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YouTube appears to be slowing itself down upon detecting ad blockers by Steve Bennett As Google continues to wage war on ad-blocking users who access YouTube, a recent discovery has been made that the site itself will load significantly slower and almost freeze upon detecting an ad blocker. Similar to previous attempts to slow down the site and the introduction of prompts to disable ad blockers, which will prevent viewing of content until the user does so, this change has been discovered to be increasing CPU load for the site, which disappears as soon as the page is reloaded without an ad blocker enabled. In a thread on the YouTube subreddit, users noticed that not just the site but video buffering was slowed with an aim to make YouTube unusable when accessed while ad-blocking software is enabled. An unintended side effect of these changes is that it's causing crashes within another Google product, Google Chrome. https://www.reddit.com/r/youtube/comments/195octe/youtube_started_slowing_video_buffer_with_adblock/ Tests by PCGamer have shown that when YouTube is open with AdBlock enabled, CPU load on the author's specific machine is increased by approximately 17% compared to when the add-on is disabled. Additionally, even when users have YouTube Premium subscriptions, the slowdown still happens, with tests still producing an approximate 15-18% CPU load increase. Google, and therefore YouTube, have declined to comment on the recent discoveries. However, given the implementation of a deliberate five-second delay to video loading that was introduced back in November, this latest move is hardly surprising. Google's position on the matter makes it clear that the company wishes to give users who use ad blockers a "suboptimal viewing" experience. As an online publication, Neowin also relies on ads for operating costs and, if you use an ad blocker, we'd appreciate being whitelisted. In addition, we have an ad-free subscription for $28 a year, which is another way to show support! Source: 9to5Google; PCGamer Update: Adblock has explained why Google isn't even the culprit for the slow YouTube performance.

Netflix looking at adding ads to its games, and charging extra for some by Steve Bennett Netflix has been increasing its gaming library significantly over the last 12 months, including adding some headline indie titles as well as some classic triple-A titles. The service is available to all users who are subscribed to Netflix, and platform availability is on a per-title basis. Now, Netflix is reportedly looking into ways to further monetize the games on its platform through a variety of methods not limited to including adverts within these games. The Wall Street Journal has reported that executives at Netflix have been having discussions over the last few months over a selection of options to keep users coming back to the streaming service. Ideas that have been floated are not new ones and already exist within the mobile gaming world. This includes in-app purchases within games as well as charging a fee for titles that are more premium (which may include titles such as the aforementioned indie title Hades). This might also be extended to providing users who subscribe to the ad-supported tier access to the gaming library (something that is not yet available), but these games would then only be available with ads in them. Previously Netflix held the position that it did not want to include ads or other monetization methods within games on its platform. However it appears that has changed in the last few months. WSJ also reports that Netflix games had been downloaded a total of 81.2 million times globally during 2023, which is nearly three times as much as it saw in 2022. It isn't earth-shattering when compared to some larger mobile titles or bigger games on traditional gaming consoles and PC. However it shows that Netflix is seeing growth in the area, and will continue to invest in its library during 2024 and beyond. Source: The Wall Street Journal

Meta announces plans to make advertisers disclose AI usage in political ads by Steve Bennett Meta has announced plans that it will begin to enforce new requirements on political advertisements on its platforms starting from the beginning of 2024, The Wall Street Journal reports. These new requirements are specifically around the use of AI to either create or digitally alter media that is used within ads on Facebook, Instagram and more. Examples that Meta specifically highlighted include advertisements where a real person is depicted saying or doing something that they didn't actually say or do, or the digital creation of a realistic-looking event or person, which either didn't occur or doesn't exist. Both of these types of advertisements could have the potential to be misleading or potentially harmful, which Meta aims to mitigate. There are certain requirements to this new policy which determine if the media in question is in scope of the declaration requirement, such as whether it is "immaterial" but if an advertiser doesn't make the disclosure then an ad is likely to be rejected. Advertisers who repeatedly fail to make the necessary disclosures will then incur penalties from Meta, which remain unspecified. Meta has also confirmed that the policy will not just apply to political advertisements, but also to topics and ads related to social issues as well. Additionally, Meta's own generative AI tools cannot be used by advertisers to make political ads. Given that the U.S. election season begins in January with the primary elections, this will be the first true test of the potential impact that generative AI can have on news and information that is spread across platforms around the world. This is the latest step in a wide range of measures taken by companies and governments to moderate and safeguard the use of AI across the world ever since ChatGPT first launched one year ago. Source: The Wall Street Journal

Microsoft's Windows 11 Copilot experience gets worse with it now showing ads on desktop by Sayan Sen Microsoft, this past week, released its latest "Moment 4" feature update for Windows 11 version 22H2. There is another one coming up fairly soon as version 23H2 is also releasing later in Q4 as confirmed by Microsoft. The tech giant released some of the features planned for 23H2 early in 22H2 itself, and one of them happens to be Windows Copilot preview. (Check the full list in this dedicated article.) The experience so far for people since the debut of Copilot has been mixed. AMD graphics card owners, the ones who overclock or undervolt, noticed that their custom tuning profiles that were saved in drivers were being wiped clean after each reboot. Although they were not sure at first, deleting or removing Copilot elements seems to fix the issue. Besides that, Copilot or the Windows 11 Moment 4 update is apparently also causing problems with the Wallpaper Engine from Steam. And what may be frustrating is that there may not be a fix for the issue anytime soon. If you happen to be one of those affected and do not have much use of the feature, you can use our guide to remove Copilot. For those in the EU, Copilot is not available due to a new DMA policy; so it may be a good thing or a bad thing depending on how your experience would have gone. Microsoft is now adding another reason to avoid Copilot. Spotted by Ghacks, the company has started displaying third-party adverts via Copilot. Thankfully, in this case, it was ads for laptops and notebooks, but who knows what else may have been served if users aren't too careful about what they are browsing on their PCs. It looks like Mozilla's concerns may indeed be very valid. And that's not all as a recent report by Malwarebytes suggested that Microsoft is serving malicious ads via Bing.

YouTube is changing the way it serves ads on TV apps by Steve Bennett Today Google has announced that it will be changing the way it serves adverts to viewers on connected TV applications such as those on smart TV's, in response to the growth in users watching long form content on these platforms. Google mentions that it wishes to further develop the connected TV experience, primarily because watch time on the big screen continues to grow even in the face of mobile watch time leading the way significantly. Surveys conducted by Kantar, as well as the latest Nielsen Gauge Report, show that users are increasingly going to YouTube first for their entertainment. The main change that viewers will see going forward is a redesigned ad view that makes it clearer how much time is left before the advert either ends, or is skippable manually by the user. The redesign moves away from a small grey box to a circular timer, which will be familiar to users of the Timer app on iOS specifically, and will begin rolling out soon. The second, and potentially the most impactful change that Google is making to the way it displays ads on connected TV apps, is that it will be moving to longer, less frequent ad segments within videos. This is in a manner that is similar to traditional ad supported TV broadcasts, and will be most noticable during long-form content, with videos 21 minutes or longer reportedly making up over 65% of watch time in the US alone according to YouTube internal data. Google mentions that the decision to make these changes has been made based on real-time feedback from viewers across many markets across the globe, with it going to say that "YouTube is pioneering a fresher, more interactive TV experience." This follows the changes that it made last year to the interface as well as recently exploring adding Games to the site.

Amazon Prime Video is reportedly working on an ad supported tier by Steve Bennett As reported by the Wall Street Journal, Amazon is looking into multiple methods of increasing its revenue from advertisement across the business, and that includes Prime Video, which could have its tiering system changed to introduce an ad-supported tier. Given Amazon's prominent position in the digital advertisement space sitting third behind Google and Meta in terms of revenue in the United States, advertisers are keen for Amazon to make this move. This would follow in the footsteps of Netflix bringing in an ad-supported tier at a lower price point than the standard subscription Advertisers are most interested in having access to premium films and programs on the service, which have until now remained mostly ad-free. With the amount of interest that these shows and films can generate, being able to have advertisements on them would potentially be very profitable for the advertisers and by extension, Amazon. At the moment, Prime Video is available with the standard Amazon Prime membership or as an $8.99 a month standalone. subscription. It doeshave some ad-supported coverage already with some of its live sports coverage and product placement within shows on the platform, as well as content from Freevee which is Amazon's free ad-supported video service. One of the routes that Amazon is said to be considering is introducing the ads into the existing tier of Prime Video membership, and offering a higher tier which would then include the benefit of being ad-free, which would follow a similar path to Amazon Music where it gave Prime members more songs but removed the ability to get most of them on demand. Amazon is very keen to expand its content library on Prime Video to compete with the large array of competitors in the space now, through bidding for rights for NFL games and having more original shows. This would be one way that it could pay for the cost of bringing more content to the service. Source: WSJ

Windows 11 is about to start showing more ads, this time in Settings [Update] by Steve Bennett It’s no secret that Microsoft has been looking to increase advertising for its products within Windows 11, and investigation by Twitter user Albacore into recent Insider builds has found that the Settings Home page will soon start to present adverts for Microsoft 365 products in the near future. A banner asking users who aren’t subscribed to the platform to “Try Microsoft 365” shows at the top of the Home tab in Settings in the screenshot below. Below the advertisement there is a section that will show the current storage status for a user’s OneDrive account, and then a security tips section for users to secure their account. This isn’t the only version of the Home tab that has been seen, with another version having the storage information listed first and the Microsoft 365 prompt to Sign In listed below. The final update that has been seen during this investigation into the Settings tab on this Insider build is a small prompt on the Accounts tab, which shows information about products that are installed to the users system that have reached end of support, such as Office 2013 which is shown in the image below. This isn’t the first time that Microsoft has been incorporating adverts into its operating system, with Start Menu ads being seen in the Start Menu of Windows 11 since November 2022. Microsoft is keen to drive more subscriptions to the 365 platform through these adverts and its apparently intrusive approach to advertising, such as the full screen upgrade ads presented to users in February. Albacore hasn't stated which build number these were found in, but we have reached out to confirm this. Update: Albacore has confirmed in a tweet the build information below, which is the recent Dev channel build 23451: This page has been hidden in builds for a few weeks and it's slowly getting more cards added to it These screenshots are from 23451 — Albacore (@thebookisclosed) May 8, 2023

Facebook explains how it will preserve your privacy while serving you ads by Usama Jawad Earlier this year, we explained how Google plans to use Federated Learning of Cohorts (FLoC) to prevent individual tracking while still serving you relevant ads. However, it announced that it is delaying this initiative just over a month ago, thanks in part to the massive backlash the company received. That said, big tech organizations are still investing significant effort in privacy-preserving methods of data collection. Now, Facebook has revealed more details about how it plans to use privacy-enhancing technologies (PETs) to power the next generation of digital advertising. Facebook has stated that it is using techniques based on cryptography and statistics to implement PETs that allow it to reduce the amount of data processed while preserving your privacy, ad accuracy, and personalized preferences. The company has described three methods it is testing in its PETs effort. The first is secure multi-party computation (MPC) which allows multiple organizations to process parts of your data and then share insights with each other. This essentially means that no single party holds all your data so possibilities of learning about you are reduced. An example of this is one organization holding information about what ads you are seeing and the other seeing information about what purchases you're making. MPC would ensure that both stakeholders would get the data they require without getting access to your entire data. Facebook is working on MPC using a solution called Private Lift Measurement based on its open source framework on GitHub. The company expects to make this solution available to advertisers next year. Next up is on-device machine learning which ensures that algorithms learn from your data right on your device without sending the data to any external identity, the cloud, or a remote server. This technique is still under investigation and Facebook hopes that it will improve with time, if successful. Finally, we have differential privacy, which is actually an add-on to existing PETs. The company describes it as: Differential privacy works by including carefully calculated "noise" to a dataset. For example, if 118 people bought a product after clicking on an ad, a differentially private system would add or subtract a random amount from that number. So instead of 118, someone using that system would see a number like 120 or 114. Adding that small random bit of incorrect information makes it harder to know who actually bought the product after clicking the ad, even if you have a lot of other data. As a result, this technology is often used with large data sets released for public research. That said, Facebook has highlighted that these are all long-term efforts and it'll be sharing more information about its progress regularly.

So I went to a work conference a few weeks back and there was a talk on capturing data (from websites/apps) and whether or not it was personalisation of a service or manipulation of a person. They played a video from Tencent, below, where Tencent were able to add adverts to movies/films post production. So they were able to tailor the viewing experience for particular audiences. The technology behind this is very cool, but the social implications are probably yet to be fully understood. Source How do people feel about this?

Russia used Google ads to advertise during US election by Paul Hill For the first time, Google has accused Russian entities of abusing its ad network to sway people’s decisions during the 2016 Presidential election. People familiar with the company’s investigation say tens of thousands of dollars were spent on ads across many Google products including YouTube, Google Search, Gmail, and DoubleClick. Google hasn’t publicly disclosed the findings of its investigation yet. Those close to the investigation reported that the ads cost less than $100,000 and that Google is still sorting through the ads to find out whether they originated from legitimate Russian accounts, or entities trying to influence the election. On Monday, Google issued a statement saying: “We have a set of strict policies including limits on political ad targeting and prohibitions on targeting based on race and religion. We are taking a deeper look to investigate attempts to abuse our systems, working with researchers and other companies, and will provide assistance to ongoing inquiries.” The news comes hot on the heels of similar admissions by Facebook, which now claims that 10 million Americans saw - what it calls - Russian ads. The ads, which Facebook says covers sensitive issues such as gun rights and immigration, were said to have been against Facebook’s terms of service. Source: The Washington Post via BBC News

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