122
votes
YouTube is now rolling out disabling videos after detecting adblockers
Link information
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- Title
- YouTube isn't happy you're using ad blockers - and it's doing something about it
- Published
- Oct 6 2023
- Word count
- 298 words
If you were to add this block of text to the "My Filters" tab in uBlock, it bypasses the youtube anti-adblock.
uBlock Origin is actively working to get around these, so only add the above if you have a fully updated UBO and are still seeing the adblocker-blocker that Google is pushing out.
There are technical ways to completly defeat adblock, especially if you're Google and you control both YouTube and the ad platform.
If Google decides they really want to go forward with this, it will be interesting...
They also control most browsers, too. And many people’s DNS. They write the HTTP specs. They control a lot of Internet backbone fiber.
Users can change all of those those things. What worries me more is hardware DRM which users can't control. Pretty much all modern computers have it built in already. Websites only need some API that allows them to use it. And they are already working on it.
I know. I used to work on the infrastructure for Android’s attestation system. In a few years the world’s most popular consumer operating system will have monthly refreshed attestation (and DRM!) certificates. Right now only a minority are using the new system.
Wow, this is such a bleak outlook for the future of a free web. The golden age really did come and go, didn't it?
I mean, we could all just stop using YouTube. It'd be miserable but at least we'd be DRM-free.
They keep hijacking my dns settings on my Windows LAN connection to their own DNS instead of my internal DNS. I had to turn on registry auditing and I'm still trying to figure out how. I'm pissed off. I'm using my own DNS servers for a reason.
do people really use chrome? why would anyone use chrome? I do not understand.
It's corp-enforced for me, everything internal is built to run on Chrome. Edge is installed, but locked all the way down - kneecapped. I can still set up custom keyword searches in Chrome, not in Edge. So there's a whole org just on Chrome, and I'm sure it's not the only one by a long shot.
What's wrong with Chrome in your opinion? I use it and I am still satisfied with it.
Less privacy by default.
In my experience Chrome, aside from the privacy issue, is the fact that it’s a massive resource hog. Interestingly, there’s an apparent parallel to Google Search itself, being that it began as this quick, clean way to search, and has torne into this frustrating mess of Sponsored results and SOE nonsense. Chrome began as a lightweight browser that was clean and really optimised resources. Now, it’s still quick, but it’s so resource intensive I can’t have more than a handful of tabs open without performance issues.
It’ll be a cat and mouse game for a while like torrenting. Never entirely defeated but at the stage where paying is easier and a better experiance.
*Torrenting games
With movies it's absolutely more convenient to torrent with the right tools, than paying for half a dozen different streaming services.
It’s been hard to return to torrenting for movies that are t available after not torrenting for a long time. The good tracker communities are private and after a half hour of seeing if I can find one, I just watch something else. Do you have recommendations on how to get back in?
I spent years working my way into the world’s best movie tracker. And I think today it might only be harder to get in than before. Trackers tend to shut down and you can’t get into the best ones by applying directly. You usually need to build reputation elsewhere first.
If you want to spend at least a year and maybe three getting into a top notch tracker, you’ll need to find a smaller tracker (one that lets you interview directly) that has an invite forum - a place where other trackers recruit good seeders/uploaders. Then upload one or two dozen good torrents, maintain a good ratio, and eventually you’ll meet the requirements to apply.
yts.mx is my current go-to, though I'm not a video-encoding-technology-buff. They are an open tracker, have the smallest file sizes for the resolution, the most seeds, and usually have popular movies out within hours of availability on streaming. If a movie is VERY popular, they might have a bootleg version for a little while until the clean is ready.
I think out of my collection of 1k+ movies, I have one that isn't from their library, and one more I can't find anywhere.
You will need a VPN for privacy.
seconding stremio. You will just need to also search stremio addons and download the torrentio addon. It works like a streaming service (remembers where you are in an episode, which youve watched, a library and recently viewed + browsing by categories) but it has 99% of the content youll ever look for.
its a testament to the state of paid for streaming that i actually do have access to hbo, disney, netflix and prime and still opt for stremio out of simplicity and a good user experience.
Media centers with plug-ins. I've used Stremio these past years and haven't touched trackers since.
I have an app on my phone where I can download a movie in two presses, and it'll trigger a download on my NAS automatically.
It's literally never been easier.
Twitch defeated adblockers by using in-stream ads. I hope google does not go down the same path.
If you're not able to block the ad, you can at least bypass them. You will require Firefox.
I wrote a tutorial of sorts on Lemmy: https://lemmy.world/post/5452725
They aren't totally defeated. There's things like TTV LOL PRO that can do different blocking methods or proxy and uBlock Origin can do it with the right lists selected but may work slightly differently than TTV LOL PRO. There's many other solutions too.
The ones I mentioned do have some hiccups to them, that is sometimes the stream stops playing when ad begins and sometimes it will resume when ads stop, other times it continues to play through the ads with no interruption and other times it plays through the ads but at a lower resolution. I found when the stream stops because of ads I can just hit pause and play again and the stream will resume while ads are being blocked.
So they made it slightly annoying to block ads which I guess from their perspective is a win. There's some situations where I don't want to deal with the annoyance of the stream possibly stopping and will find something else to watch.
They were all broken for a while, but some of them work now. I use the vaft Ublock Origin script from the TwitchAdSolutions Github, which reduces the video quality while ads are playing significantly, but the audio is still there. Kind of scuffed, but I'll take what I can get.
I suspect they would be happy with getting the numbers low enough to not be worth their time.
Off-topic but are you the same joelthelion from reddit as of 17(ish) years ago? It's one of those usernames that stuck with me for some reason!
Yes, that would be me :)
this is great! I was blocking the pop up, but it still borked the scrolling. I have a bookmarklet with the following to remove static elements / fix sites that won't scroll due to paywalls or whatever... but its annoying. Yours worked perfectly.
As i'm not surprised this popped up instantly, I do have a few questions:
Can youtube escalate and get more hostile?
Will this affect those using chromium based browsers only or everyone (which at this point I think is the few thousand using firefox and the 30 or so others deep down the rabbit hole)
As with any arms race like this, yes YouTube can keep escalating, but they have to balance making life difficult for people using adblockers versus making like difficult for general users. Ultimately if this is a fight they refuse to back down on, they’ll be able to lock up huge parts of the internet to be a walled garden based on how widely Chromium is used.
I wonder if the EU will have anything to say about that?
Apple has a walled garden, but it doesn't stop the Internet functioning. If Google started being actively hostile? I wonder if we'd see a political slap from the EU?
Absolutely. If they start embedding ads in the video stream and transfer playback control to the server (making it more akin to a live stream that the client must request playback adjustments on like seeking and play/pause), it's game over. At that point, you wouldn't even be able to use yt-dlp to bypass ads - the ads would be embedded in the file you downloaded.
Your only hope then would be to VPN-hop until you got to a region where there were no ads to start the live auction for, thus allowing an ad-free playback experience (at least on that particular video).
Not completely game over, though. SponsorBlock is able to detect sponsorship ads even with the ads being part of the file itself.
Unless something has changed recently which I'm not aware of, Sponsorblock doesn't detect sponsorship ads and such, it's crowdsourced. Every time it skips something, be it an ad or non-music portion of a music video, you have another user to thank for submitting the timestamps to Sponsorblock. I regularly submit them myself since I'm a massive YouTube addict, so often see the videos as soon as they're posted, before anyone else has submitted any timestamps. ;)
But putting that aside, your point still stands, that even YouTube embedding its ads into the videos themselves won't be able to stop people from avoiding them, if they are determined enough to.
I didn't say embed the ads in the video stream and allow full client control. If they changed YouTube to be more akin to a live stream where the client can request the server play/pause/seek, the server could just blanket deny those requests during the ads it's inserting.
Of course, SponsorBlock could still work under this scenario, assuming YouTube didn't start allowing Partners to mark specific timestamps as sponsored (and thus unskippable), but I seriously doubt they would consider such an integration without requiring a revenue split from the Partners, which would be a very difficult sell.
That would presumably come at a significant cost to them most likely to do that. Not just in terms of costs in hardware etc. dependent on implementation (my understanding is with a lot of videos youtube creates different quality variants for each video and stores them rather than transcoding on the fly, though I could be wrong on this, but their ad-serve may not work this way currently) but in loss of flexibility in how ads are displayed and thus how much they can sell ad space for.
I've wondered if or how we might see some kind of live ad-blocking for videos in the manner which you suggested they could be displayed. A lot of ads, especially ones like that, are larger brands and they're likely running the same ad in various places and maybe have a few variations of ads. I would assume someone would have to develop a fingerprint database of these ads, and maintain that database, in order to identify them live. With those types of ads the best they can do is simply cover them up and mute them (leaving a void) until regular content resumes so maybe a lot of people don't find much value in that. What made me think of this before was sports games, where lots of people turn to the 'illegal' streams online where you pretty much always see whatever ads were in the broadcast of the game, but even if you paid for 'legal' access you're still going to have to see them generally speaking. I'm surprised such a solution doesn't already exist, or if it does I couldn't find it.
I know that russian Youtube hasn't had adverts since the Ukraine war started.
this is good, but I think it's better if you tell people how to clear their ublock cache make sure its updated.
It only works for a few hours then YouTube just pushes a new name or something that slips past the filter.
If the issue persists, there is a thread on the ublock github dedicated to just youtube: https://github.com/uBlockOrigin/uAssets/issues/19976
In most cases right now, purging caches and refreshing the lists with a CTRL+F5 on youtube fixes the warning.
don't do this. it messes with ublocks own efforts. just update ublock.
updating ublock doesnt "fix" this issue...
?? yes it does. settings > filter list > purche cache and update.
I actually had to delete all the youtube rules that you folks and reddit users told me to add. once I deleted all the custom rules, then ublock worked correctly.
this worked for a day or two, but no longer seems to
Decided to not use the article's title since it's clickbait-y ("YouTube isn't happy you're using ad blockers — and it's doing something about it") and get straight to the point. YouTube is now sending notifications people who are detected as using adblock. Not everyone, the selection seems random, but it's happening.
I first heard about this plan back in June (you can find the Tildes discussion on it here), and now the notices are starting to appear. One of my friends confirmed he got the notification today with a warning it would be disabled after three videos, though he's watched more than just three videos since then.
Also relevant is that YouTube recently axed the Premium Lite plan (Tildes discussion here) available in some countries, when I think they'd actually have benefited from expanding it to cover more given the crackdown on adblock. And YouTube also recently raised the prices of Premium by $2/month, creating even LESS incentive to get premium.
My personal opinion, which I'll include separately: the way they've been handling ads on YouTube has been just atrocious, and they're going about this the wrong way.
I primarily watch YouTube on my Amazon Firestick and PS4 as background noise, where I don't have the benefit of adblock, so I've gotten a good look at how bad it is. I wouldn't be nearly as bothered if I didn't regularly encounter ad breaks literally two minutes into a video, with unskippable 30 second ads. If I see an unskippable 15 second ad at the start of the video, I'll exit and try to reopen the video repeatedly to get out.
Some general grievances from my personal experiences:
And here's one more rant I'll put in spoiler tags since this one is just 100% genuine venting and admittedly fueled in large part by years of frustration with a friend's mental health struggles:
A rant about how some ads have war footage
One of my friends recently recounted seeing an ad using war footage from the current events in Israel. They didn't go into specifics, but they revealed this by saying it showed "snuff movie footage". I don't know if the specific footage actually had dead bodies (and if it did, war footage isn't a snuff movie), but I also don't care. There are things that should just NOT be in YouTube ads, and *footage relating to an active war* is one of them. Seeing that shit out of the blue with zero mental preparation can fuck people up.This friend has HORRIFICALLY BAD ANXIETY, and it's directly tied to politics. They can't turn off their brain when it comes to politics. I spent all of 2020 basically keeping them from having a breakdown and yelling to get a therapist, I'm still actively fighting for them to get the FUCK off Twitter forever because it's just making it 1000% worse. And while my friend is definitely an extreme case, I know many, many, MANY people struggle with this issue.
So seeing war footage not because of YouTube's algorithm or tuning into the news, but because of an ad on YouTube? That's just—no. Fuck, NO, do NOT show that in ads!!!
And these are just my experiences. Meanwhile there are plenty of stories of people stuck dealing with unskippable 30+ minute ads, or cases where they can't skip right away. Tales of YouTube testing ten consecutive ads in one break.
All that said, here's the thing: I actually don't WANT to entirely block ads.
I've actually gotten good things out of YouTube ads. I found one of my now-favorite singers who had a video as an ad. I went to see Bullet Train with my dad because the trailer would show up in the ads. I got the Brave browser on mobile—and for all the issues surrounding the creator, the built-in adblock has definitely saved me a lot of frustration.
But over the years, the ads on YouTube have just gotten so much worse. They're able to run for extremely long times, and they're WAY too intrusive. I swear I can identify a specific point when they got so much worse. I had to do something with my account to be able to continue watching on my TV, and after that it suddenly became nearly unbearable compared to before. I remember asking people if it got worse for them because the ads suddenly felt so much more intrusive to me.
At this point, using Adblock on computers is practically a damn necessity for some people. The ads are just too frustrating and disruptive. At least TV shows plan around commercial breaks. I think I've only encountered one YouTube channel that does that, and it's likely due to it focusing on old cartoons and uses a parody of commercial bumpers. If it's not a video essay, YouTube creators can't really create organic pause points, which makes the ads far more disruptive.
So, how can Google balance ads better?
Those are just ideas off the top of my head. I'm sure there are even better methods, but just a handful of the ones I mentioned would improve it a lot for users.
Just... There can be a balance. Ads are a necessary evil to keep the platform running, but there are ways to make them more annoying rather than rendering the platform near-unusable. For now, YouTube seems to be going for all of the WORST options though.
I really do wish that they had Premium Light available in the US. I am extremely uninterested in paying for YouTube Music, no matter how good it may be; no streaming music service has all the music I like to listen to.
But like you said, the ads are becoming atroceous. My husband is going insane from watching the insane abundance of ads from Honda and Safelight, while I'm going crazy from all the gig economy company ads. And the fact that they even allowed The Epoch Times to advertise their anti-trans documentary on their site is sickening.
I've pivoted to watching youtube on my phone's web browser because the ads on their actual app are so insufferable at this point. I did at one point consider buying premium, but then they doubled down on poor decisions and I spent my money on the lifetime nebula deal instead.
I’m actually really happy to have found that most of the YouTube channels I regularly view are on Nebula anyway, and I found out last week that my partner got the lifetime membership anyway so once YouTube
enforces adskicks me off their site, I’ve still got something to fill that niche no problem!When they removed the dislike counter I cancelled premium and tried to move to Nebula... it wasnt the same and then going back to YouTube with all the adds! I've been paying for premium for a long time and I didn't realize how riddled with adds it had become.
I don't really watch Netflix or other streaming services (my wife does) so I can easily justify the cost for premium, but if I was a new user today and tried regular free YouTube I would probably be too frustrated and leave.
How have you found their webplayer? It's been atrocious for me, and trying to use download tools and been timing out. Haven't tried yt-dlp this time around but will do so later today...
For YT or Nebula? On YT I lose a few features by using Firefox Mobile, but I gain adblock which is better. Sometimes I miss the ability to cast from my phone onto my tv, but I have a PC hooked up so that does just the same.
Nebula? Not sure. I primarily use their app on my TV to watch it. It works just fine from what I can tell. Not perfect, but honestly neither is Youtube's app.
Nebula - I watch on my TV via my PC and Firefox. It's unwatchably choppy, even at 540p! Chromium is no better. I just wanna watch JetLag, dammit!
Thanks for your response :-)
For the Firestick get https://github.com/yuliskov/SmartTubeNext.
Take the beta version. The experience is a LOT better than the YouTube app since the player and UI is way better.
All your suggestions imply there would be consequences for not continuing to do what Google has done. But there still really isn't any significant competition in the video space so they can keep doing what they want until it starts to signifigantly affect viewership who would rather go to a related medium like Twitch, Tiktok, ,or even Facebook. e.g. maybe when it gets to the point that those unskippable 90 minute "ads" become more than some urban legend one out of every 10m users encounter
got some bad news there (I'll ping @Akir here was well for awareness)
Yep, that's exactly the issue. There are no platforms that are really similar enough to YouTube to fill the niche, so there's no incentive for Google to NOT make the experience miserable. They have a monopoly and know it. Just disappointed that they need external incentive to care about providing a decent experience at the most basic level, not just with ads but pretty much everything else.
Also, I linked that exact post in my original comment. Had no idea it existed until that announcement. With the current state of YouTube ads I'd expect they would get plenty of people who'd sign up for it, at least if they publicized its existence enough. Like I said, better to get some people willing to pay for the cheaper tier than skip out entirely.
oh, apologies, I must have skimmed past that part when I was reading the original post. But yes, I think we are both in agreement that that link shows google's intent is not fully in the interest in converting users to a cheaper ad-free plan. I imagine there's dipping into multiple otter sectors (including some incentive for Google to push ads onto users over premium plans) that made the idea of Lite not as enticing.
Not surprising at all. I'm sure they know just how many people would pay even more for no ads. Hopefully the myriad adblocker devs can stay ahead of the game
All they're doing is pushing more people to get content from other providers or use more advanced plugins and workarounds.
I'm using Revanced Extended on mobile, Stube for Firestick and Firefox with an ad blocker that I cannot remember the name of. I see no ads and no sponsorship crud. When I do, I'll change tool. If they break it completely then I'll simply not watch any YT content.
We wouldn't be at this point if they hadn't gotten greedy.
I think they're more than fine with that, though.
Bingo.
I am however hoping it at least pushes more talented creators elsewhere. There's a lot of people who I wish could jump to Nebula, but i'm never sure how complicated or unattractive that is in comparison.
Nebula isn't an open platform, so not everyone's going to be able to make that jump.
Sure, but I think it has a healthier business model for the long term.
There are many YouTube creators I wish would sign up with Nebula. There are a handful I might have checked over a dozen times.
The issue is there aren't many other providers who operate in the same vein as YouTube. Most of the alternative platforms I see are more specialized, and/or only accept content from established creators.
Part of the appeal of YouTube is the wide variety of content from a wide variety of sources. You never know when you'll stumble upon new covers of songs you'll like, or an up-and-coming video essay channel that's heavily researched and informative. Or just looking up people playing a game, or quick tutorials on things like using Blender or pixel art that aren't part of some comprehensive structured course.
YouTube has a tight hold over the market because it has so much leeway for amateur creators to break into the scene. And switching to a more curated service like Nebula just might not be feasible for a variety of reasons.
YouTube has changed a lot, I don't get that stuff anymore. I rarely see channels in my feed that garner any interest from me outside of my channels I've subbed to. And the videos recommended on my home page the same crap over and over to the point I have to tell it I'm not interested for it to disappear. It regularly suggests stuff I recently watched last week, and stuff I watched months or years ago from channels I'm already subscribed to dispite these channels having hundreds of videos I haven't seen. Once in a while I click on a video that may seem interesting outside my normal feed, and my who entire feed changes to that one video type to where I have to remove it from my watch history.
Channels that are promoted are 100k+ subscriber channels, I like the small hobby channels, 1-20k subscriber channels but those don't fit their bill. It's like 1-2 times a year do I actually come across a channel worth subscribing to, and I'm there daily as I don't watch TV, and regularly look for something to play in the background.
for the creator or user? From what I looked up Nebula is $5, so that is indeed a user barrier. If they won't pa $13 for ad-free youtube with all their favorite content, it's a much harder sell to pay $5 for what may currently be 1-2 favorite content creators.
For the creator, yeah. I can see a few of the same issues Youtube ran into. Apparently Nebula pays creators based on watch time, so even if they curate that can still soft discourage content like animation, and encourages longer videos (which may or may not lose conciseness in the process).
For the creators mainly. I don't think Nebula allows just anyone to post content, so creators need to build a following on YouTube first. Nebula also seems to slant more towards educational topics and video essays, so if that's not your niche... Well, you're out of luck.
Meanwhile for viewers, if the channels you follow haven't moved over, there's not much purpose. Right now, there aren't nearly enough creators I like on Nebula to justify a subscription. A lot of my YouTube feed are Let's Play, the "creepy" side of YouTube and lost media. Topics that won't be as likely to show up on Nebula.
Just to add to this, I was curious to see what it's like to get on Nebula and so I emailed them about how I could get my favorite creators on them. This is an excerpt from their reply:
There is also an FAQ hidden away on their webpage which says that they are intended to be a curated experience and not a replacement for YouTube. I appreciate their approach but it has some obvious downsides to it as well. I do hope that it replaces YouTube as a place to go see interesting periodic output from small-scale creators eventually, but it's going to take some time. I suppose we should thank Google for making changes that accelerate that changeover.
I pay for Nebula, I don't pay for youtube. I just don't want to give Google money. Youtube has been doing shitty things for years without me having recourse (enshittification, perhaps) so I don't feel bad about fucking them, and I don't think it's immoral due to the whole "capitalism" thing when they've been operating below cost for years and turned the market into a competition of who has the most cash instead of who has the most desirable platform.
The constant war of "give the user a giant ball of data and expect them to not filter out what they want" is a losing war. You can't trust clients. That is web development 101.
If they really want to enforce watching ads, they need to send you to a separate page to watch the ad, generate a token at the end of the ad, and give that to the user to continue the feed when it returns them to the main page.
That would be really annoying to the end user, but it is the only solution if they don't want to end up in a stupid Javascript war back and forth with end users.
I don't think it's the only solution. There's been increasing awareness of another project Google has been working on, Web Environment Integrity, and it seems likely to be used to prevent people from accessing things if they're using a browser that has been modified in any way that allows them to remove ads. That's my interpretation anyhow, among others who have speculated that. It's not entirely dissimilar from what you suggested, but it also isn't quite the same either.
Google says the stated goal is for sites to be able to restrict access to human users instead of automated programs and "allow web servers to evaluate the authenticity of the device and honest representation of the software stack and the traffic from the device".
While that may be one thing it is possible for, I don't doubt for a second that an advertising company is developing it specifically to ensure that its advertising business is not only well secured but also to position it for growth.
Sure, but that isn't in place yet. Even so, the result is the same where they don't send the feed without you providing a token proving that you can't skip the ad.
The point was that their current strategy of sending the whole thing at once and hoping for their wishes to be respected without server side validation to force it can't work. That project is still server side validation, just a bit more generalized.
I mean, your comment pondered possible solutions, of which any that you could have mentioned wouldn't be in place right now.
That's a rather significant distinction, because it's attempting to hide its intentions behind the more generalized nature of it. It will serve as a basis to claim that you aren't using a browser of integrity to deny you access rather than you aren't using a browser that forces you to watch ads.
It's also less of an interruption to users than the type of solution you suggested of redirecting users to a page solely for the ad (which I'm guessing may have been suggested in this way to counter methods of tricking the system into saying the user watched the ad and get the validation token), but in any case many of those ways could probably achieve that. The less interruption there is, the more accepting users will be, so this WEI method would be more accepted than something along the lines of what you suggested. Anyhow, you're right, as long as the client is free to do as it wishes, it's going to be hard to prevent the client from gaming it to hide the ads while still receiving the token. That's why WEI is more significant, because it attempts to control the client at a lower level than the solution you previously proposed.
It’s not a losing war, the was has already been won for most similar cases. They don’t need to make it literally impossible to block ads, they just need to make it annoying and unreliable and the vast majority will pay for the service.
You can still torrent video games today but it’s a shitty experience so paying is what most people do now.
I imagine the war is preferrable to the huge disruption in user experience. One just requires their teams time to maximize ad profits. The other loses users.
to be fair, while this is applicable advice for 99.99%+ of websites Youtube can definitely fight that war for a long time.
The interesing thing is that they don't "really" care if you watch the ad. Google's goal is simply to convince their customers (the ad networks, not the content creators) that enough of their ads are being genuinely watched to justify their slots. And the customers are convinced if they can meet their own sales targets for their respective markets. (I'm immensely simplifying the tech that goes into verifying organic views and statistics that take into account "what if they just walk away from the TV?" and whatnot. But that's the gist).
As long as those 2 factors are satisfied, the people saavy enough to utilize adblock are an acceptable loss. Probably more accetable than some extra clicks that may make them log off altogether.
This is still 100% automatable. Perhaps eventually as a browser extension, but a naive solution of creating a virtual display, mute that browser instance, and play the ad to get a token would only take an hour to script away as a yt-dlp extension.
They make billions in profit. They've minted numerous new multi-millionaire content creators. I don't know why they need to act like these platforms are the teenager in 1999 trying make some beer money from their personal website. In the decades since the early web ads have been wildly successful even with ad blockers.
I'm attempting to opt out of the adblocking arms race by getting an alternate client for YouTube. My two favorites so far are ViewTube and FreeTube.
My YouTube playlists aren't working on FreeTube. They work on ViewTube, but the public instances are under heavy traffic, so they go up and down a lot. I've tried setting up my own instance, but I haven't gotten it to work yet.
What are your favorite YouTube clients?
If they get popular enough to make a difference to Google, they’ll just block those alternative frontends from working.
It took Google this long to get serious about stopping ad blockers, and those are easy to run. I think it will be a good long while before alternative frontends catch Google's attention. Especially because their ease-of-use is, to be frank, not great.
From a technical standpoint, it probably isn't that simple. For example, you can write software that enforces "any client that connects which doesn't have blah-blah certified mechanism will be denied". Then it doesn't matter how many grassroots, unpopular clients are made; they will all fail the same way.
Thanks for the ViewTube recommendation.
I set it up on my server and it's so much faster for me than youtube's frontend.
The normal youtube frontend takes over ten seconds for me from starting to load a page until everything is finished loading and takes 4-6 seconds before anything besides a white screen shows.
To set it up I used the docker compose file they list on the wiki and added the
VIEWTUBE_CORS_ORIGINandVIEWTUBE_SECUREenvironment variables.I then added a caddy entry with the basicauth option (after realizing there's no admin page or way to restrict registration).
Libretube is very good. Has all the basics you'd expect and consistently good quality. Very customable as well.
+1 for Freetube, been using it for 2 years now. It has its problem with buffering sometimes but usually stable. Recommendations also seem to be more relevant than Youtube as well, found many new relevant content for my likings that way.
You might be interested in my metadata tool. I use it to track about 10,000 YouTube channels and playlists
https://github.com/chapmanjacobd/library#1-download-metadata
I don't use adblockers. I know that websites have to get money to keep going somehow and ads are the way to get that money. Other ways being subscriptions, for example. I accept that I have to see ads to be able to consune the thing that said website serves.
But sometimes the ads are simply too much, unbearable. If that is the case, I jumo the ship, so to say - I stop accessing the site. It's unbelievable, but Youtube got on this list of mine. I can accept two ads before video, one of them often unskippable 15 second roll. I can accept having ads in the videos list after searching for something. Heck, I can accept even midroll ads in some frewuency. But I'm not watching 5 midrolls in 15 minute video. For 15 minutes of video, I would be watching 2 minutes of ads. That is simply too much for me. More so when you want to jump somewhere in the video - say you want to watch from 10 minute mark: you have two ads before you are able to jump to 10 minutes, then you jump to 10 minute mark and are greeted by another two ads, then finally the video starts playing to be interrupted after 30 seconds by another midroll. Who would watch this? I'm not sure. I'm sure though that I wouldn't.
So, Youtube... it was good while it lasted. Good times are over.
I do not click the ad if it doesn't bring up any interest in me. I don't know if the site is paid per click or per view and I don't care.
I only care about how much the ads are obtrusive. If it's too much, I'm out.
The same goes with brick & mortar store - if there is a salesman that stands behind my back and keeps shoving the goods into my face, it's the last time I was shopping there.
The same goes for the ad itself. If one comoany has aggresive ads (and we have one just like this here in Czech republic), I'm not buying anything from them.
I know that me, one customer, is totally worthless for them, yet it is me who votes with my own money (or time when we speak about Youtube ads). We will get only asmuch abuse as we allow them to. I hate ads on Youtube, I will not access the site, easy as that. I may have need to do so here and there, but I eon't be sticking there more than necessary.
I'm honestly really surprised how willing companies are to repeatedly subject viewers to negative emotions while viewing their ads. It seems really counterproductive.
There are so many brands I feel a deep-seated repulsion toward due to obnoxious ads. And it's not just brands I've been subjected to recently; to this day, I recoil when I see brands I associate with obnoxious ads I saw frequently on TV when I was a kid. These companies that are turning potential customers away for life.
Why? Why would you do this? Why subject people to these intense campaigns where you pair your brand with intensely unpleasant emotions — over and over and over again, multiple times per day for months on end? It's like they're intentionally conditioning people to reflexively dislike their company and products.
The ad or actually mascot of the brand/ad I was taking about is more polarising than negative. Many people love it, but I'm fed up with it due to the frequency and portrayal of the mascot.
I always tell myself that if they have so much ads they clearly have enough money and don't need mine.
If somebody wants meto give them recommendation (notebook, phone, accessory, ...) and send me link to his eshop, I find them the same thing (or what I recommend) on other eshops and send links there. I actively work against the brand. If people buy it there, I don't care. I try to steer them in other direction everytime, though.
Out of curiosity, what's that company? Alza comes to mind; I always get pissed off by the stupid voice of the character, but the ads themselves never strike me as aggressive.
That's the one! The ads themselves ( what they are trying to sell) might not be aggressive, but the voice and the frequent occurence of the ads is. Haven't bought anything from them for around 10 years.
I don't know the details, but sites these days can definitely detect the difference here and it does absolutely affect things on the "ad buyers paying for impressions" side of things. That's the reason Google cares about adblockers at all.
Precisely. Google ads are pay-per-impression. They'll just tell you that if your clicks or conversions are too low, it's your own fault for not doing your part well enough.
If youtube kicks me, I'll never look back. This won't earn them a single dollar from me.
Funnily enough I was happy to pay for Youtube Premium at the grandfathered rate I was at, then they axed that and my bill would have gone up substantially so I unsubscribed. I will not be interrupted by advertisements. If this is the hill they decide to die on, that's fine by me.
From what I think is youtube just cares for their premium subscribtion sales, and not the actual advertisers and content creators.
Most people that use adblock will not click on ads, will not buy from ads, and will not buy a premium subscribtion anyway. I'm sure youtube already understand this, yet they are pushing anti-adblock stands on viewers, and the only good thing for them to come out from this stand is the YT Premium subscribtions will probably increase a bit.
If somehow youtube gets its way and sucessfuly disables all adblock on their site, Click-Through-Rate (CTR) will fall quite a bit and advertising costs will increase for the advertisers as they will need to show their ads to more people for the same CTR.
As the result of advertising on youtube ads becoming more expensive.
or
or
I personally think the second or third one is more likely to happen.
In the long run this will hurt youtube too as number of advertisers decrease.
So everybody should be fighting this not just the viewers.
As a side note, I've been trying AdNauseam for a few days, and it works quite well, I only use it on youtube which uses a Gmail account that is only for youtube anyway, everywhere else I use uBlock.
Basically it clicks on every ad while hiding it from you on the background, that way youtube gets what it wants, I got what I want, the advertisers (since they're being silent on youtube anti-adblock stand, I have to assume they like empty clicks and showing their ads to people that will not buy their products) gets what they want.
I use Adblock and still bought a YouTube premium subscription, which I think is great value for what it gives. YMMV
Exactly, thats why I said most, because it may not include you.
Youtube Premium costs around 2-4 dollars on some countries, where minimum wage is around 250-400 dollars per month, it's just not viable for a lot of people.
A lot of people from third world countries also will not even get minimum wage, I know for a fact that most contract fresh-grad workers are paid around 70%-80% of minimum wage, and if you're working for a startup company, sometimes you will be paying for your own health care.
Compare Youtube users by country to their minimum wage.
And here's Adblock users by country and Youtube premium cost by country for reference.
On the other side, peoples from wealthy countries can easily afford it, but with increasing costs of subscription services, I doubt a lot of them (may not include you) will add youtube premium to their list.
The question is whether people buying Youtube premium because of the anti-adblock or because they do want to have the subscription anyway, and I think that remains to be studied.
And yes, Ad-Block should still be used even if you pay for every big site to not display ads. That is just good internet safety practice.
That's just my opinion though.
Disclaimer: The statistics and articles linked may not be 100% accurate or up to date, but it will still give you some reference to start with.
How do you know?
What do you mean? Even if you just go to the link, there's a link on that page to an MIT Technology review, it's open source on GitHub so people can see what it does, it's banned by Google despite that Google doesn't block other straight ad-blockers (indicating it does more than just block ads like normal ad blockers), and "works quite well" could just be a review of its adblocking capabilities which are backed up by seeing a lack of ads. Seems an odd question to ask how they know if it works.
The point of adnauseum is to trick ad vendors into thinking that you clicked on their ads. It seems to me that there is no obvious way to tell if they have in fact been so tricked.
Nice. Is there any downside to using this?
I've never heard of this happening, but I've never gone looking to find it and it's pretty legally precedented: you are almost certainly breaking the terms of service for whatever website you use beyond any lenience by using adnauseum. With other methods of blocking ads, there are either degrees of justification, like avoiding tracking or data costs, or plausible deniability, "I had no idea that DNS server would block ads!"
Those excuses are pretty flimsy, but hard to argue against without looking like an asshole (as a company banning someone with a platform to complain). When you're using a program that not only circumvents the presentation of ads, but specifically sandboxing them for invisible automatic clickthroughs as to mildly defraud the ad provider, the ad company or advertiser is essentially paying for that, and they don't want any chance of that becoming seen as remotely acceptable, let alone legal. So, you're probably more likely to be banned for it on any given service more complicated than a blog.
I've posted about it here before, but FreeTube is a great alternative way to access YouTube. It's a little bit janky but has a bunch of features I really appreciate:
I'm probably forgetting some things but I really like it. It's a little weird using a standalone application to watch YouTube but the Privacy Redirect browser extension can automatically route all video links through it.
There's a similar project, but hosted (rather than a stand-alone client) so you can access it through a browser: Invidious. It's not perfect (servers tend to come and go pretty frequently) but it is another option (for now).
Are there any stats around the percentage of clients that use YouTube with an ad blocker vs without?
So, this morning YouTube informed me they would no longer play my videos if i continued to use my ad blocker for three more videos. Trying to find a solution, I found something I'd like to share (at the risk of it getting shutdown, I suppose). I found that subscribing to a channel's RSS feed through the Feedbro plugin for Firefox gives me access to a channels latest videos, and watching them through the Feedbro feed/page avoids the dreaded pop-ups. This works for now, not sure how long until it is patched. LMK if this works for anyone else!
Just wanted to reiterate clearly for those using uBlock Origin that the extension by itself will block this new popup by default. No user rules required.
If you have uBlock updated and installed but are still seeing this, simply go to settings -> filter lists and select 'purge all caches', and then 'update now'.
You may have to do this every couple of days as youtube has been changing some things that bypass the filters, but so far they have been caught by uBlock updates.
Curious to know if this triggers for people with a premium subscription that still use adblock.
That would be a weird bug since it doesn't show any ads. Why annoy paying subscribers that way?
I'm a premium user, but I haven't seen it even though I have AdBlock on my work computer where I tried this. I'm also on a VPN so idk if that has anything to do with it.
Haven't seen anything on my end but like another user said, they probably check if the user has Premium before showing the popup. I've got Premium as well as uBlock Origin on Firefox if that matters.
Saw the three strikes you're out message, so I hit reload until I was all out of strikes. Then I created a redirect rule from YouTube.com/?v= to NSFWYouTube.com/?v=
Works perfectly.
I will not be force fed ads
ublock is handling all of this. you just need to learn to update your ublock filters to the latest.
Will this new disabling system affect programs like NewPipe?
this seems to be working so far.