YouTube tests ad infusion in videos to make ad blockers obsolete

YouTube's attack on ad blockers continues with server-side ad injection. The creator of SponsorBlock, a crowdsourcing addon for skipping sponsored parts, revealed that YouTube is testing server-side ad injection.

At a high level, this should mean that the ad is now integrated into the video being streamed to your device rather than being supplied separately to the desktop browser or mobile client. The existing technique allows ad blockers to intercept and suppress advertising. In the future, the commercial should blend in with the video seamlessly.

For SponsorBlock, "all timestamps are offset by the ad times." For the time being, I've configured the server to identify when someone submits from a browser with this issue and reject the submission to keep the database free of wrong submissions.

Server-side ad injection is a bigger issue for full ad blockers, which YouTube has been addressing through a variety of techniques over the last year. Google shifted its focus from browser extensions to mobile-friendly third-party clients. As always, users are advised to subscribe to YouTube Premium.

This is still in testing, and some users have already reported issues. However, it has not yet been extensively adopted. YouTube will most likely not go into detail about what happens behind the scenes, but it would be interesting to see how the insertion is managed and what changes YouTube had to make to its ad-serving infrastructure.