YouTube is now blocking ad blockers so I make ads run faster

One day we'll use AI to replace ads with anti-marketing.

Ads for McDonalds replaced with obesity stats. Ads for goods rephrased to make the actors say, "you don't need it."

Veritasium made a video about this : thumbnails and title so much drastically change your view count that, even if you are against it, you would be stupid to not jump into the trend, especially if your business is correlated to view counts.

But I’m like you, I’m pretty sad about it because sometimes this pushes me back very hard and I avoided some otherwise very great quality channels for months or years because of that.

My most remarkable example of this is KURZGESAGT : YouTube algorithm was always suggesting it and my brain was always thinking that this looked like cheap animated videos with colors everywhere to catch my eyes, probably with synthetic narration. I ignored it for months until I watched one by accident. And boy did I discovered it was in fact a brilliant channel with probably one of the most impressive animation and music on YouTube, an incredible narrator, one of the rare YouTube channels which provides links to studies for anything sentence they say and all of this full of poetry. Also a very non intrusive business model with pertinents sponsorships at the end of the videos and their own merchandise marketplace with actually nice items and artwork to buy.

The even sadder thing is that their thumbnails are in fact pretty good but they mostly suffered from the fact that my brain is now programmed to avoid anything catchy.

If I remember correctly, Linus from Linus Tech Tips said begrudgingly at one point that the clickbait thumbnails increase views by 20-30%. Even he wasn't happy about having to do them, but the drop in viewership from not doing them seemed quite large and hard to disagree with.

> any insight into why creators are hopping on the bandwagon

It probably works.

Thanks, and yeah -- give it a go, it's a tonne of fun.

Also, you can call me for a quick 3 minute rant if a longer call feels like a commitment. In fact, I just finished my first rant today!

I would be super interested in seeing engagement metrics for this, especially from organic, cold, leads.

I used to have a computer with an audio interface that had a wordclock input (BNC connector) and a huge rack mounted wordclock (Antelope Isochrone) to theoretically reduce jitter that a cheap internal crystal clock built into an interface might otherwise introduce. To work normally, the interface and external clock both needed to be set to the same thing (say, 48 or 192 kHz, or whatever you wanted). We quickly discovered that if the interface was set lower than the clock, any audio playback would be sped up and high pitch (and vice versa) -- not only playback from the DAW, but from anything, even YouTube videos and so forth. And of course the a/v sync was maintained, so the picture would also be sped up to match.

I wonder if this effect could be completely virtualized as an audio driver, where you choose this middleware as the default output device in the OS, and it messes with the audio clock speed: essentially overclocking the upstream (OS) side whenever an ad is detected, and dropping samples (basically a rudimentary sample rate conversion) proportionately so the downstream (hardware) side never skips a beat. I don't know how an extension/userscript would be able to communicate with said middleware, but maybe there's a way.

Aside: I wonder what would happen with live streams. Probably just periodic buffering, not from congestion but from the analog to digital conversion consuming the stream faster than it's being created. Theoretically a very miniscule version of this problem always occurs if the DAC on the production side is running slightly lower clock speed (say, 47999 Hz) than the ADC on the consumer side (say, 48001 Hz) and the player knows how to gracefully compensate to avoid occasional buffering (or buffering does occur but it's too brief for anyone to notice). Hmm.

I just pay for Premium instead of grifting. Planetary-scale server farms and video hosting is not free.

Ad based businesses also have an incentive to maximize attention and interaction rather than enjoyment, education, or user happiness.

We’ve played a few rounds of this game, we’re dumber, sadder, and more politically polarized for it.

Yeah, I personally hate sponsor segments but strongly sympathize with your view. I'm currently looking for a way to donate to the stuff I watch instead.

Unless you're willing to root your phone, or use a developer certificate to run an unofficial app, I don't think there's any chance of getting an 3rd party youtube client on iOS. They're breaking youtube's TOS which is why they have to be side loaded on android.

Invidious and Piped should actually work quite well. Not apps, but work fine in a browser. That's what I'm using on the PinePhone and on regular computers. Though I don't know if Safari still has limitations that make it a pain to use. Invidious is a pain on the iPad 2 because of some dumb design decisions in Safari but I expect it to have improved since then. And maybe third party browsers will at last be allowed on iOS through third party stores, maybe also allowing SponsorBlock to be used on this platform.

I'm missing some features like being able to select a play next video easily, so I may look into writing an Invidious-based client of some sort for this, but they are so many things to do for a strongly limited time.

Maybe Piped has the features I'd like to have, I should check it out.

You can use an app currently in the App Store called "yattee" -- you can add an Invidious source in the settings, and viola you're good to go. I self-host mine, but you can totally point it at a community hosted one.

uYou+ is good, I use it regularly. Especially with a developer certificate.

Do you not get bored of spending ~10% of the total time you watch videos being spent on largely brainrot gambling / predatory game advertisements?

You're welcome, glad it helps!

Thanks for sharing the issue around installing, I haven't seen that one before but I'll see if I can reproduce & fix

> interminable garbage that is also dangerous to be exposed to (bad scripts and stuff).

Not really an issue with YT video ads though right? They're just annoying and too frequent but they're not really hazardous (beyond some cognitohazard of random crank stuff).

Everyone buys stuff from phones to food.

I think the logic is flawed in thinking this way too. Most products have an overwhelming amount of choice. If you are not in the market for that category of product then the advertisement is not aimed at you. Even if you were annoyed by the the advertisement at that particular moment in time, if you are ever in the market for that category of product then the product will have brand recognition over its competitors and that is what is so huge and valuable.

IMO it is quite like the classic example of the heuristic that there is no such thing as bad press.

People just like to tell themselves it doesn't work on them because it makes them sound more intelligent. I've yet to actually meet a single person in my life that advertising didn't work on. You just have to talk them through how they decided on the things they own and before long they start to realise the truth.

That sounds almost impossible? Unless you're Amish or something like that.

This is one of the most obviously nonsense statements I’ve ever seen made.

You've never had any major brand of pop, ever?

Cudos for you. I try something similar, I do not buy a product if I believe I saw its ads. It is a light version of your strategy (I'm not going to watch ads to know what is advertised and what isn't), but even it doesn't work in all cases. For example, my cat eats advertized food now. Not all of it though, but dry food is advertized.

Probably tons of things you are missing out on.

Some of the most life-changing products I own were shown to me in an ad. Might not have bought that exact item, but the knowledge of that type of product even existing?!

Mindblowing.

[dead]

> That's not a good idea though.

I wonder why you say that. At least an ad for a specific ad blocker sounds like a great idea.

- Ideally, you don't send ads to users of your product - Users of inferior products will see your ad, and it might be super effective (if you used MY adblocker, you wouldn't be seeing this ad) - Everything else is a user that doesn't have an ad blocker, and it's probably an easy sell to say "would you like to never see ads like this?"

I can definitely see shady companies doing this.

Show ads for ad-blockers. Deliver an ad-blocker with spyware or other forms of malware.

The anti-malware industry used to be dominated by tools that ended up being malware (I’m sure that hasn’t changed much TBH).

Could be worth it the price if the top one is an extension you own and lets some specific “partner ads” through.

I would say Facebook ads have sold me on a few things. But they are not full page, I can easily identify them and move past should I chose and at times were actually relevant to what I want. How come YouTube ads try and push the dumbest shit on me when they have all my data and know all my searches yet I’m getting ads for stuff I would never buy. So I propose google cut back on some of the video ads, force the video being watched to slim up a bit while no video ads of relevance pop on on the side.

I can't disagree with you on charities, since their business is literally begging for money. They're never going to have a "customer" recommending them to friends and family.

Travel and Fintech are products that are for everyone, so there will always be people interested in your stuff and then recommend to their friends if your product is good. Especially for travel, people are always seeking out new "products".

I think it's interesting that you brought up cars. In the past 20 years I've only seen two types of car ads: One is the stylish young woman going on a date, the second type is with young urban adults doing street dance and then the car flashes quickly in the end of the ad. Because advertising is only directed at certain groups. To normal people, these car ads communicate "We hate you" from the car company to the consumer, and would be a net negative for the brand. But since normal people are going to compare price, gas economy and features when buying a car anyway, this brand negativity doesn't mean much.

I don't buy this theory, because in my job we get a lot of new customers every year, and we don't advertise. Other forms of marketing are just so much more effective. Putting your product out there is not the same as advertising, people can find your product by search engine or other means, and then if you compete on price, quality and features, the product is marketed by word of mouth.

Do products show up on your store shelves because the company did a ton of advertising and customers were begging the store manager to sell it? Usually not. Instead these are negotiations between businesses. How often do you see ads for new products, compared to products that have been around for decades?

The only situation were advertising is wise is when you have a product that is not different from your competitors product and you have a customer base that is ignorant, so that you have a lot of margin for advertising to get your stuff moved. Ignorant in this situation can mean just ignorant on the product category.

If you can determine which traffic is ad traffic; why not just block it?

> Assuming you are American: how have you stopped the offensive in Iraq or Afghanistan?

I’m not. However I do believe that the wars in Iraq and especially Afghanistan were morally ambiguous (one of them quite a but less than the other) and certainly not imperialist wars of aggression in the classical sense (like the war in Ukraine).

> How are the Russians responsible for their government

Directly and/or indirectly? Anyway I wouldn’t really see this as fundamentally different in anyway compared to all the other sanctions targeting Russia/Russians these days.

> hating Russians will only validate the propaganda

Who said I hate them? I certainly have strong opinions about their society and dominant values. I don’t hate Russians would, however it would be nice if they had more time/motivation to focus on thins that actually matter.

> how much the west hates them and how they are protecting themselves from NATO.

Society wide paranoia and delusion is indeed a huge. How would you suggest could the “West” fix that?

The hardest part would be to redesign the video play UI to ensure timestamp references still works and the progress bar is user friendly. Live video streaming is a harder problem to solve than injecting ads in a video and they already do that, so the technical parts aren't hard for them to do at all.

A decent amount of that meme has come true. At least, in the sense of printer ink.

We were already heading there. Comedy is the most reliable source of truth there is.

It did.

https://patents.google.com/patent/US8246454B2/en

You forgot the part where your AI evolves into a reseller of cheap ad-based products, which you order to satisfy the ad AI — bringing the entire AI ecosystem into a large MLM scheme.

So do people.

Sounds like it might be illegal too...

I know what I’m giving up and it’s something that’s worthless to me.

> Where is the eula that spells out in simple language the details of the devil’s bargain that these data thieves offer?

GDPR means all tracking is overt. I have a page where I can see all the things Google tracks about me and what they are used for and I can disable different categories such as location or watch history or search history or browsing history etc.

Then just...don't use the service if you don't like it.

I'm not trying to be righteous, my moral compass is mine.

I'd be fine with YouTube being a purely paid service. Either pay, or the server returns a 500. I might even be willing to pay for it then, knowing that the only ads i might encounter are sponsor segments in the video themselves (that i can also skip right on by.)

Except it's not a service that costs much money to run, so much as it is a giant silo exploiting the fact that lots of video is uploaded there. Don't you remember YouTube in 2005 before Google's purchase? It made ends meet all by itself, apparently.

OK, video quality is higher now but, but they could make the lower-quality video freely accessible -- and so could lots of other possible video-upload sites without charging $15. The value-add is not why you're paying $15.

Bullshit. They're the ones who think themselves entitled to our attention.

No one "asks" people to see ads. They're the ones who show ads to people in the most underhanded, intentionally attention grabbing manner possible. When you are charged a price, it's obvious and they are up front about it. Meanwhile in advertising land they make it a point to hide the ads in prose so you don't even know you're being manipulated, the videos cut into the ad abruptly so you can't react and it's not like links have big signs in them warning you about ads inside.

Charge people money up front. If you send us ads, we'll delete them. Our attention is not currency to pay for services with.

I've been reading HN since around that time, and it's hasn't made me sympathetic toward VC. If anything it's hardened my views against consumption, greed and advertising.

HN doesn't force me to watch or read the ads. I can always ignore the posts that are mainly advertising.

So perhaps my moral objections are to obnoxious, in your face, unavoidable advertisements.

"I gave my product away for free, bundled it with some garbage no one cares about because they paid me to do it and am now angry because people are throwing the garbage in the trash where it belongs and the garbage men don't want to pay me anymore."