This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
I don't see any technical specification i the article, but if they inject the ad at the start of the video, making it part of the video itself, would make possible to just skip it using video controls. To avoid user skippin ad thru video controls there should be client-side script blocking it, so an ad-blocker can use this to tell apart an ad from the video itself.
Can anyone correct me on this?
Also, would this affect piped and invidious too?
Honestly it would be trivial for them to make the video controls server side too and simply not accept fast forward commands from the client during the ad.
We might be in a "Download and edit to watch ad-free" world with this change.
That sounds correct for me. It is possible for them to switch to a system where everyone can manually skip past the ad in the video stream but adblockers are useless (by not sending and indication of the ad to the client), but I don’t see that happening since most people don’t use adblockers and letting all of them easily skip past every ad is probably bad for profits.
It's not literally part of the video, exactly because of what you describe. They are separate streams that get injected into the player before the normal video. You can't skip them or interact with them in any way (pretty sure it also breaks any purchase links etc). Piped or Invidious don't have them, ytdl also doesn't download them.
As of now, afaik, you won't see them if your account wasn't selected for the experiment, if you are in incognito mode (with uBO on) or if you have uBlock Origin (and other adblockers) off (you'll see the normal ads and then the video).
They just escalated the arms race between ad and ad blocker. All this could have been avoided if they actually did something about the scam ads.
Meaning they can bury that toxic ad placement bidding now?
No need to answer, i know they wont.
Oh man, I wonder why no one ever thought of randomly injecting ads into content before? What geniuses they must have working at YouTube. I can’t even comprehend the big-brainedness. I’m sure people will love it.
