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YouTube's new anti-adblock measures

(iter.ca)
990 points smitop | 3 comments | 20 Jun 25 17:01 UTC | HN request time: 0.48s | source
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ranger_danger ◴[20 Jun 25 17:57 UTC] No.44330199[source]▶
I'm surprised they don't just inject the ads directly into the video stream, I think that would solve their issue overnight (not that I want any ads personally). You could also rate-limit it to the playback speed to prevent pre-downloading the stream easily. But now that everything uses HLS/DASH, it's easy to inject different content right in the middle of the stream without re-encoding anything.
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1. thomassmith65 ◴[20 Jun 25 23:33 UTC] No.44333102[source]▶
They don't want to boil the frog too quickly. Eventually, Youtube will embed ads directly into the stream. As the post mentions:

  To be clear this isn’t server-side ad insertion; the ad and content streams are still separate (YouTube is doing a server-side ad insertion experiment, but that’s separate from fake buffering)
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2. eddythompson80 ◴[21 Jun 25 00:29 UTC] No.44333427[source]▶
Yep. It's been pretty funny actually both here but especially on r/youtube.

Pretty much since YouTube started cracking down on adblockers, r/youtube top post Every. Single. Day. is usually someone complaining that they just got hit with "adblock detected" and comments split between "Yeah it sucks, hit me last month" and "Huh, uBlock Origin works fine for me. I must be super smart. YouTube can't defeat me"

3. mullingitover ◴[21 Jun 25 01:23 UTC] No.44333727[source]▶
> Eventually, Youtube will embed ads directly into the stream

We've all seen what they're doing with AI-generated video, and we know their market and political power. Eventually they'll be remaking the video so the person or animal or rock or tree on the screen is giving AI-generated product testimonials.