But yeah, I do tend to watch most of my videos through youtube-dl these days, even though the HTML5 player works fine for me in Firefox without any ads.
I work for video site and wrote the player we use, and this is exactly that I think would be happening. Our player has a similar issue, and it even sometimes occurs with no ad blocker.
The player I wrote loads ads via the VAST specification, which is pretty much what the entire web uses for ads. This means we have to make a client side request for an xml document, parse it, then see if it has an ad unit we can show. Even if we don't get an ad there can end up being multiple round trips due to the way VAST and the ad networks work, thus delay.
I've seen at least two other popular video sites over the years that had this symptom. (Can't remember them, maybe Hulu 6+ years ago?) One of them would occasionally have a weird overlap of the end of a commercial and the video. My guess was that the video was was queued to start playing after the length of the ad by some ad-independent logic.
how do you find the video you want without using youtube? do you just use the youtube search interface then download the video by copying the url (w/o even clicking on the link to start the video buffer)
Or, for something sufficiently ephemeral, I'll hand the URL directly to mpv and let it stream. Particularly useful if I suspect I won't care to watch the entire video. And I find mpv's player interface far better than YouTube's.
Occasionally I still use the browser video player as well.
If you want to completely bypass the web interface, you can subscribe to channels by RSS.
http://www.webupd8.org/2014/02/new-command-line-youtube-play...
incidentally, you could also just use google.
That's exactly how Chinese video websites like Youku and Sohu Video work.
So you also concluded: it's not a bug, but an intentional "feature" to suppress ad-blockers
lol, no malice here, it's their websites they can do whatever they want and they are far from stupid, they test all these things.
I'll still block ads and if Google prevents me from seeing Youtube content so be it. I'm not going to disable my ad blocker anyway.
The fight against ads is getting interesting. Let's see who gets the "last word".
It should show up in production monitoring, though.
(Also, I was using the phrase as a callback to the classic expression; I changed it to "intended behavior" to better reflect my intent.)
If you don't like it, go launch and finance your own free-to-watch-no-ads-included video site.
OTA TV is free. It's free because the network pays for it via ads. If you aren't watching ads, then you're effectively not paying for the content.- tracking users both on YouTube and outside of it
- then using the collected data to sell more targeted ads
If it were just ads, then far fewer people would care about watching them (at least in the HN demographic). So if you are going to use this argument, please use it correctly.
The world wide web was based on the idea of sharing, not paying for content by being forced to watch ads that I would never ever watch intentionally. Or do you want the internet to be like television?
http://zeronet.io/ for example. served by users for users. all you pay is your ISP, thats IT.
It's definitely an interesting ideas but a long ways away from being somethings the masses can use easily.
Besides, what are you complaining about? If you don't like people's opinions, go launch your own forum where you're free to pay for useless ads all day long and ban anyone who disagrees.
They have virtually no business apart from ads.
AFIAK they have marketshare in the UK (and maybe US) which surpasses print+tv.
Can you imagine this 40 years ago? An invention which cuts out newspaper ads and time travels broadcast TV past the commercials?
Staggering.
One is where you are searching something and they show you relevant offerings. Here, people are often happy to see the results, as they can move them toward their goal.
The other is where you are trying to do something (read a blog post, watch a video) and they want you to do something else (read about somebody's product, watch a video advertisement). Here many people are resistant, as it takes them away from their chosen activity.
My understanding is that Google makes most of their money from the first kind of ad, and that ad blockers mainly block the second. So I don't think this is a very big deal for them. In Google's shoes, I'd happily let people run ad blockers if they wanted. One, those people were unlikely to click on ads anyhow. And two, it's dangerous money. For their long-term success, they're much better off if they're doing things that customers actually like.
It's dangerous when companies get hooked on money that requires them to work against their users. Look at how much trouble TV networks have had adapting, for example; they just aren't clear on how to make great TV in the same way that places like HBO are. Or look at the sad, slow fall of Yahoo, which has always thought of itself as a media company. They were never able to do much with customer-focused acquisitions like Flickr because they never could quite understand them.
One type of ad is about recognition.
The other type is about solving a problem.
To me, this largely boils down to CPC vs CPM. It will be interesting to see how the market evolves to embrace (or discard) these different types.
> to think the risk adblocking poses to Google's
> business
Between Google Checkout and the size of their existing advertising infrastructure, doesn't seem a reach.
Content owners don't care if they're getting a check from people viewing ads, or people micro-paying, as long as the check is about the same size.
/s
People seem to have this romanticized view of Google but this is a company that makes almost the entirety of its revenue from tracking users. Between Google, Chrome, Android, Gmail and Google Maps they have an astonishing amount of access to people's lives and most people seem none the wise to it. And yet, if another company does anything even remotely close (Microsoft with Windows 10, for example), they would be crucified. Google seems to escape the same level of criticism for some reason.
Probably, $0.00. Then how are they going to keep those services up without any ads?
Also, form my understanding the Youtube Red service has no ads. If ads bother you so much, you can sing up for it, for 9.99/mo.
1) it's impossible to compete with ad-supported "free" services in a large-scale way. Any competitor to YouTube that tried to pay their bills only with paying customers can't succeed. This makes me think that we need some kind of anti-trust like law if it doesn't already exist to cover situations like this.
2) No YouTube red in most countries. I have been hit by this "delay" because I use an adblocker, but when I try to give YouTube my $9.99US a month I'm refused.
Of course, I have no implicit right to use YouTube in the way of my choosing but I would like to see them act in good faith towards me when I try to with them.
edit: Forgot to add, the website uses no JavaScript and doesn't track you at all. It also tries to implement most of YouTube's functionality, so you don't loose anything by using the website instead of YouTube.
Does Adblock Plus block the on video ads?
The only ads that cannot be blocked are those that streams over the same origin server, like Twitch's new embedded ads.
And if this supposition is violated, one would expect an error. I wouldn't personally have assumed that would work; it's probably the case that YouTube changed something that happens to also play ill with AdBlock (since AdBlock is basically futzing around with the content the page expects to be able to load, that should be expected).
and eff's privacy badger
and tampermonkey w/ anti-adblock killer reek script.
zero issues playing youtube all day long
perhaps i'm flagged some other way on the backend and it then tries a test for ad block?
Does anyone think it's possible to write a Perl/Python/Bash program to basically achieve the same thing? To "convince" the site the ads are coming down but they never get seen? This could be browser independent/act as a sort of proxy. I realize Privoxy does something like this, but gets detected.
Thoughts?
https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/blob/master/assets/ublock/...
[0] https://www.google.com/settings/u/0/ads/authenticated?hl=en
That's still a win in my book.
I used to visit a site that mandated turning off the ad blocker and paused the ad if you left the page. Thankfully, there was a countdown, and the page was large enough to scroll past the video while the ad was running.
I became remarkably good at estimating how long wait down there (with the sound off) before scrolling back up...