YouTube is still in a relentless war against ad blockers. Over the past few months, the company has tried a couple of methods such as skipping or muting your video to the end, blocking third-party apps, slowing down your video and many more. This time, YouTube seems to be testing server-side ad injection (SSAI).
But what is a SSAI? According to SponsorBlock, it means the ad is added directly to the video stream and it can break some ad-blockers such as SponsorBlock. This is due to the timestamps offset by the ad times and ad blockers use client-side ad insertion (CSAI), but not SSAI. Since the ad is integrated into the video stream, CSAI cannot distinguish ads from the video.
YouTube is currently experimenting with server-side ad injection. This means that the ad is being added directly into the video stream.
— SponsorBlock (@[email protected]) (@SponsorBlock) June 12, 2024
This breaks sponsorblock since now all timestamps are offset by the ad times.
Over at Reddit, a few users have encountered SSAI and they were unable to stop the ads even though they have uBlock Origin on Firefox. So if YouTube rolls out SSAI globally, we assume many non-YouTube Premium members would not be able to skip ads anymore. However, there's still hope.
SponsorBlock further explained that in order for SSAI to work, data need to be sent to the video player on how long the ad will play. Ad blockers could obtain the data but difficult. It's going to take a long time to counter SSAI and the experiment is currently ongoing.
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