low quality content. Meanwhile many of my favorite creators retire after revealing they’re burnt out. complaining about the youtube algorithm emphasizing quantity over quality.
In terms of darwinian evolution, it can be temping to think the best and strongest always win, but sometimes merely being “good enough” and more efficient wins instead. China becoming dominant at manufacturing didn’t happen because of higher quality. Instead virtually all western brands moved to china because they were all eager to lower expenses. I know this can’t directly be compared to youtube, but at a high level similar long term economics could be in play.
I never said it’s not getting worse. I just dispute the implication that “Most of it is overproduced or fake reaction/review videos” means that most of what YOU see has to be garbage.
ssokolow (Hey, OSNews, U2F/WebAuthn is broken on Firefox!),
I can kind of agree, but I disagree on the “YOU” part specifically when referring to users who disable tracking and aren’t logged in. Without personalized browsing history, the algorithm’s natural rankings come to the surface. This reveals a lot about the type of content that youtube promotes outside of the filter bubbles users get when logged in.
I disable tracking to the greatest degree possible and, aside from sometimes using one of Firefox’s Container Tabs to check my subscriptions, I am not logged in.
YouTube falls back to trying to personalize for some blend of what your IP address has requested and what is similar to the video you’re currently on. Add the BlockTube extension to filter out the shorts and the occasional “let’s try again to get this person interested in Joe Rogan because he’s popular” that gets mixed in and it’s quite a pleasant experience.
ssokolow (Hey, OSNews, U2F/WebAuthn is broken on Firefox!),
Youtube does track the activity in every session, but I don’t think that recommendations are based on prior IP address activity. Don’t get me wrong, I agree with you that it’s technically doable, but I disagree this is what youtube actually does. Think of the privacy violations if google did that. It could even create a HIPAA lawsuit if roommates learn sensitive medical information because youtube was leaking information to others. In any case I don’t observe youtube doing this. Every time I close the browser, the recommendations really do get reset and are not related to earlier sessions. I imagine that Google use zipcode/city geolocation, to initialize the profile but that’s probably the extent of it.
Thank you, I am giving BlockTube a try…you piqued my interest when you said it blocks shorts! I’ve hated them since day 1. Google has gone out of their way to pollute youtube results with “shorts”. I never want to see another one recommended again. Youtube is hard to customize when your policy is to clear cookies because everything gets reset, but an extension may prove useful.
I know that’s what YouTube does because, when my brothers and their girlfriends visit during the holidays, content related to channels I don’t watch but they do spontaneously starts to show up in my logged-out sidebar recommendations.
It may also still be possible to hide them using custom CSS via Stylus. I know that at least used to be possible.
ssokolow (Hey, OSNews, U2F/WebAuthn is broken on Firefox!),
I honestly don’t experience what you are claiming after clearing cookies. “spontaneously starts to show up” suggests immediate results. I have to take you at your word, but it sure seems like happens because multiple devices are logged into the same account.
I searched for non-annecdotal evidence of this but so far I haven’t found anything. I hope you can understand why when it comes to anecdotal evidence I’m still going with my own first hand observations. Youtube might promote the same videos to multiple users who share an IP, but this doesn’t conclusively prove to me that it only happens due to shared IPs. The odds are pretty high that the same trending videos are going to be recommended to thousands of people in your neighborhood.
I’d be willing to conduct a more rigorous experiment. What exact procedure and criteria do you recommend I use for testing the hypothesis?
It is called “ip based ad targeting”
If you are logged out (or in some cases even if you are logged in) they would look up your address and do real time profile lookup from ad brokers.
https://www.geoedge.com/what-is-ip-based-geo-targeting/
That is where the infamous “Google is listening to me” comes from. It is probably some other device, possibly even your TV that listens all the time (Automatic Content Recognition), and sells this data. When necessary this is later joined with other information.
(And yes, large chains like Target, or your cell phone providers are in on this too).
sukru,
You are talking about ad brokers, but can you comment on whether youtube will show you your flat mate’s recommended videos when you don’t share accounts?
I haven’t observed this happening, and I think it would be a major privacy violation. As a former google employee you are the most authoritative person here, although I don’t suppose youtube was your department.
Alfman,
Unfortunately I cannot comment on that.
The main reason is I do not know. But … even if I did, it would probably require me not to speak about it.
However the standard industry practices like real time ad auctions, brokers, and ip based profiles… they are also public. So easier to talk about.
Does forcing people to see ads even achieve anything?
If someone has gone to the trouble of installing an adblocker it’s clear they don’t want to see ads. Forcing them to is only going to make them angry. So not only are such people more likely to stop using the service, they are also unlikely to purchase the advertised products and might even actively avoid the brands being advertised.
If i was paying for advertising, i absolutely would not want my advertisements forced upon people who explicitly don’t want to see them.
> Does forcing people to see ads even achieve anything?
Yes: yt can bill the entity that pays for the ad. That’s all this is about. Whether the ad has an effect or not is not analyzed by google (well, maybe it is, on GCP, but not for google).
Serafean,
Current adblockers are detectable, but what if they weren’t? Maybe a stealth adblocker would provide a happy medium. Advertisers pay the bills and *think* their ads were seen, therefor continue to pay. Users can claw back uninterrupted programming. Of course, ads consume a significant amount of bandwidth, and a stealth adblocker would have to pay the bandwidth tax to be truly stealthy. This is clearly wasteful, but since we are already living with this waste today, at least a stealth adblocker would hide the ads.
Yeah. Google prefers to defraud advertisers by forcing views on them which they know are at least disinterested and potentially actively hostile.
Advertisers can engage in clickfraud, but a de facto monopsony, by definition, is always right.
You all should give grayjay a try: grayjay.app
With their slogan – “Follow creators, not platforms” – it echoes a lot of your frustrations.
They are still in development, so expect a lot of bugs, fixes and new bugs.
We need a new – free – video platform.
Grayjay is a aggregator of different platforms, so they are not a 1 to 1 replacement of yt. But it paves the way to migrate to that free video platform that we all long for.
Backed by Louis Rossman. He’s not everybody’s cup of tea. Much like Richard Stallman. But they both have very honest intentions.
I have been able to successfully block most of the ads that come my way. However, it’s becoming more and more of a chore to do so, and who has time to feed blocklists, set up services to proxy through, whatever…
I wouldn’t mind watching the ads if the ads would actually rotate and not be the same ad over and over again. I don’t need to see the same ad ten times in a twenty minute period. I wasn’t going to buy the product before, now after ten repetitious watchings do you think I am more likely to buy it now?
This is the same issue I have with watching cable or OTA television. Constantly the same commercials over and over again ad nauseum. This is why I stopped watching most forms of television more than a decade ago. Ironically enough, I moved to watching YouTube to occupy my time. Now the same problem rears its ugly head once again.
moriarty99779,
I agree it’s ridiculous. Not only is it very obnoxious to users,, but it also wastes advertiser money.
Google benefits from picking the highest bid, even if that happens to be the same advertiser 10 times in a row. If I was an advertiser I’d be pissed at google over this too. Do advertisers have any control over ad repetition? It just seems like it would be in everyone’s best interest except google to rate limit the same ads to prevent so much repetition.
Ahh. I thought it was a bug, like the last time fake-buffering turned out to be a bug in an ad-blocker (AdBlockPlus, I think).
*shrug* I multi-task, so I don’t mind waiting, so long as I don’t have it distracting me.
(I generally don’t listen to podcasts because I don’t know of any SponsorBlock analogue for them.)
The problem with paying for Youtube is that Google will still profile you and sell your data to advertisers for use elsewhere in their empire, even if they don’t display ads on the videos.
Is this true? I understood that Google doesn’t like selling data as that is the source of their competitive advantage. In fact, I am pretty sure other regulators want to force them to share data.
mkone,
I agree Google would rather mine the user data and sell ads themselves. But torp’s wording is a bit weird and if you take it to mean shifting data between different google/alphabet advertising companies, that’s probably true. What you do on youtube may effect the ads you see elsewhere.
Yep, I don’t care if they actually sell my data to other entities or they use it themselves for monetary gain. It’s still not compatible with demanding money for their services.
If they were not so horrible, I think a lot of people would be fine with watching ads. Currently, the video is interrupted anywhere, most of the time in the middle of a sentence, and then returned right back. They should have done as it was in tv, where there are ad breaks.
After they broke manifest 2 in plugins in Chrome so their ads couldn’t be blocked, I’ve been letting them play with ublock lite installed. Somehow still got into the “adblockers aren’t allowed on youtube” and “only 3 more videos left.” To pull that while not acknowledging that you are in fact playing ads, sends me to Firefox immediately. Meanwhile ublock’s lite counter easily creeps over 100 on Youtube, so probably trying to load infinite trackers
dark2,
I normally use FF, so I haven’t observed the impact of manifest v3, but technically it is a downgrade in adblocking capabilities and that seems to be the point of it. I have been affected by google’s adblock detection on FF with ublock, but so far google hasn’t been that aggressive. They only seem to be randomly testing it in phases.
I know that google has the means to turn it on across the board and do something worse than merely delay the video (which is still a better experience than blasting unwanted ads IMHO). But breaking adblockers too badly is a sort of a nuclear option. If google makes it impossible for adblockers to work by blocking ad downloads, then future stealth adblockers will have to work by downloading the ads and then not displaying them. This will mean that google will no longer have accurate accounting for ad impressions, which could conceivably create trust and legal complications between google and advertisers.
I never have and never will subject myself to Youtube ads.