YouTube’s crackdown on tools that block advertising continues with server-side ad injection.
The developer of SponsorBlock, which is a crowdsourced extension to skip sponsored segments, shared today that “YouTube is currently experimenting with server-side ad injection.”
At a high-level, this should mean that the ad is now part of the video that’s being streamed to your device instead of being delivered separately to the desktop web or mobile client. That current approach allows ad blockers to intercept and not show the advertising. Going forward, the ad should be indistinguishable from the video.
Top comment by Andrew Brooklyn
At some point we have to not only realize but act on the fact that these companies have and continue to get rich off of our data and then want to charge us for these services despite the fact that we've already been making contributions. As for the advertisements, this will be another area we'll have to take a stand on or we'll live in a future where we'll be inundated by advertisements at every turn. Nowhere will be safe from this injection. That said, they arguably own our data and have also taken ownership of the data of the history of our civilization and at some point if allowed to go unchecked and uncontested will own every waking second of our existence. Who does the knowledge of the past belong to? I hardly think the answer is a few tech giants that are getting rich on the backs of everyone who accepts terms and conditions that are at the very least written in a language that obscures the ramifications of accepting the contract. Which even if we read the entirety of the text can hardly be expected to understand the context which has been intentionally obfuscated.
In the case of SponsorBlock, “all timestamps are offset by the ad times.”
For now, I set up the server to detect when someone is submitting from a browser with this happening and rejecting the submission to prevent the database from getting filled with incorrect submissions.
Server-side ad injection is a broader problem for full ad blockers, which YouTube has been working to counter through various means in the past year. After browser extensions, Google targeted third-party clients, which are popular on mobile. As always, users are encouraged to subscribe to YouTube Premium.
This is currently still in testing, with some users already encountering the problem. However, it’s not yet widely rolled out. YouTube will presumably not detail what’s happening behind-the-scenes, but it would be interesting to know how the insertion is handled and what changes YouTube had to implement to its ad-serving infrastructure.
More on YouTube:
- You’ll probably start seeing more YouTube videos with changing thumbnails soon
- YouTube adding Google Lens search integration on Android
- YouTube Premium subscribers can now test the new desktop redesign and give feedback
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