49
votes
YouTube without a working ad blocker
I liked ( past tense ) watching YouTube with the latest Firefox on my Mint Linux box.
No more.
The ad blocker I use ( latest version ) has stopped working for removing YouTube commercials.
The commercials are obnoxious.
I think I will quit until the ad blocker I use updates again with a fix.
Sorry YouTube, you are far from being worth $14.00 USD a month.
Edit:
Mint Linux 21.2
Cinnamon 5.8
Firefox 128.0.3
Ublock Origin 1.59.0
- I completely removed UBlock Origin
- I completely emptied my Firefox cache and other data
- I signed out of Google completely
- I reinstalled UBlock Origin
- I signed back into Google
- I tried using YouTube with my VPN turned on.
No joy.
I can watch YouTube ad free via a private window in Firefox.
I can watch YouTube ad free if I log out of my Google/YouTube account
My add blocker works in other browsers when I am not logged into my Google/YouTube account.
I think youtube may be doing some A/B testing to see how people react if they cannot block ads at all. If that is the case, stopping youtube usage until you can block ads again is the best course of action.
I use uBlock Origin plus Youtube Enhancer (but that one I think does not do anything against ads anymore, I'm mentioning it since it does affect the website in other ways) and the only problem I've had recently has been that on Chromium youtube shorts do not show any video, only sound (which is nice, reminds me not to watch them and I'm pretty sure it could be fixed, might even be a side effect of my clumsy custom filters to remove recommended videos from search results), everything else works great. That is on Windows 10. Firefox on Windows and Linux seems to be working without any issues.
If your goal is to watch YouTube ad-free, this may or may not be true. If you aren't watching ads and you aren't paying for Premium, YouTube only loses money on you*. If they strike some optimal level of annoyance with their ads, the people who use adblock will leave and not strain their servers, but the people who tolerate ads or pay for premium will stay. Maybe they can improve their margins even if overall viewership goes down.
* Except that people who use adblock do still count toward viewership, and they do still (usually) watch sponsorships which subsidize YouTube's creators. If viewership goes down, maybe sponsorships will also lose value and YouTube would have to spend to incentivize creators to stay on the platform.
Honestly I don't know. Neither of those arguments seem quite sound to me (Does "optimal annoyance" even exist? Would sponsorships really lose value?). My real point is that the issue is complicated and I don't know that you can definitively say any course of action is best.
I do think you can definitively say, if your goal is to watch YouTube ad-free, the worst signal you could give is to switch to Premium in response to increased ads or adblock-block. There's a separate argument on whether that's ethical or not. Personally I think, even if you want to pay, this is a bad time to do it since it just incentivizes enshittification.
Maybe the best you can do is say only to yourself, "I don't want to watch these ads," and don't watch them. Cut out YouTube altogether if that's the only way to do it.
The other benefit to YouTube to allow those using adblockers is the network effect to keep out competition, and help prevent competitors undercutting it. I welcome a strict ad based YouTube as it will lead to loss of customers and growth of non Google alternatives
True, I kind of jumped the gun with that conclusion.
Perhaps an unpopular opinion, but I actually think YouTube premium is worth it. Tons of creators use YouTube exclusively, and I've heard they get a bit more money per impression from premium viewers than ad viewers.
YouTube is a subscription that isn't comparable to a streaming service. I don't really need to worry about popular content creators jumping platforms, as you do with TV & movies on streaming platforms.
I don't think it's feasible or reasonable for every person to subscribe to patreon etc for all of the people they watch regularly. $5-$10/mo for one or two creators, sure, but beyond that you're paying more than you would for some of the streaming platforms with big budget productions.
As a side note, I personally don't use the music portion, but I know a lot of people are impressed with the catalog.
They had the lite subscription for 7 euro a month which did not have music included. That was great and I used to pay for that. Then they just removed it and it's either full premium or nothing. Well nothing it is then as I don't want the music and other "features" of premium and it is too expensive.
Something to consider would be making a Google family with five friends and everyone chipping in for premium.
You are limited on how many devices/accounts can be watching at the same time, IIRC
AFAIK, creators make fractions of pennies per viewer per video from ads. If people could pay creators for the content and YouTube for delivering it, it should cost less than subscribing to their Patreon or paying for YouTube Premium because they wouldn't have to pay for ad production, delivery and accounting infrastructure.
People always think ads somehow magically make the content free, but that doesn't make any sense. Ads cost money, and we, the consumers, are paying for them.
This depends so much on your income and personal situation that it's hardly worth arguing about.
If you're the kind of user that only wants their subscriptions and nothing else, you can look into using freetube as a stand alone app or setup yt-dlp as a service/cronjob to download the stuff you want onto your machine. Both systems also have Sponsorblock to cut out in-video ads too.
While we’re on the topic of more “esoteric” methods, a techy (read: CLI) way I’ve really gotten to like for the one-off video I’m recommended by friends or discovering myself is this:
mpv will, using
ffmpeg,yt-dlpand a bunch of other black magic tools, fetch the video and then display it in a graphical window on your machine completely disturbance-free. Even the buffering works!It’s obviously not the best for pure browsing, but once you have a video you wanna watch in full, it’s a simple, unobtrusive joy to use. I hope Google doesn’t break this for a loooong time.
I went the yt-dlp + cron job + sponsorblock route and I'm really happy. But yeah, I pretty much only watch videos from my subscriptions.
+1 vote for freetube, I switched and haven't looked back
Have you tried ublock origin? They're usually very reliable
YouTube won't work with ublock turned on. From my experience anyway, I've tried circumventing it the best I can (I'm not tech savvy) to no avail.
It's still been running for me as of yesterday. Ymmv of course
Have you manually updated ublock origin? They provide fixes pretty quickly after youtube changes things, and I've had no problem viewing youtube on two separate devices since updating.
uBlock Origin has moved to differential updates and has removed manual full updates.
Yeah. I followed all the GitHub instructions. Didn’t work unfortunately.
Works just fine for me. I don't know why OP has issues.
Ditto
Hmm? I use firefox mobile (with ublock origin) and it works fine, and it's working on chrome and firefox on my desktop and laptop (also with ublock origin). Very odd, I've never ran into this problem you mention.
Are you using Ublock Origin? Still works for me on Firefox!
I also agree on it not being worth the money; technically what they're actually offering is hilariously illegal in the Netherlands. They've removed the option to only get YouTube Premium (here at least, not sure about everywhere), you have to get YouTube Music as well.
That's against Dutch law, you're not allowed to sell a service and then obligate the consumer to automatically buy a second service (koppelverkoop, in Dutch). Even if the second service is free, which it definitely isn't in this case. We've fined giants like Microsoft in the past for forcing Internet Explorer onto those who bought Windows. I think once the adblock is really gone, and people start seriously being forced to consider premium, it'll start rumbling in the courts here. Let's hope for a nice nasty fine - I'd be a lot happier buying premium if it was just like 7 bucks or so. But screw YouTube music.
Very interesting comment. I wish our ( US ) laws were like that. I think I might pay $7, a year, for YouTube. :-)
Dunno. Youtube creator taught me how to test and sub out the capacitor for my AC unit that cost me $20 to replace and saved me about $200 to have an HVAC tech unscrew 8 screws, pull out 5 wires and plug them back in.
That alone paid for my annual family plan, and the creator got a lot more money from my view than from a free viewer.
YouTube had a video about how I could replace the broken window switch in my car. I only had to pay $20 for the part. For all I know going to a mechanic might have cost me the yearly YouTube fee of $168.
Regardless, I think I may only use YouTube for an instructional fix it video 1 - 2 times a year. I'll endure the commercials in those instances and keep the $168.
This doesn't justify paying for youtube though. If you wanted to just watch one video about fixing something, you could have watched it for free with ads.
To clarify, I don't do that, and certainly wouldn't pay that for just 1 video. While I and my family might be an exception, I generally don't think so. I'm betting most people who say "I don't watch much Youtube" don't actually track how much youtube they watch.
I'll typically do that tutorial lookup 3x a week for various things. As will my wife. Once you look past crowdsourced tutorial heaven, you get into incredibly niche entertainment, like historical dressmaking or weird takes on board games, you've got the proper replacements for the completely trashed niche cable of the past.
And I'll happily, happily, happily pay for no advertising. I pay approximately $25 for a family plan and that translates to less than $0.50/hr for watching video, and the music comes in at a bonus several hours.
Once ads creep into the paid tier I'm out. And I feel (even) less bad about adblocking because I pay to remove ads when I can.
Yes, and it does not for me.
Firefox 128.0.3
Ublock Origin 1.59.0
Ahh that sucks!! Have you tried with a VPN?
Just did, no joy. Thanks for the suggestion.
Yeah, I've had the same issues as you. I first started tweaking especially because YouTube now has two ads before every video. But I guess I'm used to it by now (it's still super annoying).
It is in some countries like mine! Which just proves they basically inflate the price as high as possible per region because they can.
I'm okay paying 8 a month for premium since I also use youtube music but if they raised it to 14 like in the US I would dip in a heartbeat.
Google has a tendency to silently and intermittently roll out changes to small user subgroups for testing purposes. Quite possible that OP is part of a current testgroup and your are one of the majority baseline.
Considering you're doing everything right, You may be the victim of their server side ad injection. uBlock and Brave both are working fine as of now.
Interesting comment. How would that work? YouTube picks some user like me out randomly, then ad some code to their output that thwarts my ad blocker?
My understanding of the "how it works" is that the ads now become part of the same streaming video. Twitch uses this method.
Just to try to oversimplify the explanation for anyone unfamiliar with video streams, imagine you're watching a VHS tape someone recorded a show from live TV onto. You're also going to see the ads - they're part of the recording. There's not much you can do about that since you're viewing the tape directly. Internet video streams can work the same way, and it's why YouTube alternative viewers work - because they're just retrieving the same video stream the official website interface does.
Right now, the ads effectively pause the video you're watching and take you to a new short video (ad). But if ads now become part of that live stream, you'll see them regardless of how you're viewing. There's some complexity on their backend servers that will decide which ads to embed, how often, etc. But from your perspective, it's just one video stream.
Thank you.
It's not thwarting the ad blocker so much as completely bypassing it. uBlock would have no way of even being aware it's happening. It's extremely effective, and infuriating.
This same thing happened to me a few weeks ago, I suddenly had ads everywhere. It also made the stream itself unstable. Sometimes it wouldn't start. Mid-video ads would sometimes fail to load and leave me with a blank screen. It was pretty shit, I stopped watching almost entirely. It reverted to the normal ad behavior after ... a week? Timing was unclear.
That sounds really interesting! I'm almost tempted to read up on the details of the workings.
Good to know there is hope! Thank you.
If you don't mind me asking, why isn't YouTube worth paying for in your opinion? It's not free to stream videos on the web, and premium views pay creators more than ads.
Google isn't losing money on Youtube. IIRC they had an earnings report recently and it was profitably in the billions. The war against adblock is Google simply wanting more, not to break even or dig out of a deepening hole.
The database Google had been building, has built and maintains, is based on everyone's accounts and all the myriad of information they know about each of those users, that's the monetization of Youtube.
And they're monetizing the hell out of it. It lets them offer extremely targeted data (and thus extremely targeted services) to any entity that pays them for access to that database. Someone wants to know what a certain very granular slice of the demographic is most interested in and to what degrees, along with their dislikes and the rest of it ... Google has that database and is selling access. Everything, from videos to websites to shopping tastes to any other online activity, along with age, race, nationality, where you live, what you do with your week, how often you vacation, income, how much you pay for your phone, who your phone's with, who you visit and work with and their demographic data ... everything.
That database (was) filling up even from "freeloader" users.
They've been offering dozens and dozens of free online services since the early 00s. They didn't do that out of the goodness of their hearts. It let them build to what they are now; a mega billion corporate empire. Just about everyone else offering a tech service of some kind wants it locked behind a subscription. Garmin wants between a hundred and two hundred a year for most map updates, for example; Waze is offered free. Just pull the app or find the site and punch in an address. Same for Google Maps, offers navigation without the fancy app and voice hooks.
Google does that because they're profiting off the information they get. Knowing where people are, what they do, how they live their lives, what they buy, everything and all of it; they profit from that data.
Them trying to break adblock and force everyone to pay for an expensive streaming subscription for unfettered Youtube access is simple greed, pure and plain. Some Exec decided being able to point to upticks in subs would bolster his or her next promotion results, would boost their bonus, would give them some corporate politics advantage when the time came.
So no, I have no sympathy for Google. They're making money hand over fist. Yes, it's technically complicated to host and serve video content online, requires lots of resources (hardware and human). That's why it took so long to get video streaming going online, and why only Youtube was really around for Google to buy when they decided they wanted to get into that game. Since Google's had their hands on Youtube, they've expanded it heavily, and it generally runs nigh flawlessly for the entire world.
It ran that way for more than a decade without a hint of "pay us" surfacing. They were profiting, benefiting, and that's why they kept running it. Why Youtube is still running when so many things Google's bought over the years have been folded or forgotten. They knew why they bought Youtube, knew what value it had to them, and they tapped that value "invisibly" to users for a long, long time.
Until someone at the company decided to push, to make the line go up because that's what corpos do; need the line to go up.
Many people have expressed that point better than I could over the past months, but for me not paying YouTube is a matter of principle.
Google operated it at a loss and dumped as much money as they could for 15+ years to annihilate all their competitors. And now they're the only viable choice left, and the best example of enshittification.
I'll "steal" from them as much as I can.
I don't remember there ever being a healthy competition of free video hosts, even before Google acquired YouTube. Maybe DailyMotion? Vimeo? The latter is still operating, and profitable as far as I know. But realistically, which competitors have they annihilated?
It seems like they ran YouTube at a loss not because they wanted to, but because video hosting sites are extremely expensive to run. Only in the last few years have they been able to create a compelling paid product, negotiate licensing contracts, and optimize their content delivery to allow them to finally start making more than they're spending.
Youtube came out in 2005, Google bought it the following year. They've been running it at a loss for 18 years. Eighteen years of running a service that is hemorrhaging money every day, growing it at every opportunity, building THE video hosting service while making sure that no-one else would be able to compete against it. The competitors they annihilated are the ones that came out and died in the obscurity, or the ones that simply never came out because who in their right mind would try to make a Youtube competitor? And Vimeo & Dailymotion aren't relevant today, because they never had enough money to grow at the same pace.
So today, Youtube is a de facto monopoly because no-one was able to compete against it, because Google was the only one to have enough money to make it grow for so long and outrun all existing or potential competitors. And now that they're the only service left, they're effectively forcing users to pay, or suffer terrible ads. That's not like you could go somewhere else, right?
I don't have an issue with paying for a service, I have an issue with paying the bully.
Edit: even better, according to this post they're profitable. So, more of your usual corporate greed, and an even better example of enshittification.
Not OP, but regarding these points:
I don’t care if Google is profitable. In fact, in my ideal world it costs them money for me to interact with them. I find them to be an extremely unethical company that has wedged themselves into a place where it is difficult to not interact with them.
A Patreon (or even more ideally, a direct donation) pays infinitely more than premium views ever will. Kind of a "steal the music buy the concert t-shirt" deal.
I pay for Nebula and I have three Patreon subscriptions running for the YouTube creators whose content I specifically value.
I would pay for premium, if more money actually went to creators, way better to use adblock and support them through Patreon
Good question.
I would be paying $14.00 USD a month to simply not see commercials. I do not care for Premium YouTube's selection of movies and television series. I can get those and more in other streaming services and other sources that make more financial sense.
Other content is about people trying to influence people ( politics, religion, etc ), or people who want to be celebrities trying to get their foot in the door ( actors, models comedians, etc ). I believe the former should be paying me. I don't buy t-shirts with logos on them. I think if someone wants to use my torso for advertisements they be paying me to be a billboard. :-). Likewise for people trying to influence others.
The rest of the content is still homemade videos with the quality you would expect. Not worth it. Especially with many videos providing misinformation. Why would I want to pay $168 a year so that the "medical medium" can tell me that celery juice is a miracle cure?
I feel like you have very very different youtube experience from me.
I only watch creators that make well produced content that entertains me and streamers who I often interact with live. I spend a good chunk of each day on YouTube enjoying said content.
By paying for premium I not only get rid of ads but I also support these creators that give me so much content for free (since it is financially impossible for me to subscribe to everyone's patreon/membership).
I guess I'm interested why you watch YouTube at all if it's just stuff you don't like?
I didn't write that I don't like the content. I just don't think it is worth paying $168 USD a year for.
That's because you've been effectively pirating it for years by not watching the adds.
IMO either suck up the fact that you'll eventually have to start watching the adds, stop watching it, or try to get 4 other people to go in on a family plan with you to soften the cost.
I have no intention of being combative, but I think that could have been put in a less rude way. Happy Monday.
Ya, I could have probably said that better and I didn't intend for it to come off that way, but I do think its going to be increasingly difficult to actually block the adds. At some point its going to be difficult enough that you'll have to make a choice.
I find youtube completely unpalatable with ads and worth the money I spend on it. If you can manage to find 4 other people to split a family plan then its about $5 each and it does include youtube music which is okay I guess.
Yeah YouTube is literally the only subscription of any kind I have, though I admit if there were a more elegant mobile solution to both ads and background play then I would cancel it as well.
Not through official channels, no, but Revanced offers this option.
I'm not an official channel kind of guy, so I will look in to this. Thank you!
if youre on ios, afaik the only way to one-step background play and adblock is via brave browser. id seen another user in this thread say that adguard pro with safari will block video player ads, but they hadnt mentioned if they were able to do background play. both are equally important to me when it comes to mobile, so i feel compelled to chime in, just in case.
in our house we happily pay for YT Premium. Our kid watches educational videos most days, we watch the news on it every day, and I listen to music on YT Music every day when I commute to work. We pay ¥1,280/mo directly to Google. Would be higher if we subscribed via Apple. It’s well worth it for us.
Sometimes I think about the collective time wasted watching the increased number of YouTube ads. Millions of hours spent just so that a VP at Google can buy another house on lake Tahoe.
Cloud bills gotta be paid somehow. Options are subscriptions or ads, so pick your poison I guess.
The thing is, YouTube was successfully subsidized for over a decade by Google’s ad+search monopoly. I suppose eventually they needed to squeeze YouTube for revenue to appease share holders.
Surely you didn't expect them to operate YouTube at a loss indefinitely on principle.
If it wasn't paying for itself, I would be (more) concerned at how Alphabet was feeling like they were getting their money's worth out of it.
Notify me when Google is in danger of going bankrupt, I'll reconsider.
Paramount+ runs on GCP, they're definitely contributing plenty as one customer.
Google also uses existing infrastructure as the basis for some GCP services, like YouTube for Media CDN or letting GCP customers register with the Google Front End, which is kind of like a global-scale reverse proxy on steroids that fronts all their public-facing services.
At this point we really need a nonprofit foundation to operate an alternative to YouTube that's solely funded by donations. I'm thinking something the scale of Wikimedia and Wikipedia, but for videos.
Youtube's annual revenue is approximately 166 times greater than Wikimedia's, but while Wikimedia makes their expenses public, I cannot find any reliable information on the annual costs of operating YouTube. Despite that, I'm still convinced it's realistically possible for a foundation to operate a service of the same size and global reach as YouTube.
1, who funds that foundation, that entity? To the tune of billions? I suspect any of us have a better chance of winning the lottery than finding someone to fund this mythical entity. The IT infrastructure at Google's scale is insane. Google has employees that do nothing all day, day after day, except unbox hard drives and connect them to the data farms.
2, it would require extreme changes in how people consider online video. Specifically, in how people view their right to upload stuff.
Because while Google is trying to squeeze Youtube users, they have next to no restrictions on uploaders. You just painted your front door and want to upload a six hour real-time of the paint drying, upload it! Youtube won't stop you, nor will they take it down when they find out.
People upload the most ridiculous stuff. The examples are almost endless, and that's before you get into the really, really, really amateur and poorly filmed ones (shaky cams, inane v-logs with no point or purpose, gamers that just played a game and randomly uploaded it, on and on and on.).
And my personal favorite, the channels that take other content and reupload it to their channels. Youtube lets it happen. Studio drops a trailer or a sneak peek segment, and seventeen thousand other channels grab it and put it back up under their banner so they can rake in views. Some other "creator" throws up some make video or tutorial or crash compilation or whatever, a different set of seventeen thousand other channels grab it and up it goes to capture more views.
A tsunami of stuff, most of it crap, is uploaded every single minute of every single day. And Youtube just stores it all, indexes and links it, and up it goes ready to be clicked on. No matter how stupid, inane, incoherent, repetitious, or irrelevant, up it goes. It's cheaper to pay the hard drive guys to keep unboxing and connecting hard drives than it is to pay for literal legions of moderators to review and parse "content" to determine if it "should" go live.
It's very meme to demand "competition" in online video. But someone's gotta pay for it. Google figured out how to pay for it, well before anyone else appears to have even considered the question. They capture all that activity and mine it for personal detail, information about people and how they think and how they live and where they go and all of that. Google monetizes that information, successfully, to the tune of vast profits.
Someone else is going to have to be funded beyond belief to "build a competitor" and "break the monopoly" of Youtube. There's a critical mass of information that makes the database valuable enough to monetize so it can support the operation, and that critical mass requires a HUGE chunk of the online population clicking and identifying themselves so the database can index them profitably. That takes time they'll be burning money in as it passes, while they wait for that critical mass of users to show up.
As much as I enjoy flipping through Youtube when I'm of the mood, I'm under no illusions; Youtube is not a right and is not an essential part of life. There's a reason no one else has created and built another video sharing platform, and why there's not only a slew of failed attempts, but that the handful of "successes" one might decide to point to are either ridiculously small, porn, or locked behind some subscription hoping to somehow become wildly successful.
(Using USA-centric process, as other countries already do this for other mediums) Government-sponsored non-profit corp, ala PBS or NPR. A $100 annual internet-service tax translating to $30 billion in funding user-driven video content, music, services, and games.
Alternatively, bring the S back into ISP. There was a time when your ISP gave you FTP, Static Site hosting, email, and more for your monthly fee and not just access and email.
I'm glad we got rid of that. It was a form of harmful lock-in. Sometimes you'd want to switch ISPs and now you have to go update your email address with everyone you'd given it to. Sometimes you'd move somewhere and not even have the option to keep the same ISP.
I very much want my ISP to be a dumb pipe.
And there's no reason there couldn't be a middle ground: They could just provide hosting for an email domain of your choosing.
Or in absence of tech giants, perhaps they would have evolved to be the (relatively) small-scale cloud providers.
This would have been a smoother course if the competition that existed in the dialup space existed in broadband.
People, governments, other nonprofits, YouTube/Google competitors who want to see them lose money. It would probably require a combination of all of these, but considering YouTube's operating costs aren't known, I don't think we can discuss objectively the difficulty of funding. Plus, I imagine it's very much in Google's interest to make operating YouTube seem as expensive as possible.
(If anyone has reliable information on the cost of operating YouTube, please post it.)
As for everything else in your comment, I think those are problems that could all be solved by having a decent policy for what kinds of content are allowed (no useless re-uploads or copies of videos, for example) and a distributed and community-based form of moderation, similar to like how Wikipedia does it.
(It obviously wouldn't work the exact same, considering the medium of Wikipedia (text) is different from YouTube (video), but I think the size and scope would necessitate a similarly community-driven moderation structure as Wikipedia, for better or worse.)
Now, I'm glad you took the time to write out all these hypothetical reasons you think my idea wouldn't work (I mean this genuinely, mostly).
But let's flip the script on its head. I want a version of YouTube that is free to access, upload to, is well-moderated, and does not serve advertisements or monetize its users in any way.
How do you think such an online service could be organized and funded?
I used to watch Youtube, especially science/tech related but still kinda over the top chanels like Colin Furze, Stuff made here and many man others. I also loved watching progress of Jimmy Broadbent from living in a shed to winning championship in Britcar. I won't see any of it anymore.
My stance in life around internet and services that are available through it is quite simple, really. I realize that ads pay for the site and people behind it, I know that. I understand that without ads, there won't be the site I'm visiting, this is why I don't use any adblocker. Yes, I'm the type of guy who don't have PiHole setup and who has zero addons in the browser. I use Firefox (should be mentioned, probably). But here comes my stand: If your ads are ok, I will visit the site and tolerate them. If they are too much or you can't actually see what you came for due to too much ads, I'm out and you won't see me ever again.
I stopped visiting regularly only two sites in those ~10 years that I adopted this stance: one local tech/PC related web that had fullscreen ad (no content visible until video played) and Youtube.
Everyone reading this should try and disable all the adblockers and then go and watch some Youtube video. I get 20 second unskippable ad before it starts, one minute in I get another ad, five minuetes in I get another unskippable and don't you dare to try and find specific part of video - anytime you release the mouse button, you are served anoher ad before you can see even just one second of the video. Trying to watch some tutorial on Youtube is painful way to lose the whole afternoon watching ads instead.
I hate paying with my money for services, especially subscriptions. Youtube actually made me (figuratively) take out my wallet and pay. To their avail, I don't pay for Youtibe premium. I went and subscribed to Floatplane (Linus Tech Tips) where the money goes to creator and I subscribed to Nebula that is owned and made by creators. Too bad for Youtube, I guess. They lost addicted visitor without adblock and this visitor actually took his money and spends it every month/year on subscriptions, but he does so on different site.
Youtube simply didn't want me as their visitor, thus I left. I wouldn't go to brick and mortar store where everyone hates me and openly let me know that, so why should I do that on the internet?
Is it too bad? An addicted user who never watches ads is just a drain on server resources. In the retail example, it’d be the person who sits at a cafe without ordering a drink.
Seems like a win-win, you’re happy with your decision and YouTube isn’t going to miss you either.
I was still better than anyone who blocks the ads - I was watching ads. I didn't use any adblocker and all I got in return was unusable service. After one minute of video, I have watched 60 seconds of video and 40 seconds of ads.
If we want to transfer it to coffee shop, let's say I come in, order coffee (that's what I went in for and what I pay for; I went on Youtube to watch video and pay with ads) and actually before I even speak, I'm offered half of the things they have (preroll ad). Then I order and while I wait I'm offered the other half (midroll after one minute). And then while I sit there and finally enjoy my coffee they come to my table and start offering the first half of their things once again (5 minute mark midroll). I'm never coming back to this shop and I will make sure all my friends know about it.
In other words - I would be very much ok if the let me order the coffee and then ask if I want some cake or pie with it or if I wanted to try their new coffee AFTER I have said what I came in for - thus I don't mind them telling me about their other stuff I can spend money on (offering other service, basically ads), but if they shove their offerings to my throat multiple times in a few minutes, I'm not pleased with such service and I will not be coming back.
Youtube doesn't deserve visitors without adblockers, they simply went too far.
Youtube still benefits because having a big crowd is valuable by itself. That means that creators focus on your platform. And that will draw in other viewers and make it harder for competitors.
If the person is visible from the outside, the cafe benefits. Given the choice, people will enter a filled establishment over an empty one because: A) empty places have a less pleasant atmosphere and B) people will rely on the judgement of others. If everyone is at that one place, it clearly must be the better one.
For a long time (and it could still be the case), when you signed up for YouTube Premium they would calculate your currency and cost based on whatever country your IP address happened to resolve to at the time, ignoring the country or any addresses associated with your account or payment method.
For example, if you used a VPN to give yourself an IP address in Turkey and then signed into your YouTube account and upgraded to premium, your cost for an individual membership would be TRY 57.99, which is around $1.75/mo when converted to USD. A family plan costs 115.99 TRY or around $3.50 USD/mo. Once signed up you could turn off the VPN and use YouTube like normal and you'd continue to be charged whatever rate you signed up at for the lifetime of your subscription.
You can potentially save some money that way if it still works and you can find a cheaper country than wherever you live. The caveats are that if you use YT Music, the country that you signed up in factors into their recommendation engine (so in my example you'd get a lot of Turkish artist recommendations), and obviously there's always a chance that Google discovers the error and either fixes it or takes some kind of punitive action against you for gaming the system.
Anecdotally that hasn't been an issue for me. Also anecdotally, my father (who lives in Canada) made the mistake of signing up for his Google Workspaces account around a decade ago while he was visiting me in the USA. Google has been happily charging him in USD and charging him state and county taxes for my location despite his address and payment method using his Canadian address, and him constantly asking (even begging) them to recognize that he lives in Canada over the years. Google refuses to do anything about it, so it seems like the country that you sign up in is pretty locked in and Google has no desire or ability to detect and/or correct it when it doesn't match the country you live in or use their services from.
Anything against Brave browser? If not, ad block continues to work flawlessly.
No OP, but for me personally, I do have a serious problem with Brave. Namely, their Prop 8 supporting, homophobic CEO, Brendan Eich. Not to mention the shady and unethical shit they did with BAT "donations".
Yeah that's exactly why I added the qualifier.
I don't trust Brave. I read that the owners are a bit shifty in a criminal sense. When I tried to remove Brave from my system it screwed my system up.
What does that mean?
Fair enough. It's why I added the qualifier.
If it's a UBlock Origin issue (needs to be updated by their devs), then within the day it should be sorted. The dev team is usually pretty eager to give Google the finger.
Before that though, have you tried a private Firefox window? Without being signed into any of your Google accounts? Since Google started going nuclear on ad blockers, I no longer use a signed-in Google account for Youtube, and further do it in an anonymous window. Haven't had any issues yet, knock on wood.
Thanks for the suggestion. No commercials in a Firefox private window!
It is designed for mobile, but you might have luck with Grayjay, an android app that lets you aggregate subscriptions across different websites.
https://grayjay.app/
UBlock Origin > Filter Lists > add https://pastefy.app/G1Txv5su/raw -- I haven't seen an ad since this started.
Thanks for the tip, sadly it did not work.
I went to
UBlock Origin > Filter Lists > import (bottom), I expanded the node, pasted the URL into the text field, verified that it was taken, and I restarted my browser.
I think you might have to paste the contents of the URL. It's a giant list of filters.
That URL became a tree node in the filter list. When I expand it and click on eye icon I am shown a list of Youtube URLs. Am I right in thinking the contents are already in UBlock Origin?
Oh I guess it's smart enough to parse the link then? I did the copy/paste the whole list way and that also seemed to work. Sorry, thought I was helping. 😬
did you clear the cookies and all for youtube? also make sure uBO is enabled. The only other thing I have enabled is this script and this script in violentmonkey.
Yes and yes.
Yeah this is similar to my experience on going through reddit threads lol. People saying it works and it just not working on my end.
its nice to be on the other side of it for a change :)
lol.....yes I have been on both sides too and I have a preference for one over the other. :-)
have you had the script that speeds up the ads by 100x or whatever?
I haven't heard of it. What is the name of the script?
try this one — i think it’s right. https://greasyfork.org/en/scripts/497702-speed-up-ad
of all goes to plan or will speed up ads so you barely see them.
Thank you.
I hope you can live a life without their terrible ads. worst case, get into yt-dlp and download everything :)
NewPipe and Freetube still work for me. NewPipe went down for a couple of days, but they hotfixed it.
I watch YouTube on a PC.
NewPipe rocks, I use it for watching music videos while I am on the elliptical at the gym.
Take a look at Invidious, which is an ad-blocking proxy server for YouTube content. There are multiple instances, which are sometimes temporarily blocked but there's a nice Firefox add-on for it called Invidition that allows you to easily enable/disable the proxy and select the proxy instance.
Thank you.
Aside from Invidious, FreeTube is for PC too. I use NewPipe on my phone and FreeTube on my computer.
I wanna separate the two main conversations here, or at least separate how I respond to each.
First, on the technical side, over the last year or so youtube has been experimenting with different anti ad blocking measures. I got hit by their beta test last year before seeing any posts about it online. Videos would refuse to play, and in their place was a message about how my device was blocking ads. It said something to the effect of "if we see this n more times your account will be subject to some penalty". I mostly gave up after sifting through all the common, good, free adblock tools. On my phone I found some third party apps which seem to forward the video data from YouTube ad free. I forget the name, but even the best of them were buggy and would often crash my phone. At the time I was looking, nothing worked on my windows HTPC. Since that HTPC was primarily used for YouTube, we pretty much stopped using it and started using the Playstation full time as the media device in our living room.
Interestingly, I had to turn the HTPC on the other day to pull some documents. When I popped the browser (brave) it loaded my last session, and I realized that no ad played in the YouTube tab as I clicked through. Just for shits and giggles I tried a few more videos, and sure enough the YouTube ads were once again being blocked. No warning screen and no ads. I didn't change anything from my old setup. Just unlock origin and abp on brave. Same rig wasn't blocking ads (or was being served the warning screen every time) last year. So it seems that, at least right now, brave on windows with that pair of blockers is working.
The other piece of this conversation is whether one ought to block ads, or be able to block ads, on YouTube. Maybe because I grew up in the late 80s and early 90s when advertising was significantly less prolific, I really dislike having ads shoved in my face. If they still followed the original Google model of non-invasive ads, which I personally think was largely responsible for Google's massive rise in the mid-to-late 00's, then I'd be happy to leave them alone. And on several devices we use in my home there is no practical way to block them. But given the model they use now, where even the content pushed for very young children (blippi, cocomelon, etc) have multiple ads per video that will play endlessly until you intervene, it's worth fighting back I think. I do want creators to get paid, and I'm not averse to an ad, preferably before the video starts (or at the end, but I get why that's not viable), but interrupting a ten minute video three times with unskippable ads, or ads with skip timers that crawl less than one tick per second and reset when one ad ends only to load in another.. It's just disrespectful of my time and attention. If I could block this stuff at the router level I would.
That's about all I've got.
I do most of my YouTube streaming through my Nvidia shield with an app called Smarttube that blocks ads, sponsored segments, etc. On desktop, uBlock Origin still works fine for me on Firefox, and I use AdGuard Pro with Safari iOS to block YouTube ads in-browser. I never use the official YouTube mobile app anymore.
I was a YouTube premium subscriber for years and have subscribed to many streaming audio or video services at different times. They’ve all raised prices, and I decided I’m tired of giving them more of my money for effectively the same (and often worse) offerings. I try to be more intentional with giving money directly to YouTube creators in ways already mentioned here instead.
I guess I'll be the odd one out (edit: oops, second odd one after lou). I started paying for YT Premium after YT Music increased in price for some reason because split screening my lifting app and YT Music at the gym was fairly irritating (since it won't play if the YT Music app is in the background). No ads on YT ended up being amazing. The benefits to both apps are worth it imo, especially considering how many "sponsored" videos there are, so with ads you are getting double teamed with YT ads, plus sneaky sponsor adds built in by the creator. The skip ahead function is really nice as most sponsorship sections will be tagged to be skipped over.
Although, I think this awful shit may be the future:
https://youtu.be/TE_LTIuK25g?si=NLYEIb9dPz7Ykz5o
Even without ads, in this video this dude advertises Insta360 every chance he gets, his merch bike straps, some radio things, Dominoes (or some other pizza chain), the e-motorcycle itself (with a clickbait thumbnail of a different bike too!), and I think a few other things. The entire video is basically a longform ad for multiple products, imagine if it had YT ads on top of it all.
Seems like eventually any sort of ad blocking or premium service will be useless as every video will have some sort of baked in product advertisement every 3 minutes. Soon it all be Patagonia style advertising videos:
https://youtu.be/4TsndZxysts?si=G77Dyz-zCQNMXM9P
:/
I use Brave as my YouTube browser and it blocks ads perfectly. Also good for reddit on mobile, if a search leads you there. Firefox is my browser of choice because I don't want to support the Webkit mono culture... but I honestly think Brave is better.
I avoid ads using a VPN set to a country with no Google Ads, like Moldova.
And I've heard about setting a Google Family account in a LCOL country and paying for YouTube Premium that way - £2pm for 5 accounts in Argentina.
I have previously experienced something similar.
The next step I took in the adblock/advertising arms race was to implement ad-blocking DNS. There are a few different options out there, the linked one is the one I'm using - just their free public DNS server option, nothing paid for.
The idea is that using an ad-blocking DNS server will maintain a live and constantly adapting list of ad-serving IP addresses and simply fail to resolve anything that requests those. It has worked for me thus far. Similar in concept to using a Pi-Hole home DNS server.
Thank you.
You're welcome.
Also, about the frustrating situation of "I have the same browser / blocker as you and it works for me": Google has a tendency to silently and intermittently roll out changes to small user subgroups for testing purposes. Quite possible that you are part of a current testgroup and others reporting in without problems are of the majority baseline.
But that doesn't work on YouTube, does it? YT serves ads from their own servers, so a DNS blocker can't differentiate them from legit videos
So far it is working for me. While I DO sometimes have a black screen in which the YouTube player is waiting, trying to load an ad (unsuccessfully), it does not actually show me ads, and when I encounter that I just refresh the page and then my desired video plays.
I know I've read that Google is working on direct embedding of ads into the video stream such that a single video stream will have ads without changing sources, but it looks like that hasn't reached implementation yet.
I recommend Freetube: https://freetubeapp.io/
Alternatively, spin up your own invidious instance: https://invidious.io/
Can you download with yt-dlp and watch with mpv or something?
Please consider subscribing to nebula.tv. It's basically a creator cooperative.
Personally, I subscribe to Nebula and then end up watching its videos on youtube anyway - I use Freetube for youtube channels but it can't play Nebula videos, so I don't.
Nebula can't replace Youtube on its own anyway - it's carved out a niche for high quality educational-ish(?) content, so e.g. this, while great, shouldn't be put on Nebula. Point is, Youtube should be replaced by multiple services, and a single app that lets people sloooowly phase out youtube in favour of multiple other services would be the best solution.
I agree that no single service should replace YT. OTOH, the first step really is to give money to somebody else to build something and right now our choices are pretty limited. Paying with our attention is a bad choice, because it will only lower our agency in the long run.