this post was submitted on 13 Jun 2023
822 points (100.0% liked)

Technology

37726 readers
45 users here now

A nice place to discuss rumors, happenings, innovations, and challenges in the technology sphere. We also welcome discussions on the intersections of technology and society. If it’s technological news or discussion of technology, it probably belongs here.

Remember the overriding ethos on Beehaw: Be(e) Nice. Each user you encounter here is a person, and should be treated with kindness (even if they’re wrong, or use a Linux distro you don’t like). Personal attacks will not be tolerated.

Subcommunities on Beehaw:


This community's icon was made by Aaron Schneider, under the CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0 license.

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] aksdb@feddit.de 10 points 1 year ago (9 children)

I think the commenters intention was that YouTube could stream you the video with embedded ads. They would have to stream the content though and skipping ahead would have to be guarded serverside by some clever checks on if you received (and therefore likely seen) the section of the video with the ads.

What probably speaks against this is that it would significantly increase their costs, since they couldn't cache as easily anymore and always need "clever" services/servers along the way. A dumb CDN wouldn't cut it anymore.

I fear it's still just a question of when it's either cheap enough for Google to do it or when the expected returns are high enough to offset the increased costs.

[–] spoonful 2 points 1 year ago (2 children)

The clever check is impossible. The server can't know the client is showing the video even when playing DRM content. I could literally mute the sound and put a black box over the ad until it's over. The problem is as old as the internet itself.

That's why Apple and Meta pushing eye tracking so hard. It's the only solution to the ad blocking problem.

I think YT is doing well with YT premium and that's the way to go for them. It's one of my favorite subscriptions and I'd probably stick around even if they raise the price unless they hurt the creators so badly they bounce and I'd bounce with them.

[–] aksdb@feddit.de 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

The clever check is impossible. The server can’t know the client is showing the video even when playing DRM content. I could literally mute the sound and put a black box over the ad until it’s over. The problem is as old as the internet itself.

They also can't force you to look and listen to the current ads. So the "clever tracking" doesn't need to be better than the status quo. What it could avoid is completely skipping ads as if they are not there. The server could reject giving you further frames until the time the ad runs is over. If you suppressed the ad, you still had to sit it out. Which in turn means that it's (almost) futile for the user to do that. If I have to wait 2 minutes to watch, I might as well leave the ad running.

[–] spoonful 1 points 1 year ago

Which in turn means that it’s (almost) futile for the user to do that. If I have to wait 2 minutes to watch, I might as well leave the ad running.

I would still guess people would rather block it and context switch for those 5-10 seconds or it could be preloaded for every video on the timeline which in turn just hurt Youtube's ad system. The reality is that adblock people are tech savy minority and it's not worth bending the whole ad pipeline out of shape just for that.

I guess we'll see how Google handles this but I don't think they can pull it off tbh.

load more comments (6 replies)