Duck Tales: Duck Player — a free, private way to watch YouTube videos, with fewer ads & no distractions (Ep.15)

In this episode, Beah (SVP, Product) and Omid (Product) discuss Duck Player, how it’s private, and how to use it.

Disclaimers: (1) The audio, video (above), and transcript (below) are unedited and may contain minor inaccuracies or transcription errors. (2) This website is operated by Substack. This is their privacy policy.

Show notes: Duck Player is available in all DuckDuckGo browsers. When you click on a YouTube video either within YouTube or our Search results, you’ll be asked if you want to view in Duck Player.

Beah: Hello and welcome to DuckTales, where we go behind the scenes at DuckDuckGo and discuss the stories, technology, and people that help build privacy tools for everyone. In each episode, you’ll hear from employees about our vision, product, updates, approach to AI, or how we operate as a company. In this episode, you’ll hear about a feature called... Oh, Omid, do you want to say it?

Omid: Duck Player

Beah: And I’m Beah Burger-Lenahan. If you’ve been watching DuckTales, you’ve maybe met me already. I’m on the product team here, but you probably haven’t met Omid, so Omid, why don’t you introduce yourself?

Omid: Hello, my name is Omid. I’m also on the product team. Been at DuckDuckGo for a little over four years and have worked on a lot of our browser stuff, including email protection, our password manager, and Duck Player, which we’re talking about today.

Beah: Sweet. So why don’t you start us off by just explaining what Duck Player is.

Omid: Yeah, in a nutshell, Duck Player is a more private way to watch YouTube videos with fewer ads and with no distractions. I can, I think, do a screen share and kind of show you that in action, fingers crossed if this works.

Beah: This is actually our second time starting this episode because the first time it didn’t work.

Omid: Yeah. So here’s our browser. I’ve got a couple of tabs open. There’s really two main ways to get to Duck Player. If you’re on YouTube and you click on a video, we’ll ask you if you want to watch in Duck Player or No Thank You, which we just watch in right on YouTube as you would normally expect. So if I turn on Duck Player, it opens in a new tab and the video just starts playing.

Beah: Okay.

Omid: You have the option to always open these videos in Duck Player. You could always get back to YouTube with this button to watch on YouTube, but it’s just your video, nothing else. And all of the personalized ads are gone. So I can kind of go into like maybe some of the details about how that works, if that sounds good.

Beah: Yeah, and actually maybe before that, can you just tell people how do they even get Duck Player?

Omid: Yeah, so Duck Player is available in all of our browsers, so Mac OS, Windows, iOS, and Android. And by default, when you load a video, you’re going to get asked that question if you want to use Duck Player, whether you’re on YouTube and you have this question here, which you can also remember your choice, or if you’re on search and click on a YouTube video. We’re also going to ask you if you want to watch it on YouTube or watch it in Duck Player.

Beah: Got it. Okay, yeah, let’s talk. Tell me a little bit about why we build it and what problem it solves.

Omid: Yeah, so we built it as a feature that launched, I guess I could stop sharing screen now, a feature that, it’s still on my screen and it’s there and I know exactly what’s happening. But Duck Player was a kind of a marquee feature of our Mac OS browser launch. This was, I think a bit over three years ago.

Beah: You don’t want to though. You want to keep watching the Bad Bunny Tiny Desk. Okay, you’re watching. You’re not even listening to what you’re saying.

Omid: We did some research, or at least I think found some third party research about people’s usage in browsers, what they use them for, particularly on desktop and video consumption, specifically on YouTube was a huge use case. And so we wanted to be able to have something that made doing those things more private, because that means more people have more privacy protections. And it was also a differentiator for our browser launch as we were getting into the desktop browser space because we’ve had the mobile apps for a little while and Mac OS was our first desktop browser launch.

Beah: Yeah. Yeah. And if I recall correctly, you know, we’d been also doing a bunch of research on ad blocking and learned that the, the one of the spaces, maybe the space where people were most annoyed by, creeped out by ads was video and Duck Player doesn’t show, like you don’t get targeted ads when you’re using Duck Player.

Omid: Yeah, yeah, so the way that it works is that YouTube offers this privacy enhanced mode for any embedded video. So if you see like a YouTube video embedded on the web, the person who’s implementing that, making that webpage that has the YouTube video on it can turn on this privacy enhanced mode, but it’s optional and you have to opt into it and I assume not many people do.

Beah: Okay.

Omid: And so what Duck Player works is we have this special page that loads in the browser and the video you’re trying to watch gets embedded into that special page and we turn on this privacy enhanced mode. And within privacy enhanced mode, we found in our testing that there’s been almost no ads at all and nearly all the ads have not shown up there, but YouTube specifically says that there’s no personalized ads that get shown there. It’s coming from a different domain that uses different cookies entirely and so all the personalization stuff actually can’t happen technically because it’s doing this special privacy stuff, which is nice.

Beah: Sweet. And I should have asked this earlier, but I mean, do I have to pay to use Duck Player?

Omid: No, you do not. It is entirely free. It’s actually the same technology that we have within our videos vertical on search. So even if you’re not in our browsers, we offer a private way to watch videos if you’re in the videos tab on the search results page. And that uses the exact same thing where we have this privacy enhanced mode for the embedded video. But for the full experience, you’ll be able to get like the full distraction free watching that’s within our browsers. And that’s a free feature.

Beah: Got it. Cool, do you have any favorite things personally about Duck Player?

Omid: I have a five-year-old daughter. I think the example that you saw on the search was like a how to draw a Hello Kitty character video. And so exactly if there was a Spotify Wrapped for those video searches it’d be Hello Kitty, K-pop, Demon Hunters. But like I’m very conscious of the content and the amount of videos that my five year old is exposed to and watches. And so if you just loaded the YouTube homepage, you’re kind of inundated with like all these recommendations and different things that are thrown at you. And after you watch, when you’re watching a video, you have a side rail of all these videos. After you watch the video, it’s like, here’s more, or it’ll autoplay to the next one. And so if I’m just trying to show my daughter how to draw a Hello Kitty in a video, we load that in Duck Player. We watch only the video and it’s done. And it’s like the perfect use case for that.

Beah: Nice. That’s a pretty good one. Tell me about have there been any particular challenges or surprises along the way as you’ve built Duck Player?

Omid: I think the biggest challenge, it kind of continues to be a little bit of a challenge, is that not all, not 100% of videos can be viewed in Duck Player. If you’re a YouTube creator and you upload a video, there’s an option that you can say that you don’t want to allow your videos to be embedded, and that includes anywhere. So if someone was trying to add your video to their own website, they couldn’t do it, and Duck Player is included in that. And then there’s also some age-restricted content and the way that YouTube does age verification is you have to log in to your account to verify your age. And because it’s on an entirely separate domain that the privacy enhanced mode gets served from that kind of breaks the entire like privacy and personalization stuff. So there’s some small amount of videos that cannot be loaded in Duck Player for those reasons. We estimate it to be somewhere around like 3% ish on desktop. And it’s unfortunate, but we also allow people to go to YouTube and there’s a number of other use cases where you might want to go to YouTube to you know subscribe to the channel, like view the comments or something so it’s purely complementary to it and that was a challenge to communicate why people couldn’t watch those videos when that small amount does happen.

Beah: Did we try any ways of getting around those limitations or just kind of there’s nothing you can do?

Omid: Yeah, for the ones where it’s just not allowed to be embedded, there’s really nothing we can do. Another category is some YouTube bot detection. They do some pretty sophisticated things, we suspect, trying to determine if you’re a bot or not. And if some combination of those things get triggered, they’ll ask you to also log in to verify that you’re not a bot. And so we’ve tried to look into ways that we can try to get around some of that, too. But it’s really, really tricky and complicated. And so our messaging is right now to you can go to YouTube and watch it. And if there’s ways in the future we can improve that, we’ll certainly do it. But we’re trying to just at least communicate it really well to people so they understand what’s going on.

Beah: Have you ever been submitting multiple Hello Kitty queries repeatedly and been blocked as a bot?

Omid: I haven’t yet, if I was YouTube’s detection algorithm, I would probably flag that considering the volume.

Beah: Yeah, yeah, I would flag that. Cool, okay. So tell me, like, are there anything, we launched the first version of Duck Player quite a while ago, like, anything significant that we’ve changed about it along the way?

Omid: The biggest thing I would say is probably on mobile. We launched Duck Player on mobile a bit after the desktop launch. And one of the things that we learned there as we were doing some testing was that, as you saw when I demoed it, you get this question in the video. It says, like, do you want to turn on Duck Player? And when we were on mobile with the smaller screen and it taking up a bigger percentage of that, we learned that people kind of don’t really know where that message is coming from, or they maybe confuse that message to be coming from somewhere else, like it’s coming from YouTube itself or coming from the video or it’s an ad itself because they see ads in that space so frequently. And so on iOS in particular, we actually made a change where we made that prompt be more attached to the browser UI so that when we ask you if you want to use Duck Player, it’s out of the way. And we kind of make sure that we’re not like interrupting people or that it’s clearer to them that this is coming from DuckDuckGo. It’s a feature you can do, you can watch it in Duck Player if you want to, and if you don’t want to, it’s not blocking you in a lot of ways.

Beah: Yeah, yeah, I personally much prefer the iOS version. Check it out if you have an iOS device. Cool. Yeah, anything that we haven’t touched on that you want to add?

Omid: I mentioned the constant recommendations and YouTube kind of throwing more and more videos at you. One thing I think I maybe had glossed over was if you watch videos in Duck Player, those views don’t get fed into your YouTube history and therefore your algorithm and more recommendations. So it’s another privacy benefit of using Duck Player as well.

Beah: Nice. Okay, wait, I have one more question. Recommend one, only one video on the entirety of YouTube that users who want to go test out Duck Player should look up and watch.

Omid: On the spot, just like that. It’s hard for me to argue against the Bad Bunny Tiny Desk Concert that I just pulled up, but I will also say, if you go to any of those NPR Tiny Desk Concerts, I would be shocked if you didn’t have some artists that you knew. There’s been so many of them on there, so find a Tiny Desk Concert and watch that. It’s fantastic.

Beah: Nice. Awesome. Well, thanks so much, Omid. It was a pleasure talking with you about Duck Player.

Omid: Yeah, thank you. Likewise.

Beah: We’ll be back again for some other topic in the future.

Omid: Sounds good. Thanks, Beah.

Beah: Alright. Later.

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