Experimental Youtube "feature" detects and blocks some users of ad blocking browser extensions on Youtube

[starsmine]

30 minutes ago, Fred Castellum said:

Wish youtube would work on improving the platform itself over trying to stop adblockers. 

Regardless there will be ways to circumvent this, and I won't miss chrome one bit if I have to switch to another browser. 

They do?
Its not an either-or mate. Two things can be worked on at the same exact time. It's almost like there are more than one person working there.

What issues are you having with the platform?

[GhostRoadieBL]

22 hours ago, Kisai said:

I'd be perfectly fine with doing/having the sponsorships, if I would use it myself, and that's one of the reasons why I'd never accept most sponsorships. They are almost entirely US-oriented, I can't use/play it with a straight face, or the conditions to actually get the sponsorship money is a joke.

 

Cool, nearly $2000... now what's the catch?

So really it's only $35. In order to get that maximum value, you need to convince at least two viewers to play to level 12, and you need to complete to level 25. AND you need to spend $30 in the game. You could maybe compel me to play the game at least once, but I know the viewers I have will not. I typically will not play these games, and I would have a hard time restraining my disdain for gacha mechanics.

 

But what about HelloFresh. Something you've certainly seen LTT have as a sponsor. $1500. I don't have a present offer for it. But the keyword in the offer is "HelloFresh US",

 

But surely you can get two people to play a game right? Wrong. Of the people I know who have done sponsorships, getting the payout is usually not possible because the criteria has been rigged against you. Unless you have hundreds of concurrent viewers during a live stream, where you might actually luck out and get a few people to actually play the game with you, chances are you'll get that minimum $35 payout and nothing close to the maximum. Now look at the amount of time you need to play it. 2 hours. That is $17.50/hr . How much is your time actually worth? Mine is $200/hr and that's how much I ask to do any work for any client without a contract.

 

If a sponsorship is going to be permanently part of a video, then clearly it should be reflect how evergreen that content will be. Would you watch someone play a game for 2 hours that they are at best lukewarm on? No. But, some people enjoy playing anything put in front of them. I'm not one of them.  Generally when someone has played a game as a sponsorship most haven't been that enthusiastic about it, and as soon as the time is up the game is dropped like a hot potato.

 

What should a game sponsorship look like? Well first and foremost, don't make it depend on the viewership doing anything, because that just turns it into a affiliate commission structure, which if it's going to be a commission structure, there should be no time limit on it, and any affiliate of any size should be offered the same amount. Every time one of these game offers have popped up, the dollar value has increased by 10% but the minimum has not.

 

I honestly don't know if it would work, however, based on what you are saying (other than the limiting US sponsors) is companies are not putting forward good deals and I can definitely see that as being a byproduct of pushing smaller video producers/streamers around by being a bad company.

This would support the idea of using YouTube as the middle dealer, making them the big player instead of the companies going straight to smaller creators and being scumbag companies. A company the size of Alphabet doesn't get pushed around like a small creator getting their audience set up and can push for (and loudly state how they are doing it) better deals for creators, at a platform wide level. You can guarantee YouTube's contract team isn't accepting game play time for payment.

 

I run into a very similar situation on Instagram for photography, companies offer discounts for you to buy their products so they can post your images all the time. My only response is basically set up a sponsored photoshoot as a contract and I'll feature the products you send me, but don't waste our time with trying to have me pay you to use my photos of your products.

[Taf the Ghost]

The big issue with YouTube Ads is simply the Circle of Trust problem. I run heavy adblocking & decent amounts of script blocking. Have for years and will continue to do so. The internet will always be like "open terrain". You cannot assume Trust until you've established it. And I don't have a great reason to trust Google, generally. Even if I do use a lot of their products.

 

That said, the actual biggest issue is fundamental to, especially, pre-roll Ads: I didn't click on the Video to see whatever random ad I won't ever click on. I'm there to watch what I actively attempted to engage with. (I also never use Autoplay). This is a real problem with Twitch right now (you can remove Twitch integrations, it's just more complicated.) 

 

I'll always give @LinusTech and crew credit for their approach when it comes to Ads. To the point that the sponsor segues are sometimes the best jokes in the videos. It helps when the approach is from people that actually use the platform, so they get the pain points and played a long enough "game" to know that leaving a little money on the table comes at the benefit to cutting down your audience.  Linus is also about 75% of the way to being the Techtube Martha Stewart. (Just remember, it's only Insider Trading if you actually Sell. Not Selling when you planned to is free & clear.)

 

Edit: I also should mention here that YT still loses money hand over fist and I doubt the product is actually viable on its own nor could it ever be. Though maybe some of the tech & IP, used in other Google products, means it isn't a blackhole of losses like it used to be.

[Kisai]

15 hours ago, GhostRoadieBL said:

I honestly don't know if it would work, however, based on what you are saying (other than the limiting US sponsors) is companies are not putting forward good deals and I can definitely see that as being a byproduct of pushing smaller video producers/streamers around by being a bad company.

 

The problem I find, and don't get me wrong on this, is that advertisers are ultimately "lazy" in a bad way. They want to go to a middleman and go "here's $100,000, get me X many impressions" or "Here's a CPC (cost per click) ad, you get a commission every time a sale happens." For the advertisers, CPC is what they would want, because that means they get to advertise for free, indefinitely, especially on youtube and twitch. If you are content creator, you should refuse CPC ads just on principle. 

 

Now "Sponsorships" or "take over" type ad units are different on websites. Basically these trade off a permanent space on the site for a set amount of time. These are actually FAR more preferable to both CPM and CPC ads, for both the advertiser and the person having the ads shown, because the the advertiser can actually see the ads are working, and the site the ads runs on doesn't cede control to some middle-man that might sneak extra popup/popunder crap in there. Basically the skins usually activate by having CSS code in the page that shows when the skin is active, and the javascript only is enabled if the CSS is displaying it. It's complicated to setup for a web page.

 

The equivalent of this in Videos (eg streams or evergreen content) is to have a "sponsored by/brought to you by" logo on the screen the entire time. 

 

Now to be fair. If Intel or Nvidia or AMD said "I'll sponsor you if you promote our gaming brand" I'd be like "sure", because I can be enthusiastic about GPU's and CPU's. Won't likely happen, but it's a lot easier to chuck a permanent text-crawl or something in the video that you can just-as-easily-ignore.

 

I've always kind of liked how Linus does ad reads... not all the time (some ad reads feel forced) I won't usually skip over them, BUT, that applies to Linus only. The rest of the LTT staff tend to not feel like they want to do them at all.

 

 

15 hours ago, GhostRoadieBL said:

 

This would support the idea of using YouTube as the middle dealer, making them the big player instead of the companies going straight to smaller creators and being scumbag companies. A company the size of Alphabet doesn't get pushed around like a small creator getting their audience set up and can push for (and loudly state how they are doing it) better deals for creators, at a platform wide level. You can guarantee YouTube's contract team isn't accepting game play time for payment.

I wouldn't mind Youtube at least trying to do this, and take back control from third parties. At least if they could offer the  streamer/youtuber the sponsorship directly, that cuts out the middleman, keeps everything civil, and everyone can be given the same offer. But Youtube also has a problem with content farms/bait. There has to be some level of human review (not by AI) to check that sponsorships that are accepted are actually being done, and not simply someone accepting all sponsorships and doing none of them.

 

15 hours ago, GhostRoadieBL said:

I run into a very similar situation on Instagram for photography, companies offer discounts for you to buy their products so they can post your images all the time. My only response is basically set up a sponsored photoshoot as a contract and I'll feature the products you send me, but don't waste our time with trying to have me pay you to use my photos of your products.

 

Honestly it should be illegal to "require" or even suggest the person doing the sponsor spend money to get money. For a while out there there was a bunch of Chinese hardware vendors doing this. Where they would sponsor an artist, but what they were really doing was Amazon feedback farming by having the artist buy the device from them, leave a positive review, and then being paid after the video was "approved". And of course some of them would weasel out of it.

 

Like the purpose of me showing the offers was to highlight the limitations of how things are right now. Youtube pretty much doesn't cede enough control to the youtubers themselves. Like imagine if some youtubers just were perfectly alright with advertisements of adult products on videos they do... of adult products. Those videos can be completely invisible to the search (eg can only be found subscribing to the user, or embedded in the user's own site/patreon/etc) but youtube still gets the direct benefit of being able to accept ads and sponsorships from legit adult products and the users that have directly opted into that category (with the tradeoff of not being in search) can have those ads run. 

 

Likewise users should also be able to define a minimum CPM for banner/video ads that they are willing to accept certain categories of ads, including "nothing". If a user then decides they do not want political ads, but could give less of a care about everything, that's what runs. But that isn't what happens. The channel owner is the one who knows who their target audience is, and if control could be given to the actual channel owner (of any size) to narrow things down, that saves Youtube money in the long run by not running ads that most people will skip anyway and the wasting of time and bandwidth in the process.

 

[williamcll]

On 5/11/2023 at 6:24 PM, Kisai said:

It's fine to disagree, but it doesn't change the point that adblocking is always done as a spiteful thing first.

How is this a bad thing. Clearly if something needs to be advertised it is not important to my life.

[Dracarris]

On 5/11/2023 at 7:58 AM, AluminiumTech said:

Premium is £12 per month. I would hardly call that cheap when it costs only £7 (£2 extra) to remove ADs from Netflix.

IMHO YT Premium is stupidly expensive for what it is, if you don't want YT music, which applies to every Spotify user. Just compare it with what you get with a single-user Netflix sub.

 

Dunno if someone has posted it here within the 4 pages of discussion: Using a VPN to get YT Premium in Argentina or a comparable country for like 2$/month still works fine. For me that's a decent compromise, I am simply ignoring YT Music and use background play (a limitation the stupidity of which knows no boundaries) and occasionally offline downloads.

 

I also think baked-in sponsor spots becoming more and more prominent is problematic as YT Premium does nothing do them. Even if they can be skipped, they are annoying af and disrupt the viewing experience. They also tend to get longer and longer with multiple minutes not being rare anymore. And are yet another sign that creators simply cannot survive on adsense alone as it pays so poorly.

On 5/13/2023 at 12:38 AM, Fred Castellum said:

Regardless there will be ways to circumvent this, and I won't miss chrome one bit if I have to switch to another browser. 

As someone that uses Firefox for over a decade by now and occasionally tries Chrome I think I will never understand why the heck it is so popular and people prefer it over FF.

[Stahlmann]

45 minutes ago, Dracarris said:

As someone that uses Firefox for over a decade by now and occasionally tries Chrome I think I will never understand why the heck it is so popular and people prefer it over FF.

Years ago there was a significant difference in speed, which is why many people switched to Chrome. Then it snowballed into the giant it is now. Nowadays, speed is great on practically every browser, so Chrome is only held up by it's "legacy" reputation of being the fastest, plus the advertising on Google for their own browser.

 

I'm making the same argument for Edge for months now. In terms of speed, memory management, feature support and privacy options it's objectively a top-tier browser nowadays. Still, many people still think it's bad now because it was bad 5 years ago. Just as most people think Chrome is good because it was good 5 years ago.

[LAwLz]

28 minutes ago, Stahlmann said:

I'm making the same argument for Edge for months now. In terms of speed, memory management, feature support and privacy options it's objectively a top-tier browser nowadays. Still, many people still think it's bad now because it was bad 5 years ago. Just as most people think Chrome is good because it was good 5 years ago.

Edge is an awful browser though. It is in fact worse than Chrome in terms of privacy.

It was good like 2-3 years ago and have gotten worse and worse with every update.

[Stahlmann]

3 minutes ago, LAwLz said:

Edge is an awful browser though. It is in fact worse than Chrome in terms of privacy.

It was good like 2-3 years ago and have gotten worse and worse with every update.

Do you have any examples of it getting worse? Afaik they haven't taken away anything and only added more features (some of which are controversial, but most - if not all - can be disabled if you don't want them)

[LAwLz]

4 hours ago, Stahlmann said:

Do you have any examples of it getting worse? Afaik they haven't taken away anything and only added more features (some of which are controversial, but most - if not all - can be disabled if you don't want them)

This was my Edge journey.

I switched to it August 2020 and thought it was great. 

Then I learned that according to this study, Edge sends more private information back to Microsoft than even Chrome does to Google. Edge sends a lot of very privacy intrusive things such as a unique hardware ID and you can not turn it off.

But I kept using Edge anyway, until I was finally fed up by popups like these appearing over and over (telling me to change search engine to Bing). Over the course of about a year, I was asked to change my search engine to Bing 4 times.

 

Then they added this annoying menu whenever you highlight text to encourage you to search with Bing.

Then they started doing things like fullscreen ads when you update your browser.

Then they added a "buy now pay later" function in Edge which is just disgusting.

 

A few weeks ago they introduced a feature that sent every single website you visited to Bing. This feature was enabled by default to everyone who installed the update.

 

At some point I feel like you have to ask yourself why use a browser that clearly is mainly a vehicle used to push Bing? Why not use a different browser, they are free after all, that actually focus on being a good web browser. Personally, I switched to Brave and it was really a breath of fresh air compared to how bloated and annoying Edge had become near the end of my usage. Not only does Edge clearly not respect its users because constantly bothers them and don't respect the options used, it's also a privacy nightmare that you constantly have to check because at any point they will introduce a new bloated feature that ends up sending a ton of private information to Microsoft, and sometimes you don't even get the option to turn it off.

 

 

Then there is the whole thing about Edge showing their own ads when you visit competing websites. For example, if you visit Google Bard you will get an ad for Bing in the address bar.

 

 

The new Edge is miles ahead of the old Edge, but I still don't see why anyone would use the new Edge over a browser like Chrome or preferably Brave. It is still just a more bloated, privacy-intrusive and annoying browser.

[Fred Castellum]

7 hours ago, Dracarris said:

As someone that uses Firefox for over a decade by now and occasionally tries Chrome I think I will never understand why the heck it is so popular and people prefer it over FF.

I did use firefox for a while in the past, but I ran into some stability issues I could never resolve at the time. Hence why I switched browsers back then, I'm open to moving to other browsers these days. Been using chrome for ages now. 

[Dracarris]

2 hours ago, Fred Castellum said:

I did use firefox for a while in the past, but I ran into some stability issues I could never resolve at the time. Hence why I switched browsers back then, I'm open to moving to other browsers these days. Been using chrome for ages now. 

Only thing I can tell you is I keep Firefox open without closing it a single time for several weeks and there are absolutely no stability issues, with ublox origin and a video download grabber active. Occasionally, a rampant Twitch stream manages to run wild and cause a memory leak and bad performance. But closing that tab only usually resolves the issue.

[Obioban]

I would pay for youtube premium if it didn't require me to also pay for Google music service. 

[Dillpickle23422]

On 5/11/2023 at 1:07 AM, Kisai said:

There is no legitimate reason to block ads on a site that isn't a garbage site. Block ads on garbage sites, because those are sites peddle in stolen content anyway. Blocking ads on youtube is just being a spiteful jerk.

I mean... I use my adblock during elections because i don't want to see any of that political bullshit. Almost EVERY SINGLE AD during election seasons are political. I wish youtube at least would give users the option to opt-out of political ads, just like gambling and alcohol ads can be turned off. I can't stand political ads since their whole purpose is just to make crap up about the other candidates, which in my book should be considered misleading anyways. 

[Fred Castellum]

1 hour ago, Dracarris said:

Only thing I can tell you is I keep Firefox open without closing it a single time for several weeks and there are absolutely no stability issues, with ublox origin and a video download grabber active. Occasionally, a rampant Twitch stream manages to run wild and cause a memory leak and bad performance. But closing that tab only usually resolves the issue.

This was many years ago, it may be much better now if I were to use Firefox. Should add my browser usage is kind of nuts these days though.... I have 10 windows and 525 tabs open lol....

 

Back when I was using firefox back then I had at most 35 tabs across a few windows.

[Stahlmann]

1 hour ago, LAwLz said:

The new Edge is miles ahead of the old Edge, but I still don't see why anyone would use the new Edge over a browser like Chrome or preferably Brave. It is still just a more bloated, privacy-intrusive and annoying browser.

I turned off the features i don't want or need and it's the only browser on the market that offers even feature i want. My biggest problem in finding another browser is HDR support. Chrome doesn't offer a consistent HDR experience. Brave and Firefox don't support it at all. The tight integration with bing is an advantage imo.

[Kisai]

6 hours ago, Dillpickle23422 said:

I mean... I use my adblock during elections because i don't want to see any of that political bullshit. Almost EVERY SINGLE AD during election seasons are political. I wish youtube at least would give users the option to opt-out of political ads, just like gambling and alcohol ads can be turned off. I can't stand political ads since their whole purpose is just to make crap up about the other candidates, which in my book should be considered misleading anyways. 

 

That requires logging in and telling them how old you are and what country you live in. GDPR basically made that pointless.

 

Anti-adblocking tech has been around as long as ad blockers have been around, because the old-old versions of ad block simply appended CSS stylesheets.

 

And you know how you detect/defeat it? You use those css stylesheets against it. I've run tests on sites I run with this, and we determined at the time that the backlash wasn't worth it. Because what happens is people get even more spiteful if you break the site for adblockers.

 

THAT SAID, people are incredibly naïve if they think adblocking is going to last forever. All it takes is adding "ad" css to the framing content, and the site will now no longer work until ad block is turned off.

 

Youtube most likely detects one of the css changes or url blocks by adblock and that's how it identifies it.

 

Personally I don't feel it's a smart idea to go "ad block is not allowed", because yeah, it's not allowed, it's theft. But it's the kind of theft like not buying a transit ticket. Unless Youtube is going to start asking creators to opt-in to paywall mode, I don't see this going over very well.

 

 

[kumicota]

11 hours ago, Kisai said:

THAT SAID, people are incredibly naïve if they think adblocking is going to last forever. All it takes is adding "ad" css to the framing content, and the site will now no longer work until ad block is turned off.

There's a point that people didn't realized when talking about ad-blocking. Unnoficial API software. Almost every social platform, big news site(even ones that blocks ad-blocks) and more, has a 3rd party clients that uses an unnoficial API, like nitter for twitter and invidious/yt-dl and others.

 

The main problem with unnoficial API is that their views aren't counted, watching a live from twitch/youtube on MPV+yt-dl doesn't add another view to the it, reading a post through nitter doesn't add 1 to the view counter and more.

 

Blocking 3rd party clients aren't easy because it's not a simple to fix it because they use a non-public/documented API for it, blocking also would fuck up a lot of people, like ad-companies, clippers and big channels as even LTT that relies on other people/companies videos. The only way to get a video in the best quality available is by using clients like yt-dl that let's you download it in full quality, screen-recording and other methods aren't reliable.

 

I bet every ad-block is piracy person would prefer that to have the views and 0 money of ad-blockers than losing their views

[Dillpickle23422]

11 hours ago, Kisai said:

That requires logging in and telling them how old you are and what country you live in. GDPR basically made that pointless.

 

I mean I don't think the U.S gives a single crap about GDPR unfortunately. 

[Kisai]

2 minutes ago, kumicota said:

 

The main problem with unnoficial API is that their views aren't counted, watching a live from twitch/youtube on MPV+yt-dl doesn't add another view to the it, reading a post through nitter doesn't add 1 to the view counter and more.

 

 

Here's what I think is going to happen. 

 

Youtube clamps down on adblock

yt-dl -like program usage surges as unofficial players for youtube, thus not only losing the ad revenue, but all the other features of youtube. All those unofficial accesses result in no analytic data. Blocking the ads, also results in loss of some/all of that analytic data.

 

As it is, it's often much less obnoxious to watch a video with vlc/mpc-hc than it is with a website, and some backend script that fetches the "video fragment playlist" (which yt-dl can act as) so when you want to watch a 2 hour video un-interrupted by distractions, it's better to use the app in the first place.

 

 

[kumicota]

5 minutes ago, Kisai said:

As it is, it's often much less obnoxious to watch a video with vlc/mpc-hc than it is with a website, and some backend script that fetches the "video fragment playlist" (which yt-dl can act as) so when you want to watch a 2 hour video un-interrupted by distractions, it's better to use the app in the first place.

Agree, a lot of times I watch big videos on mpv or invidious because youtube pauses it an put the "are you still watching" pop-up and because I'm playing something and wants 5+ FPS. The only reason that I think those softwares didn't caught on are because only very privacy advocates uses it or someone with a very specific thing like the ones you cited but this can change a lot if they implement anti ad-blocks and more

[kumicota]

29 minutes ago, kumicota said:

I bet every ad-block is piracy person would prefer that to have the views and 0 money of ad-blockers than losing their views

@LinusTechI have two questions about this for you.

 

When RIAA DMCA'd youtube-dl github you was one of the first big tech influencers who defended yt-dl software on twitter and IIRC on WAN Show and was against RIAA pratices. I don't know if you know but some softwares like mpv, can integrate to yt-dl, where if you have both installed and drag a youtube link to mpv, it uses yt-dl to stream it to MPV bypassing ads and the client itself. Implementing a frontend who would do the same isn't hard as invidious do it but it's ugly.

 

While some people knows that, a lot of them doesn't know that there's using unnoficial clients like those don't generated views, metric, analytics and more data.

 

So my questions are, do you still support those 3rd party softwares like you did when RIAA DMCA'd youtube-dl? if yes, would you rather have X views from uses who uses ad-blocks that are counted and have metrics or 0 views/metrics from those users who used a 3rd party client?

 

I'm asking this for the single reason that if someone improved the UI of one of those frontends and added a lot of features, it could bring more harm to channels than having an adblock enabled

[Dracarris]

12 hours ago, Kisai said:

But it's the kind of theft like not buying a transit ticket.

Those are very, very different things with "the law" in several countries backing this.

 

If you get caught without a ticket, you a (often hefty) fine.

If you get caught using adblock, in most countries there is no legal leverage against you.

[Kisai]

12 minutes ago, Dracarris said:

Those are very, very different things with "the law" in several countries backing this.

 

If you get caught without a ticket, you a (often hefty) fine.

If you get caught using adblock, in most countries there is no legal leverage against you.

But it is the same isn't it? People just get on/off busses and trains without a ticket all the time. Some have passes that they just don't bother to pull out, others just have the same spiteful attitude that they won't pay unless they're caught.

 

A commuter who skips paying for tickets every day vs the one person from outside the city who doesn't know how to buy a ticket, yields the same penalty if caught. What the transit police do here is they escort people who didn't pay to the ticket machine to buy a ticket. Or at least that's what they used to do before the fare gates.

 

Remember, it's been a thing, culturally (in the US) to try and use the trains for free by hopping into cargo box cars and then try to dodge the rail network's police. You can see these in old movies and cartoons. What's the consequences most of the time? Being escorted off the property.

 

Adblocking is a relatively recent thing in terms of the age of the internet "world wide web", and being told "adblock is not allowed" falls into that same "people aren't gonna care" mindset of not paying for a transit ticket, or sneaking your own snacks into a theater. Yes, you can do it, and get away with it until you encounter someone who gives enough of a care to crack down on it. I'd even suggest the ability to block ads has been around longer than the ability not no.

 

[Dracarris]

5 minutes ago, Kisai said:

A commuter who skips paying for tickets every day vs the one person from outside the city who doesn't know how to buy a ticket, yields the same penalty if caught.

Well, where I live usually not. The people checking tickets usually show a ton of common sense and will fine the commuter but simply sell the other guy a ticket for the regular price.

 

And let me tell you, there are a lot of entities that do care a lot about adblock, and they have all tried their way through court with all kinds of approaches (theft, copyright infringement, IP violation, you name it). The courts have so far rejected them all AFAIK.