110
votes
How you use YouTube in desktop and mobile devices. YouTube to limit usage of ad blockers soon.
YouTube limits ad blocker usage in new test
YouTube could be testing a three-strikes policy for ad blocking (Update)
So its clear now that YouTube is going to limit the usage of Ad blockers in the coming future
I use Ublock Orgin with Firefox which basically used to block all ads and on mobile device I use NewPipe
We exist to be served ads and monetized, nothing more. I hate it.
I dotn get it, I don't think I've ever willingly clicked on an ad or bought something because of an ad. The only time I go looking for ads is when I specifically want a product and am looking for the best reviewed version of that product like a new cologne or something.
Am I alone in this? Ads have to work on someone or else they wouldn't be so fucking prevalent.
You're not alone, I'm the same way, but it clearly works for a large majority of people, otherwise it wouldn't be so profitable and prevalent. The thing about ads though is, it's not about clicks, it's about impressions. More impressions means more brand recognition with the general public.
It's not necessarily about "this person needs to buy my thing by clicking this ad", its more like "Next time this person needs to shop for this type of product, they will remember our brand as familiar and be more likely to buy it as opposed to our competitor"
It gets complicated. There are impressions, if you've been shown an ad, there is CTR (click through rate), and there are conversations, whether you've purchased something because of an ad you've seen. The kicker is that conversion isn't just tied to an ad directly, but it is tied to an ad campaign indirectly. CTR is very low and direct conversion is almost non-existent, but companies can see a direct correlation between the existence of an ad campaign and revenue from sales to recognize that there is a correlation. A website makes it's money through impressions. That's all they really care about. They make more money if there's a higher than normal CTR, so there's incentive to place ads that are of interest to a viewer. The problem facing YouTube is that as they negotiate rates with their market, the companies that want to sponsor content, they need to show that for the viewing time spent by users, they have generated a certain metric of impressions. Ad blockers mean that they aren't able to meet their contractual obligations to the advertisement entity. I don't know that ad blockers are a significant loss of those impressions, but YouTube needs to be able to deliver. This would either mean increasing the number of ads per minute, showing more ads, or negotiating a different rate which probably would net them less money per viewing minute. Ad blockers affect two of those legs. Blocking ad blockers would increase the number of impressions and allow them to increase that impressions per minute rate. It's a band-aid for a bigger problem they face in balancing operational costs, and bringing in more advertisement revenue.
Ironically, the one ad that worked on me was for the Brave browser. Which, if you don't know it, has its main appeal being built-in adblock. I downloaded the mobile version on my phone ASAP. (Alas, I usually watch YouTube on my PS4 so no adblock there.)
Well, actually that's one of three ads that worked on me. Some YouTube channels use ads as a way to get new viewers. While I usually skip them, I ended up following a scary story channel for a while, and found one of my now-favorite YouTube singers from another.
Adverts work less for trying to sell some individual item, and more for building brand awareness. No, I'm not going to buy a vacuum cleaner after seeing it in an ad, but I have found out about things like project management tools and such from youtube ads. I didn't go out an immediately buy them, but they are sitting in my brain now and I would check them out more if I was in need of one.
That's what they want us to think, but it isn't true.
You do not exist to be advertised at.
I do watch a lot of YouTube and paid for the subscription in the past, but the algorithm has annoyed me so much that I cancelled it some years ago.
I don't watch political content at all on YouTube, mostly gaming content and science stuff. It didn't stop trying to push me into some toxic hole of disinformation and political loaded right wing content. I had to tell it so often I don't want to see this content or the specific channels but it would still put them on my fronpage and recommend them so much, that it felt like work not watching this content.
When it comes to content I like, it keeps recommending single videos I'm not interested in for years. If you make the mistake of saying you don't want to watch a particular video of a topic, it suddenly stops showing the topic at all. On the other side it still recommended channels that I told it to never show me again almost daily.
It's very bad for discovery, if you don't find a channel through social media, you won't find new interesting channels at all. When you find them, they seemingly got recommended to everyone at once.
The discover section is the hottest of garbage I've ever seen. Not even once did I find an interesting video or youtuber in there.
Youtube doesn't recognise that I prefer long videos over short clickbait content at all, it just ignores my personal browsing habits completely. It stops recmmending youtubers that I binge watched just because I forgot to subscribe immediately, but it also shows me youtubers every day that I completely ignore.
I understand that they want to direct people to short videos that have an add every 2 minutes attached by the creator, but in a paid subscription that shouldn't matter, so why am I still getting treated as a user they have to show as many ads as possible if I pay to don't see ads.
It's a shame. If you compare the Spotify algorithm for example, it actually feels like you can train it to your personal preferences and metrics, and not by some advertisement metrics.
So that's the reason I cancelled my subscription, because it still treated me as the same cheap customer trying to please the creators that are good for ad statistics, not the ones I actually watch.
It felt as if they actively tried to make me cancel and watch ads instead. I canceled but don't watch ads now.
Edit: To answer the question of OP. I watch it on my PC with Firefox and adblockers activated. On my android I put a browser shortcut on my home screen that redirects me to the
desktopmobile version where I have adblockers installed as well.I think you're ignoring a side of this equation though. This shows clearly why it's worth it for Google to get you to sign up for Premium, but you're not paying Google the money it earns for ad impressions so I don't think that's the best way to measure whether it's worth it for you. I think a better metric would be getting some measure of how much of your time is wasted by ads on average per amount of time watching youtube videos, and then multiplying it by some measure of what you think your time is worth.
Not trying to argue Premium is worth it for you or that you should get it btw. I just don't think the comparison to how much your ad impression is worth to Google makes sense as a way of assessing that.
The product is worth whatever the market can bear. The price is what people value their time at. If you save 15 minutes and hour of ad watching divided by how often you watch per month you get to a reasonable calculation. Unless you can easily implement a system that can block out the ads on the devices you and your family consume the content through, the monthly price may be reasonable.
In a truly free market. With well informed rational actors. And fungible goods. And low barrier to entry for other players. Then.... maybe, I don't ascribe to that theory of value though.
Otherwise, no. There are too many other influences and contextual issues for the product to be worth whatever the market can bear.
I pay for the family YouTube plan. I'm in my 40s and watch a decent chunk of YouTube on the Google TV, my wife likes to cast her shows from her country that are uploaded to YouTube, my toddler watches cocomelon on the TV. Trying to set up a pi hole was too much of a hastle for me. I don't like seeing ads and all I did was invited her to the family link and she does not see ads. I should probably ask chatgpt for a better step by step solution though
My wife and I currently have two separate subscriptions since we haven't bothered changing it since before we lived together... we should probably switch to the family plan though, even for just a couple I think it's still cheaper than two singular ones. I'm similarly not up to the effort of setting up a Pihole at this stage. We visited my parents' place recently and holy shit the ads are so obnoxious, I def thing I get my money's worth from the subscription. Especially since I use the youtube music instead of Spotify.
Why not? I want to say it took about 20 minutes to set up my PiHole.
eh I'd have to take time to learn about it and also buy something for it to run on. I haven't ruled out doing it in the future but for now ublock origin and youtube premium are good enough for me
Ah!! I have a suggestion!
I used to maintain a Pi-Hole on an rpi, but then I came across NextDNS. It's a web service that performs the same function as a Pi-Hole (DNS-based content blocking), but without the need to self-host anything.
It takes about 3 minutes to sign up, create a block list, and set it up on your devices. Plus, their free tier has a very generous request limit that I've never hit. The convenience and user-friendliness makes it hard to go back to maintianing a PiHole.
Ooh thanks for the recommendation! I'll bookmark this and look into it for sure.
I got into YouTube premium from google music before it was killed off. I liked Google music, I think the recommendation/random play next was better. YouTube red is way worse, but by then I started getting into watching adfree YouTube on TV.
I now have a separate like creator profile on my YouTube for music, so all the recommendations are for music I like. I also have another for cocomelon that I can change to when I'm in the car and the kids stuff will not pollute my main feed.
ah yeah I had Google Music back in the day too! I loved its weather-based recommendations on rainy days. Youtube music isn't quite as good but it's serviceable enough for me to use instead of Spotify. And yeah ad-free on the tv and phone is nice.
Having separate profiles for music like that is a great idea though! I'd never thought of that one.
The yt-dlp aspect really scares me as an editor tbh. I use yt-dlp multiple times a day for work- having a massive change in that workflow would require so many meetings and training for re-standardizing new methods for general editing bays. So many people use it
YouTube earns more than that through ad revenue though. A youtuber can depending on the content earn more than $18/1000 clicks with a range of $10-30. That's what they are willing to pay so their total income must be much higher.
According to the recent reports Google charged advertisers up to $100 for their TrueView fully-viewed ads and $5 for regular ads.
I don't know how YouTube currently looks but there were often multiple ads throughout the video some of which stopped being skippable.
The excess profits do also find their way to the content creators to some extent. So I don't think it's that clear on how much one is overpaying with the subscription.
YouTubers have shared they make more from Premium subscriber views than ad views. That's why I'm still subscribed.
I personally pay for premium, but I'm grandfathered in at $10/mo from the Google Play Music days. IMO it's worth it because you also get YouTube Music so I don't need to pay for Spotify. And every time I watch YouTube without it, the ads are almost unbearable.
Ads are so weird now. I'm on mobile a lot and I never know if the people shilling stuff are micro-celebs from the influencer space or if they're just terrible actors.
On TV and on streaming services like PlutoTV or Tubi, some ads are entertaining but leave me clueless as to what, exactly, is being sold/promoted.
I actually find the weird ads to be strangely refreshing. If I'm being forced to watch pointless drivel, then it should at least be entertaining pointless drivel.
And frankly anything is better than Honda's ads. I'm especially irritated with their stupid egg campaign that came out after the price of eggs went back down to reasonable (but still high) prices.
It would be one thing if YouTube were financing its content like e.g. Netflix, but YouTube is literally just a service provider like an ISP. It allows creators a place where they can share their content with you. They have a monopoly on this and that is why they can extort more value from the platform than what they are actually providing.
In the consultant space, when you give a lead to another company and it goes through, a common cut is ten percent. That works fine and is enough to make it worth your while, especially if you have your hands full. The fact that these platforms take anything above this ten percent is just abusing their market position.
They are a service provider like your ISP who you likely pay a monthly subscription. I can't tell you if YouTube's pricing is fair but they absolutely have significant costs through their servers and creator payments.
My isp is cheaper per month than YouTube premium.
An ISP doesn't have to store much data or process it. They are more similar to VPN services than YouTube.
What's happening? Reddit killed third party apps, twitter just killed nitter, and YouTube is about to nuke adblockers, if not third party apps too, all at about the same time?
Just as an add-on: I think the whole Netflix-account-sharing saga connects to that too. They are aggressively pushing out some users in order to consolidate their base, which is apparently willing to pay a substantially higher price than before.
All platforms seem to test their lock-in capacity at the moment - and the (social) internet becomes a less interesting place for it.
This, I believe, is far more significant than any Elon antics
A decade of 0% federal interest rates meant capital was cheap to come by. Investors were willing to take longer term, higher risk investments because the opportunity cost of tying up their funds was offset by the potential for explosive growth in tech. Now interest rates are going up and investors are pulling back and reassessing their risk. That free capital flow is drying up, and companies are looking to get serious about their profitability to compensate.
Pandemic lockdowns were a colossal boon to tech companies. As life gets back to normal, they are scrambling to maintain the illusion that pandemic growth was permanent. Aside from just generally trying to make the most out of a windfall, they also don't want to tell investors that their YTY numbers are cratering (even if it's just a return to pre-pandemic normalcy) due to point #1 above. Even if a downturn is expected and not a sign of a fundamental problem, it's still an incentive for investors to move their money elsewhere in the short term.
Related to both of the above, a lot of tech companies were hemorrhaging money with the expectation that they could burn capital now for explosive market share then later down the road, once they have market dominance and a loyal userbase, change to a more profitable business model to reap the benefits. That latter bit has more urgency now due to #1 and #2, and is the phase we're in now.
The users were never profitable, however, at some point they have to be.
We're now finding out that's downright impossible with the way things are.
The internet as we know it is dying I guess
AKA the enshittification of the internet.
Well, the internet as we knew it just a few months ago was very flawed as well, where everyone basically uses and works for a few big entities. All of it going to shit may be the push we need for a critical mass to choose better alternatives.
Can't disagree with that, but I still feel there's a difference between what you describe and what seems to inevitably happen now - with forced ads and paid models everywhere
I hate it. I think eventually there will be some sort of major shift that brings down even the biggest tech monopolies. One day YouTube and Twitter and Reddit will go the way of AOL, there's just no telling what will cause it.
It’s not just ads. I had another thread about wanting to install/use my own email server and some of the replies basically pointed to the fact that if you’re not on a “big, well reputed email service” that your “indie email” will likely get spam filtered out.
So “big tech” is even controlling (is it collusion?) the channels of communication we can use with one another.
So much for Alphabet.
I’m already moving away from Google search because it’s become basically useless due to their failure to handle “SEO” abuse properly.
I’ll be abandoning Gmail if the rumours about their plans there are true.
And now it seems my days of using YouTube are coming to an end as well. Shame, I’d actually be willing to drop a few dollars a month for an ad-free premium experience, but they’re asking way too much and their “search” algorithm basically ignores what the user is looking for, so that’s a no-go.
Maybe they are referring to this?
Google might delete your Gmail account if you haven’t logged in for two years
I’ve only seen a couple of passing mentions, but supposedly Google are making moves to ‘extend’ email protocols with their own proprietary ones, kind of like Microsoft tried to do with JavaScript back in the day.
You should have moved away from them a long time ago if you value your privacy, time, or money, my friend. Good luck changing your email though, that'll be at least a week down the drain. Totally worth it though!
I’m all good. My real email is paid for, along with my own domain, via a small local host. Gmail is just for throwaway stuff lol.
Tutanota and ProtonMail are fairly reputable.
You can pay a subscription for various features, or get the whole thing with VPN, calendar, etc. No idea how many people actually buy that, but it seems to work for funding.
They monetize by selling additional storage (similar to Google Drive), VPN, custom email aliases (see Proton SimpleLogin)... so.. also they position themself as secure end-to-end encrypted email, so I suppose they have intention to don't become Google and to don't track users.
what are you using instead of Google search ?
Not them, but common alternatives are DuckDuckGo, Startpage and, I guess, Bing. See also: https://www.privacyguides.org/en/search-engines/
Kagi is also an option.
For the moment, a range of things. But if their pricing comes down a bit, I'll switch to Kagi full time.
I pay for Youtube Premium so I haven't really thought about ads on youtube for a long time.
Agreed. Not to shill but YT Premium is like $25 a month USD. This plan covers my parents, my 2 younger sisters and my fiancée. None of them see youtube ads (minor) but can use YT Music on any trip without ads (major). 6 heads with no ads on YouTube or YT Music seems worth it to me but I would love to hear a counter argument.
As someone with zero interest in YTMusic or any other streaming music service, 25 bucks a month sounds insane to me. None of the content I watch on YT is produced by YT (do they even actually produce original content in the way that platforms like Netflix or D+ do?), so why on earth should I pay them that kind of money just to host content that independent creators are producing for them for free?
I would maybe consider something in the realm of 2-3 bucks a month for an ad-free experience, but given the way they treat the content creators that have made their platform a success (de-monitization at a whim, ridiculous copyright strikes with no actual recourse even when the complaints are baseless), anything more than that is 100% out of the question for me.
Part of what you pay also goes to content creators. In fact, with premium more goes to content creators compared to when you are watching the same with ads.
So to me premium is not just to get rid of ads, but also a way to support all creators more without having to be a patreon for every single one of them.
In addition to that, I personally watch way more YouTube than any other streaming service. As I pay for those other streaming services I don't really think it is that odd to also pay for Youtube premium.
So why are they still showing ads on demonetized videos? If the creator isn't deemed worthy of making money on a video why does youtube get to just take the ad revenue still? I'd consider paying for premium if Google didn't make it so impossible for content creators to actually get paid on their videos. They'll hamfist ads into everything and then tell creators "whoopsie. You said fuck that one time so we're taking all your money"
It's getting really old fast watching adults speak about adult subjects meant for adults like their in the back of an elementary classroom.
I'm an adult, I want to watch people talk and act like adults. I really wish there was a hard clear line and separate app for a kids YouTube. Would be great for parents that want to plop their kids in front a screen as they don't have to worry about it going down weird rabbit holes. I think there is a kids app or at least was, but if so then why does every advertiser only want family friendly even on regular YouTube? Whole thing is frustrating, even without ads the content creators still have to cater to them to stay in the algorithm, so no matter what ads make every level of the entertainment worse and awkward to watch.
I know some creators complain a lot about it, I also know that it is much more common depending on the subject. I also don't think it is actually that big of an issue for the majority of content creators. If it is that prevalent for the content creators you consume content from, I can understand your reservations. In that case it might be better to support them directly through Patreon.
One of my favorite youtubers went twitch only for a while because Google screwed up on their end and told him he would have made $30k from ads over that time period but they didn't see why they should retroactively pay him even though it was a bug in their system. It finally got sorted out and he's back on YouTube but I don't blame any creator that ditches the platform. Youtube only sees it's creators as an income source they wish would just shut up and make videos for pennies
Right? That's 3-5 days worth of food for me. No way I'm paying that much jfc
If YouTube Premium was $2-3 per month I would consider it. I have no desire to use YT Music, so the costs they are charging are way more than I’m willing to pay.
But on top of that, on principal I am really against the way YouTube has gone about the monetization aspect. They’ve removed features that used to be free and put them behind a paywall, and realistically, the way they’ve been pushing YT Premium is by making your free experience so bad that they basically annoy you into paying.
I know video hosting is expensive. I have no problems with having a paid tier, I have no problems with even 4k being part of that tier given how expensive it is. But if your answer to “how do we get more people to use our premium service” is “by making the non-premium version increasingly worse”, I’m just inherently against that model.
I have had it for so long I guess I didn't know they degraded features of the ad based side. I picked up Play Music like 10 years ago for myself and my sisters which came with YouTube Red or whatever it was called. I used to be a professional musician, and the kiddos are similarly inclined so a music streaming service that allows our friends to post makes sense for our use case. What did they change to the user experience side? I feel like I might be supporting bad practices accidentally at this point based on the comments.
I think we might just disagree on this one. For $4 per person we have access to basically the music catalogue of the planet. As far as I can tell there are no geographical limitations, I am generally hundreds of miles from my parents and siblings and they are able to use my subscription. The fact that this happens to also remove ads on YT is just a bonus.
I imagine I listen to 15-20 hours of music a week, and both of my sisters have a similar music addiction. As far as paying the creators, that's Google's end of the bargain. The primary creators in this case are musicians, and generally ones that have a publisher. Metal Blade Records is not letting Google play their artist's music across the world for free so I imagine that's where my money is going on this one, which seems pretty fair to me.
Google doesn’t allow family members whose accounts are registered to another country, presumably to avoid Argentina pricing shenanigans.
That's possible by setting a VPN to Argentina, or Turkey, or some other country with a cheap plan. It'll cost you a dollar or two.
It's technically not allowed but I haven't heard anything about any banwaves yet.
Still though, you may consider doing it on a secondary account rather than risking your primary getting banned.
I think it checks more than your IP. I have not been able to buy YT Premium using a VPN and trying servers in various countries.
I think it looks at location data, and location history. So if all your views have been from the US, and then you suddenly try to sign up from India, it doesn't allow you to.
It’s not much of a counter-argument but companies keep on moving the goal post with subscriptions. I assume YouTube will change their policies like Netflix is doing someday. I considered getting YouTube premium, but it’s annoying to get used to a service that gets downgraded down the line.
I actually have YT Premium through a family plan, and was temporarily kicked off the plan because I live across the country from the owner of the family plan. All I had to do though was contact support and tell them I was in the same house, just using a VPN. This was about 2 years ago and I haven't had a problem since so they clearly updated their guidelines, but YouTube definitely has thought about going the Netflix route before.
Wait, YouTube have support that you can contact and they will answer? Is it still true? Because actually thats news for me.
I could definitely see the enshitification potential, and I'm worried the service will go the way of....most Google products. If the service somehow goes downhill or starts costing more than it's worth to us than of course we will drop it. In its current state, the price went up (my plan was grandfathered from Play Music) a few months ago and it's just something the 6 of us use enough to be worth it.
$25 a month is crazy expensive just to not see ads.
That and it's not even a guarantee of ad-free service in the future. A perk of paid cable used to be that were fewer ads (or sometimes none at all) compared to broadcast TV, and yet the ads came despite a monthly subscription.
I wouldn't be surprised to be ads claw their way back in once it becomes normalized to pay for YouTube.
Yeah, for me I would expect the price to increase as well over time, even if it's 25 today I'm sure they'll want 50 or 60 or 70 or 80 in the future.
Yeah it's IMO only really worth it if your family also uses YT Music as their primary music source.
I'm sick of Google in the aggregate but YT Premium is too good of a deal to pass up. It's a no-brainer actually, because all my kids use YouTube as their primary entertainment. For me personally, it's unusable without Premium and still quite good with it.
Isn't YouTube family plan for people who share an address though?
If you live with a partner and don't have kids, that isn't exactly an amazing deal (especially if you have more than 10k songs saved in Spotify, and therefore won't be using YouTube music)
My family's YT subscription works across multiple continents.
It’s for people who are in a “Google Family”. The only real enforcement of family being family is the family payment method. The Google family creator has to define a “family” credit card payment method, and all members can use it. So you have to have some level of trust with who you put in your family. Other than that, you can have whomever you want.
No, the 6 of us have 4 different addresses in total and the service works just fine. I'm not sure if it changed, but when I bought into this like 10 years ago Spotify had super shitty service in comparison to Play Music. Since the user experience hasn't changed much and the pricing still seems reasonable I just haven't checked into alternatives.
I watch YouTube pretty much exclusively on desktop - partially because of the ads - and I don't use YouTube music at all because it basically does not have a free music player app. Given that I don't plan to change my habits I don't see any value in giving Google several euros a month for not having to turn on my ad blocker.
Since YT Music is so bad, and I already pay a Spotify family plan (granted they're aggressively trying to make their desktop app unusable recently) and watch very little youtube, it feels like I'd be paying for 0 gain, especially because the Spotify thing is 10 cheaper a month.
Can you tell me how YT Music is bad in comparison to Spotify? I hated Spotify when I tried it out like 10 years ago and I'm curious if there is a better service out there worth trialing.
In my experience there's nothing really wrong with what's there already, but the app is pretty barebones so some things I was used to in competitors' apps were not there.
Hmm, maybe I should give it another look. Since the service I have was meeting the needs I haven't done any research into alternatives but you've convinced me to see what's out there. Thanks, I appreciate it!
Ah, I was probably unclear about that, apologies. Not my primary language.
I meant to say that I think YT Music is bad - as an application - and that Spotify is something I already pay for anyways while at the same time I watch too little YT to make Premium in itself worth it for the video component.
That wasn't to say YT Music is worse than Spotify, I'd in fact say both are bad in their own regards. YT Music has pretty shoddy audio quality even among streaming services and still sometimes tries to crossover between my music and my video recommendations and I cannot figure out why it does that since they mostly solved it years ago (though as someone who only tries it intermittently, maybe it's a "seeding"-thing they do?) while Spotify was once great but both their mobile and their desktop apps seem to be playgrounds for first-semester UI students to do unsupervised experiments with in the past ~2 years.
It's a weird race to the bottom. As if the goal is to be only a fraction superior to the competition so if they break anything, you have to immediately break your own service.
What I basically wanted to say before though is that if I were to watch videos, then YT Premium would probably be the much cheaper total option especially on a family plan. But failing any significant Youtube engagement, I might as well pay for Spotify which is the cheaper option.
YT Premium is such a good deal. My whole family is under the same subscription, removing ads from all devices in multiple households. It even gives more money to creators.
Jesus. Is that how much it costs now? I was lucky enough to be grandfathered in at 9.99 for YTM and YTP and I've been contemplating cancelling for awhile now and you've just convinced me to just let to continue.
He has the family plan, his cost per head is just over $4.
For a personal plan, with regional pricing, in the US it's about $12/month, which is what I pay.
YTM and YTP?
You The Man and YouTube Poop?
My family plan pricing was $15 up until April I believe (from the Play Music days), they sent an email with updated pricing about a year ago. I did have time to consider if the service was worth the change and decided I liked it enough to keep the plan I had. The whole thing seemed reasonable to me but if you're still getting the older pricing, I'm envious!
I pay for YT music premium (regular YT premium isn't available in my country, Spotify literally won't let me register). It is well worth the ~2 dollars/month to be able to listen with my screen off/locked, and never have ads. If I could I would pay for the full YT+YT Music premium in a second. It's significantly better value than a Netflix subscription.
I think a valid counterpoint is that YouTube Music is expensive dead weight for a lot of people, and it's the majority of the cost of YouTube Premium.
A few years ago there was a trial run of YouTube Premium Lite in the EU market that de-bundled Music from the subscription and brought the cost down significantly. If that option existed today I'd subscribe in a hot minute, but since it doesn't, I'll just keep dodging those frustrating ads whatever way I can.
Oh I think I understand where you're coming from. It sounds like you're most interested in removing YT ads and the music part of it is useless to you? I got the service back when it was still Play Music specifically for the music streaming aspect so we just might not align on this one.
I bought it too. Got the $120 for a year plan. I mostly watch on my phone and Chromecast. $10/month is worth it for how much I consume on either. Plus creators get a bit more from my views.
I've also considered moving from Spotify to YT music. Just need to figure out how to move my liked songs over
Warning - if you sync your liked artists from Spotify to YouTube, every artist you follow will be subscribed to as a YouTube channel.
If you follow a lot of artists, this is a great way to waste an hour trying to make a list of the actual YouTube channels you follow
What I did was set up a brand account that I only use for music, to keep them separate.
Same, and it's one of the subs I really do not mind paying. I watch YouTube on my Apple TV constantly and there isn't an adblocker for the device, so premium is a must if you don't want ads every 3 min.
I have a suspicion there's more ads on non desktop YouTube apps, it's wild.
Same. The cost of YouTube videos is either a.) watching ads or b.) paying for YouTube Premium.
My wife, my daughter, and I all watch a ton of YouTube. It would be crazy not to pay for it.
People are so entitled with their ad blockers. That shit ain't free to make (well, the good stuff isn't) or free to host.
Who has the word on how AdNauseam is working with this implementation? I literally refuse to view ads on videos, so either YouTube gets its free data on my viewing habits or it can go jump off a short pier, lol.
There’s an interesting comment on a topic about browser extensions regarding the effectiveness of AdNauseum overall.
I mean, I don't care if it's effective at them filtering out my actual clicks tbh. That can be improved upon and deepfaked further by the devs, assumedly. But if blocking is out, then surely clicking all the things is worse (or selectively choosing ones to "real-click").
uBlock Origin and SponsorBlock are a must.
uBlock Origin works well enough for me right out of the box. Sponsor Block I like to recolour sponsored segments to the same colour as Youtube Ads for a more seamless feel, and I enable auto skipping for everything but engagement reminders.
YouTube Enhancer can be used to mostly kill shorts (removing them from your homepage, showing you shorts as regular videos if you do visit one, and gives you a couple more options such as flipping videos and reversing playlists. Firefox is king!
Three of my family members use YouTube on their TVs and Tablets, and me and my friend use YouTube on our phones for our commutes, so I used my VPN to purchase YouTube Family Premium for all of us (5 people in total). YouTube music comes bundled with it, which I actually prefer to Spotify, and downloading videos is super nice. I buy it from Turkey for TRY 59.99 which translates to ~£1.85 or ~$2.30 a month. My bank cards I have used are my Monzo/Starling cards, who don’t charge exchange rate fees.
India also worked for me in the past and is the cheapest, but I had too much trouble resubscribing after my bank card expired. It also required me to manually pay every month as Indian bank laws don’t allow automatic monthly payments apparently.
No, Banks do allow automatic payments. I think you may have tried during 2021 or early 2022 when recurring payment rules were changed. Apple and Google didn't see it worth it to update their payment gateways. Apple still hasn't afaik.
What changed was Banks had to provide one single platform for managing all recurring payments, send a notification 2-3 days before payment deduction, for subscription above ₹5000 customer consent before every transaction.
You can read more here, old article for 2021
Just to add to this because I've seen this confuse people: you only have to begin YT Premium subscription over VPN, you can then use it without geographical restrictions / need for VPN.
I personally use uBlock Origin in Firefox on my computer, and YouTube Revanced on Android. No problems as of yet, although I have a spare YouTube account in case my current one gets throttled (had a brief issue with an older version of Revanced, but downloading the newest Revanced Manager and patching a recent version of the YouTube APK fixed that).
I'm one of those suckers that pays for YouTube Premium bc I personally get a lot out of it and it's my only subscription, only other one I have is a VPN. However, I still use third party clients to watch YouTube on my mobile devices. Revanced on Android and uYouPlus on iOS purely for SponsorBlock. I also use SponsorBlock on my PC. It's almost impossible to watch YouTube without these extensions now for me.
Same. I got it recently when the first news of Youtube blocking ad blockers surfaced. I was already eyeing some music streaming service so it just kind of made sense. I'm not thrilled about the price (or paying subscription in general), but I genuinely have very few issues with Youtube (its recommendations work for me) and YT Music is great at building playlists for me, so it seems like a pretty fair deal. I still keep few Patreon subscriptions going, but usually only $1/month (so I don't get anything but a good feeling out of it).
SponsorBlock is a godsend, I totally agree.
Agreed on the point about YouTube recommendations. Maybe it's just the fact that I've used YouTube more than any other service so they have more data for recommendations but I found that YouTube Music's recommendations are pretty much perfect, I only have to dislike a handful of songs every now and then. I also love the various mixes it makes for the different genres I listen to. I usually listen to a random mix of genres but sometimes I just want a specific genre and the numbered mixes do a great job of doing just that
Eh. Even if they block adblockers, someone will create a way to bypass it. Twitch tried it and they have one of the most aggressive anti-adblocker systems I've ever seen... Didn't work, there's multiple solutions online.
So I'm not worried in the slightest.
What solution do you recommend for skipping Twitch ads?
Twitch Adblock 2023
Download the extension manually (its a fork of TTV LOL so its a couple extra steps compared to a regular extension):
https://github.com/younesaassila/ttv-lol-pro/releases
(Look for the "Assets" section - you may need to click to expand it)
Chrome:
*.crx (Ex: v1.9.0-chromium-save-link-as.crx)
Firefox:
*.xpi (Ex: v1.9.0-firefox.xpi)
Install the extension:
Chrome:
Firefox:
Install uBlock Origin (skip if you have it already)
Customize uBlock Origin
9a. You should see a list of variables and their set values. The bottom variable, "userResourcesLocation" is the variable we want to edit. If this is your first adding a script to ublock origin, it should say "unset". Change "unset" to: https://github.com/pixeltris/TwitchAdSolutions/raw/master/vaft/vaft-ublock-origin.js
9b. If you have a URL in the "userResourcesLocation" field already simply add a space between the urls
Allow List
If you are using default chrome/brave/edge then you may need to set an allowlist registry setting. This will automatically add a key value to the registry to tell the browser that this specific app is allowed. If you don't do this, the browser will likely disable the extension when you restart the browser.
Restart Your Browser
Hopefully Twitch will be ad free now.
Have a look here, TTV LOL PRO is the best one, but requires finding working proxies. If you're too lazy just go with video-swap-new, it lowers the image quality temporarily but works right out of the box. If everything else fails, just use streamlink with ad skipping turned on, it takes a few seconds to boot up as it skips the ads but, at least from my experience, you don't see any ads afterwards.
Only watch people worth paying for.
Yawn. Bring it on Youtube.
Their developers can't keep up with the pirates and everyone knows it. I'll be enjoying all of their content on SmartTubeNext with all of the integrated ad-blocking and I don't need an account to do it - so please, ban, sue, censor, and punish my non-account. Meanwhile, anything done to counter this constant piracy will enshittify the experience for the regular users and drive people to competitors. I dare Alphabet to make having a google account a requirement of viewing youtube's content. Please please do it so everyone will move on to a better platform.
If I have to stop using Youtube, I will. I do enjoy watching it when I'm doing things, but generally I don't watch anything of great substance that would be missed. If anything, this would push me into Subscribing to Nebula where I find a lot of the creators I like, have moved to.
Plainly, I do not allow ads in my house. Between everything using an Adblocker and PiHole, I will not go back; I'm done having this shit shoved down my throat and will actively stop using things that force me into ads. My kids go over to their grandparents house and are utterly baffled by the ads on the Cable TV at my parents house.
I just use Invidious. They did block a bunch of invidious clients recently but vid.puffyan.us and onion.tube still work.
I use a self-hosted Invidius instance. No tracking or ads so far.
What is Invidius?
It's an open source alternative frontend for Youtube. Installation is quite straightforward if you are familiar with docker and docker-compose.
Install instructions can be found here.
Installed... works but I can only seem to get 720p and DASH setting gives me "Playback cannot continue. No available working or supported playlists." Any insight by any chance?
According to cogipas:
Youtube has themselves to blame for making me aware of AdNauseam. I've switched to it now from uBlock and privacy badger; you can allow it to not block/bot-click ads that respect your privacy, and disable it on certain sites altogether since it's based on uBlock Origin.
Every youtuber I follow that relies on youtube income has a patreon or does sponsorship to get by since ads get them a pittance, but it's what youtube makes their money off of.
Now they can reap what they sow.
I use ReVanced and, while a little difficult to install initially, has been just as good as Vanced.
Revanced has just started playing up for me. Every video starts playing normally then between 30 seconds and a minute or so in it stops playing and buffers indefinitely. Refreshing doesn't help, but hopping to any other video then back again to the original solves it.
I've had that happen before, I had to go in and repatch revanced and make sure I was on the most recent version. The first couple of times it took me awhile to figure it all out but now it's a couple of minutes. If they ban folks for stopping YouTube ads though, I may try to figure out something else
That worked perfectly. Thank you!
Yup, ReVanced isn't as stable and Vanced IMO (randomly crashes sometimes) but I didn't find it too difficult to install and it is a lot more customizable than Vanced (or maybe not and I never trief customizing Vanced lol). It was slightly more complicated than installing Vanced but I don't think it's prohibitively difficult or anything
I just want to know if SmartTubeNext is going to be affected as well. Better ask this in its Telegram group.
This is a problem because there is no competition to YouTube and the nature of the business makes it impossible. I don't know where to go when this becomes commonplace, because I rely on yt-dlp, SponsorBlock, and other extensions to enhance the experience. And yes, they will probably turn ads on for Premium users too.
I watch YouTube on Firefox with uBlock Origin and Sponsor Block. On mobile (android), I watch on the YouTube app since it's usually just to kinda look at a video someone links. If I actually want to be watching YouTube, I use NewPipe.
If, somehow, they are actually successful at blocking adblockers for more than a day I hope that will just cut out the time I waste watching YouTube. I'd sooner pay for a Nebula subscription (and all the creators I subscribe to that it would be a shame to stop watching are on Nebula) than for YouTube premium.
I used to use Invidious, but recently yewtu.be AND invidious.snopyta.org stopped working so I might just stop watching youtube and do something more useful with my time.
I use NewPipe on my phone and UBlock Origin, SponsorBlock and DeArrow with firefox on pc for viewing a quick video or two.
I don't log in on YT, so I keep track of my subscriptions locally with FreeTube, which is basically a desktop client. It's FOSS and you can set it up to use Invidious for scraping. It also allows importing/exporting subscriptions to NewPipe and back. There's also profile system for separating subscriptions, so if I don't want all the entertainment content in my feed right now, I can switch to News or Programming profile.
Frankly, I'm not too worried about Youtube attempting to force ads. I just can't imaging them actually pulling it off with all the tools available for side-stepping any restrictions. Worst case scenario I'll just use yt-dlp.
Honestly, three strikes would be a great way to keep me from going down the rabbit hole on YouTube. I'd be getting back some free time!
It won't work.
I'm flabbergasted that people care about these announcements. Are you new to the internet?
There is always a way.
I used Invidious on iOS and Mac.
Freetube(also based on Invidious) on Linux and Windows.
NewPipe on Android.
Sometimes on Windows though I just use FF+uBlock instead of just FreeTube.
Also unfortunately YT is now trying their hardest to block Invidious.
I also use FreeTube. It’s a buggy mess but works well enough for my needs. I love that it’s integrated with SponsorBlock. The next few weeks should be interesting to see if YouTube is able to break it. If they do, the app feels so fragile already (and its release cadence is so slow) that I’m not sure the devs would be able to fix it. I hope I’m proven wrong but FreeTube really does feel like its days are numbered.
I understand that this isn't a tech support thread, but is anyone else struggling to get google to properly export their YouTube subscriptions? I'm looking for a CSV file, but it just gives me an HTML file instead.
That's strange, maybe there is some step that I didn't do right?
I've tried that. I always get an archive with 1 html file inside that looks like this:
https://i.imgur.com/a/NbUvd1W
This number seems really low considering the size of Youtube. These changes, coupled with the cable-esque ad break length, are probably aiming to draw more people to their premium service. I'm sure the profit margins on Youtube Premium are way larger than anything they get from ad revenue. Services like Twitch are doing similar things trying to drive more profits that come directly from the user.
I genuinely that the age of free content on the internet is slowly coming to a close.
Just curious if anyone knows what techniques they use to detect or circumvent ad blockers. Like the video expects a certain key value to be sent by an upcoming ad and will only continue playing if that key is received by the ad (verified server-side)? Accomplished through distinct pre- and post-ad URLs?