YouTube intensifies fight against ad blockers showing pop-ups, and users are frustrated | Blocking ad-block users::undefined

  • virtualbriefcase@lemm.ee
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    11 months ago

    If they did that then they’d have to re-encode videos for each veiwer (which would require an insane amount of processing power), or give up on tracking and have contextual only ads.

    Their only real option is to have ads as separate files and then use the magic JavaScript to tell your computer to play one file then the next, which is where adblock comes in like “naw, let’s not do that”.

      • virtualbriefcase@lemm.ee
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        11 months ago

        I didn’t mean like they just strait up embed video.mp4 on page for the video, but as far as I understand on their backend they still have actually video files of various resolutions and such that they serve to you.

        Even if the page isn’t giving you a copy of a strait up file in the way it might in 2000, the player is still pulling a copy of a pre processed video file stored on YT’s servers, and in order to have the ads as part of that same file in order to make adblock very hard to implement they’d need to re-process it any time they want to show an ad that hadn’t been already inserted into the video.

        I could be completely wrong tho, I don’t work at YouTube and haven’t built a video sharing site before.

          • virtualbriefcase@lemm.ee
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            11 months ago

            Thanks for the breakdown and the link, cool to learn about the new (well new to me) tech, sad to see it’s gonna probably bit us in the butt at somepoint.