- YouTube is testing server-side ad injection to counter ad blockers, integrating ads directly into videos to make them indistinguishable from the main content.
- This new method complicates ad blocking, including tools like SponsorBlock, which now face challenges in accurately identifying and skipping sponsored segments.
- The feature is currently in testing and not widely rolled out, with YouTube encouraging users to subscribe to YouTube Premium for an ad-free experience.
Usually ads have a significant volume above the content they sorround (which, by the way, is the thing annoys me the most), so you would only need to check audio for that, which is lot less load than processing the video.
Guessing you’d get a lot of false positives that way, but I like the ingenuity.
My kiddo watches stuff on youtube where the person on screen gets suddenly loud which could really mess with detecting ads by changes in volume. Apprently that is a widespread thing too.