• YouTube is experimenting with injecting ads into videos on the server side, according to a report.
• YouTube serves its ads on the browser-side but this new change could finally break some popular browser-based adblockers.
• Server-side ad injection adds a number of complexities to the YouTube experience, including slower load times, broken timestamps and more.

In order to push more users to its Premium tier, which is free of adverts but costs a monthly fee, YouTube and its owner Google have been looking at clever ways to restrict the usage of adblock software on its platform for some years now.

The hope is to make it increasingly more inconvenient for users who want to rid themselves of ads on YouTube that they just end up paying for Premium instead, but as YouTube’s new adblock protections kill pirate platforms like YouTube Vanced, freeloaders are forced to find even more creative ways to circumvent ads.

Google then extends its reach in response, and the latest escalation in the conflict may be bad news for everyone who uses the platform, whether they care about ads or not.

A new report from Android Police, citing SponsorBlock, who tell other users which parts of a video are sponsored in order to skip ahead, YouTube is currently testing server-side ad injection.

“This means that the ad is being added directly into the video stream. This breaks SponsorBlock since now all timestamps are offset by ad times,” the blocker said.

Server-side ad injection sees publishers stitch together ads into the runtime of videos at a server level in the backend, rather than at the browser level. This would be a major change if implemented on the billion-viewer platform at scale, with the first noticeable change being the removal of the yellow ad timestamps in videos.

It is likely to break most browser-based adblockers from working on YouTube as well, but would make how YouTube serves its ads more complex, and could increase the resources needed to simply watch YouTube on mobile and on desktop.

An example of added complexity with this change is that YouTube would have to implement a means to automatically skip the ads of Premium subscribers, but Android Police explains that this would reveal ad segment info to the client, which could then be used to formulate an adblocker that also automatically skips the server-side ads in the same way.

Does YouTube mind making its service slightly worse to make more money? No. In fact, they have arguably been doing this already in many regions, including throttling the experience of users who have used adblockers in the past.

The experimental server-side ad injection has only been rolled out for certain people, potentially involved in beta programs or simply at random, and many are already complaining about broken timestamps in video links and broken chapter markers as videos become longer with in-stitched ads.

But there are already rumblings of work-arounds for server-side ads. For example, Twitch already issues server-side ads to viewers, and there exist certain scripts on GitHub that can be run to block these ads. This could potentially extend to YouTube as well.

Looks like YouTube may have found an upper hand in the war again, but it could already be short-lived.

[Image – CC 0 Photo by muhammadsaqii786 from Pixabay]