General > General Technical Chat
YouTube runs experiment addressing users with ad blocker
coppercone2:
I like how it tries to sell you shit when you are watching international war news ::)
that really puts me in the mood for getting soap delivered to my house ::)
PlainName:
Better than an ad for a computer game like Call of Duty or something!
AndyBeez:
Has anyone Wiresharked their LAN whist watching YT? What makes advertiser content dissimilar from creator content?
From my software design perspective, If I was building an 'advert play out cart', I would embed the the advert content in with the same transport stream as the channel content, so no AdBlocker could ever function. The experience would be the same as watching regular television. Obviously on planet MP4 things work different with unique filenames and client side Javascript to 'detect' ad blocking.
My usage of YT and others is, I just hover over the Skip Advert button and pay zero attention to the advert. It's a 'skill' I likely developed early on watching Kids TV. Later on in life I was involved with online advertising and analytics. Even having seen the other side of the banner advert, to this day, I still cannot understand why online advertising is regarded as profitable highly lucrative for those in the advertising industry. It's all just visual noise - like posters on the subway or neon signs in Times Square. I guess I am even developing immunity from the social media disease of brainless influencers. Find a way to block them and you're set for a chicken dinner for life.
SiliconWizard:
--- Quote from: langwadt on October 13, 2023, 10:40:37 pm ---
--- Quote from: PlainName on October 13, 2023, 09:58:32 pm ---
--- Quote from: langwadt on October 13, 2023, 09:07:59 am ---
--- Quote from: Bicurico on October 13, 2023, 08:38:13 am ---Screw Youtube, I will significantly reduce my Youtube usage, which mainly consists in using it for playing background music, by listening to online radio or my own playlists for my own music collection.
--- End quote ---
if you are unwilling to pay for the service, one way or another, why are you using it? does Youtube owe you free service?
--- End quote ---
They've already had their pound of flesh from search/mail/contacts/phones/youtube/etc data snaffling and selling (and they didn't bother asking either). And they can't even claim not to be evil any more.
--- End quote ---
that data is only worth something if it means they can charge more for ads because they are better targeted, if you block ads what is that worth?
--- End quote ---
The data is a gold mine, it can be sold for a very large number of purposes. Usually marketing, but not only. And even for marketing purposes, one company can sell data to another without necessarily selling ad space after that. It's just a bonus.
hans:
--- Quote from: AndyBeez on October 15, 2023, 08:39:48 pm ---Has anyone Wiresharked their LAN whist watching YT? What makes advertiser content dissimilar from creator content?
From my software design perspective, If I was building an 'advert play out cart', I would embed the the advert content in with the same transport stream as the channel content, so no AdBlocker could ever function. The experience would be the same as watching regular television. Obviously on planet MP4 things work different with unique filenames and client side Javascript to 'detect' ad blocking.
My usage of YT and others is, I just hover over the Skip Advert button and pay zero attention to the advert. It's a 'skill' I likely developed early on watching Kids TV. Later on in life I was involved with online advertising and analytics. Even having seen the other side of the banner advert, to this day, I still cannot understand why online advertising is regarded as profitable highly lucrative for those in the advertising industry. It's all just visual noise - like posters on the subway or neon signs in Times Square. I guess I am even developing immunity from the social media disease of brainless influencers. Find a way to block them and you're set for a chicken dinner for life.
--- End quote ---
Little chance of solving that at such low level. Ads are served from the same servers at regular videos. There is not some DNS or IP hostname you can block, as you can with many other ads that are served outside of the original "platform". All comms is also TLS/HTTPS, so little packet inspection possible (unless you're willing to MITM yourself 24/7)
.
As @tom66 posted in reply #96, ads may even appear (under the hood) like regular videos that are being played.
The anti-adblock measures seem to work on monitoring whether adblockers are running, the ad videos are skipped before possibility of skip (or they finish playing), etc.
The script posted by Yurkshirelad in reply #117 was force-setting some JS variables to clear the adblock detectors. But it seems to have been taken offline already, well the txt endpoint that is. The readme page seems to indicate its not completely bug-free... as YT will surely be monitoring what people are changing all the time. This is always a cat and mouse game. And IME ""the pirates"" eventually win, as there are also 'options' to use 3rd party players etc.
I'm actually surprised that YT hasn't put more effort into script obfuscation. Its still possible to set/clear unobfuscated variable names, instead of choosing completely random ones (as an anti-scraping technique used by some sites)..
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