Technology

I believe this describes them altering the ad host at load time for the page. DNS blocking of ad serving hosts only work if the hostname stays predictable, so just having dynamically named hosts that change in the loading of the page would make blocking more difficult.

Example: 1234.youtube-ads.com is blocked by AdBlockerX. 5678.youtube-ads-xyz.com is not on the blocklist, so is let through. All they have to do is cycle host or domain names to beat DNS blocking for the most part.

Previously, injecting hostnames live for EACH page load had two big issues:

1. DNS propagation is SLOW. Creating a new host or domain and having it live globally on multiple root servers can take hours, sometimes days.

2. Live form injection of something like this takes compute, and is normally set as part of a static template.

They're just banking on making more money from increased ad revenue to offset the technical challenges of doing this, and offsetting the extra cost of compute. They're also betting that the free adblocking tools will not spend the extra effort to constantly update and ship blocklist changes with updated hosts. I guarantee some simple logic will be able to beat this with client-side blocklist updating though (ie: tool to read the page code and block ad hosts). It'll be tricky, probably have some false positives here and there, but effective.

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).

Otherwise, apply uBO new script if you get them

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.