UPDATE 2 It seems that starting today, uBlock Origin is working to combat this Youtube Block. Mine started working again! Lets all thank the devs of UBO for fighting this fight!
UPDATE So as new info comes out, I’ll be posting it here. It seems as if this Rollout Has Several Parts.
Part 1
You get a popup message over top of your video, blocking the screen:
- This is the first sign. If you see this popup AND are logged into a YouTube account, your account has been selected.
- At this stage you can likely close or block these messages with an adblocker.
Part 2
This message will change, indicating that you have 3 remaining videos to watch without ads.
Will insert photo once one has been found
- At this stage your adblocker will imminently stop working in 3 videos time.
- Personally using Firefox + uBlock Origin and tweaking filters and updates does not even fix it.
Part 3
None of the video loads now, everything looks blank.
- At this stage you must tred new ground to avoid ads. I have posted methods in the comments. If you want to bypass this end page, read down there.
End of Update
YouTube has started rolling out anti-adblock to users inside the United States, which means that they are preparing to roll this out to the entire country. Personally, I have been blocked already. I want to gauge how common this occurrence is.
Youtube’s use of A/B testing is very smart in that it’s actually nothing about testing user response and all about limiting the number of people they piss off at once with their god awful changes.
The day I can’t block ads on the internet is the day I stop using the internet.
targeted ads have broken the Internet, saturated our subconsciouses, hijacked the attention economy, and continue to erode what’s left of our dwindling privacy
advertisers are the de facto gatekeepers of larger and larger swaths of online content.
it wasn’t always like this. it’s gotten so much worse in recent years.
It’s only going to get worse.
Shoving more ads in people’s faces just desensitizes them to it so you can keep adding even more ads into the mix.
“You were okay with 2 ads, why not 3?”
“You were okay with 3 ads, why not 5?”
Repeat until the end of time, or until the masses stop being dumbasses and work together to topple the ruling class.
P.S. I have no respect for anyone in the advertising industry. They are all scum worth less than the gum under my shoe.
I always knew that funding the internet using ads wasn’t sustainable in the long run.
There’s constant fixes for it btw from the ublockorigin team now! :D
Ads would have happened anyway like it’s happening on the streaming services. They’ve got people paying subscriptions *with *ads. Double the money, double the fun, right?
I wonder if there’s actually any benefit to ads. Like if you could magically ban advertising, would people spend any less money?
Banning advertising will cause people to rely on word of mouth.
Now, instead of some nameless entity telling you a product is the greatest thing, you’ll be able to hold people accountable for the things they recommend you.
I wonder how lemmy makes money…
Oh wait. It’s almost like ads only exist so people can make a living doing nothing.
Advertising is poison.
The entire concept is intolerable, and it breaks whole industries. We’ve ruined televisions - not the medium of television, the physical rectangle in your living room - for the sake of cramming ads into the menus. They can show ads over your home movies. Paying for content to avoid ads is impossible because they just add ads. The siren song of slightly more money must not be ignored!
yeah this, youtube inb particular is entirely unusable without an adblocker
I’ve got so many layers of adblock it’s hard to know which one(s) are responsible for blocking the ads.
Same here. Was just explaining to a coworker who was complaining about YT ads that I “just” use PiHole+Unbound for network blocking, AirVPN with DNS blocking, mullvad Private DNS on Android, and then Libretube to view my self-hosted Piped instance. As I said it I realized how ridiculous it’s gotten and how deranged I probably sound.
This all sounds like extremely reasonable to me. Fuck the haters.
Reasonable, yes. Feasible for everyone? Not necessarily. I would like to get at least a pihole going at some point but for now ublock origin and ReVanced have been enough for me.
Same. Keep up the good work.
Haha I appreciate y’all! Next stop: Tor City
I just use use uBlock Origin.
I didn’t think that could block Youtube ads alone? Like Hulu and Spotify
Before this new behavior uBlock Origin always blocked YouTube ads.
I mean, it did up until maybe now.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but isn’t the point of using Piped having a proxy between you and YouTube? Or are you serving your instance to friends/family so that your queries get mixed together?
Yeah that’s the point. I do use my instance for links when sharing to people, but the main reason I selfhosted was for control and mostly just fun
PiHole+Unbound . . . AirVPN with DNS blocking, mullvad Private DNS . . . Libretube
This is what I pictured reading all that.
Why do you need adblock, when using piped?
Because the internet includes more than just youtube…?
For everything other than Youtube!
I genuinely think that advertising should be illegal at this point. It’s a ridiculous concept.
Based. Absolutely true, there is no good use for advertising.
How do you define “advertising”?
Is it advertising if a community government makes citizens aware that bus service will be changing?
Is it advertising to tell people that there’s a suicide hotline available if they need help?
Is it advertising to encourage people to volunteer for a local festival?
What about telling people that the festival exists using a poster? Is that an ad? Does it depend if the festival is free or non-profit?
Advertising is just fundamentally about bringing people’s attention to something. The spectrum can range from a municipal government “advertising” its monthly meeting so that local people can participate in their local democracy, to spam emails hyping a pump-and-dump cryptocurrency.
Different people will have different ideas where the cut-off should be. The extreme libertarians will say that nothing should be banned. Others will say that it’s ok to ban ads for alcohol and cigarettes but not for makeup or coffee. Even totalitarian states and supposedly communist states where one entity controls all companies have ads. Some of the most striking ads ever made were for Mussolini.
So, the question really isn’t about banning ads, it’s just where to draw the line.
An increasing number of states are banning billboards along highways. Travelers do need a low tech method for finding certain services though, such as food, lodging, fuel and restrooms. So you’ll see those blue signs that says “FOOD NEXT EXIT” with a Waffle House and Burger King logo. In order to put the logo on that sign, the business has to meet certain criteria (which vary from state to state like all highway laws), for example a restaurant must be within 3 miles of the highway, be open for at least 12 hours a day and feature public restrooms and telephones. The sign itself may include a distinctive logo and the name of the business in legible font but no slogans or ad copy. “This burger restaurant is nearby.”
This I see as an appropriate amount of advertising.
Paying to tell others that they should buy something they otherwise would not.
So, the government of Florida advising people to stock up on emergency supplies ahead of the oncoming hurricane – banned?
It is a great example of how an industry can survive with only self-reported effectiveness. I remember a freakonomics episode where it was shown that very infrequently do companies get a positive return on marketing spending. It will be very interesting if that industry ever collapses.
Multinational scam artists
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Oh definitely. Its essentially a massive case of ‘it’s difficult to get someone to understand something when their salary depends on not understanding it.’
Same shit with Facebook claiming videos were the bestest content possible, using numbers sourced from the vicinity of their pelvis. Now every goddamn news site has autoplaying video for no damn reason.
Advertising is about creating trends, and catching some impulse buyers. Effectiveness is likely overstated, but on the other hand it’s difficult to quantify the effectiveness of a trend. I don’t think it’s likely to ever collapse, people will always want to believe they can influence others more than they actually can.
I wonder if the people having this issue are using chrome. On FF it has never been an issue for me.
Not there in Edge as well.
I had this issue using Firefox. But updating the block lists has fixed it for now.
Interesting.
Remember when some people said we’re nuts thinking Google will try to ban ad blockers with manifest v3? Yeah.
Google will try everything in their power to stop us from blocking their ads. It’s their main source of revenue, you don’t have to be a genius to see why they don’t like ad blockers
Wouldn’t this show that they failed, if they have to recur to site-based adblocker blocking? Clearly v3 hasn’t stopped people from using Firefox, yt-dl, or whatever.
The Gecko Engine (Firefox), holds a user share of 4%. When compared to Chromium’s (Google Chrome and its clones) whooping 72% (roughly) user share, it’s clear that Firefox has limited relevance to their business strategy.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:StatCounter-browser-ww-monthly-202011-202011-bar.png
(according to latest statistics, Firefox would have an even lower share)
My point is: if v3 were effective at neutralizing ad blockers in 75% of the user base, or even 95% since Safari is supposed to get on board too, why are they developing additional countermeasures?
Or has Safari decided to do like Firefox, and still allow full ad blockers?
I reckon that blocking ad blockers isn’t some extra countermeasure here. It’s actually right in line with what Manifest V3 and that new environment attestation system are all about. They’re basically making sure that if you tinker with crucial bits of the JavaScript – stuff they see as essential (like anti-adblock) – you won’t make it through the attestation and you’ll get blocked.
They don’t want to block all modifications because that would be a hindrance to many users, for example the visually impaired. However, anything affecting their bottom line will probably be blocked.
How that will affect Firefox? I don’t know, maybe nothing will change for us, or perhaps Google will block Firefox altogether. We certainly know they’re capable.
Yes, attestation is in line with V3 changes, just that it makes them irrelevant: YouTube’s website could some day ask for environment attestation of “no extension using the intercept hooks”, or “only the approved ones”, and still have the same effect. The fact that they’re implementing a server-side anti-adblock now, while postponing V2 deprecation over and over, makes me think the V3 changes are a flop.
Firefox… would likely require Mozilla to play ball and implement similar attestation in an official binary attestable by the OS. Edge too, just so MS doesn’t mess with Chrome’s binary attestation on Windows.
Safari already has attestation, without extra parameters, but it could be extended:
https://httptoolkit.com/blog/apple-private-access-tokens-attestation/
There’s constant fixes for it btw from the ublockorigin team now! :D
I’ll just stop using YouTube like I’ve stopped using Reddit.
I’m ready for that. When being a youtuber started looking like a job I think the site lost something.
Yeah, YouTube was better when it was a bunch of amateur cat videos.
There was a sweet spot when cat videos went pro. Then the spam killed it.
I’d say just smaller, less scripted content. Maybe that’s what tiktok is.
I remember one of the early Youtube sensations was this teen chick’s vlog that turned out to be a fictional soap opera basically. Because it hadn’t occurred to anyone to do that yet.
This was BACK IN THE DAY, around the same time Boxxy became a sensation, or that one chick who just sat still in front of the camera because the Japanese liked her huge eyes.
lonelygirl15? I remember a friend telling me about that series because she wanted to share a funny video reply (Remember those?) by somebody who managed to find the same animal plushies that the girl carries around; it was a parody episode where the plushies talk about the current situation in the story and suggest that maybe the girl should drop all the teen drama stuff so they can all focus on running for their lives instead.
That’s the one, lonelygirl15. What a wild story. My internet destroyed brain immediately jumped to “Wow that was before the Youtube partner program, and it was presented as an authentic teen’s vlog at least at first…I wonder what the monetization strategy was?” And it turns out there kinda wasn’t one. They went into $50,000 worth of credit card debt to fund the series, according to Wikipedia. Like remember that episode of South Park (remember that show?) where they had the waiting room full of viral video people waiting to get their non-existent internet fame money?
That is something you just cannot avoid with a new medium. Eventually there will always be professionalization. It just sucks that youtube now just gives us the same shit over and over instead of making it easy to find new creators, like it used to be.
Hell I think you could make a massive improvement to the site if it could realize “Hey, I’ve been suggesting the same exact video to this user 500 times in a row, and he’s never clicked it. Maybe this user likes this creator/series, but not this specific video.”
Here’s hoping YouTube Revanced on Android and Adguard on desktop continues to work, eh…
Tbh, at this point there’s no reason in them disabling ad blockers. If you haven’t gotten used to this insane amount of ads by experiencing the slow, uphill creep, having to go from seeing no ads to suddenly this, is impossible. I couldn’t watch youtube videos in the current state of ads, so I’d just have one less vice.
I had already stopped once, when youtube vanced went offline (until i found revanced) and I will do it again
Firefox has zero issues with adblock on Desktop. On mobile I prefer Newpipe, but hey. Anything goes.
Revanced stopped working for me last week. I may reinstall incase I was running an old patch.
Patching a newer version of the Youtube app resolved the issues with playback I was having.
Yeah likely cause is something outdated. All working fine on my end
REX is working fine with the SponsorBlock enabled.
Forgive my ignorance – what’s REX?
Revanced Extended.
The irony of the straw poll site throwing up an anti-adblock banner 🤣
I have a VPN and I can’t vote.
That’s self selection bias if I’ve ever seen it
I’m going to start a discussion in the comments here about methods to bypass the message. I will add suggestions here, so leave comments if you find a method!
Methods to bypass Youtube Anti-Adblock:
- The easiest method is simply to comply and turn off your adblock extension.
My Method
- My method, and the one that will likely work universally is as follows:
Install Extension Enhancer for YouTube™
Go to the extensions settings and ensure that under the Ads Management section, “Block Ads” is turned OFF
Now find the Custom Script box at the very bottom and enter the following script. I did not write this code, it comes from egaudette on GitHub
(function() { 'use strict'; var clickInterval = setInterval(skipAds, 5); var ytpAdModule; var miniAdd; var skipButton; var currentVideo; function skipAds() { ytpAdModule = document.querySelector('.ytp-ad-module'); skipButton = document.querySelector('button[class*="ad-skip"]'); miniAdd = document.querySelector('.ytp-ad-overlay-container'); if (ytpAdModule !== null && ytpAdModule.innerHTML !== '') { ytpAdModule.style.display = 'none'; } if (skipButton !== null) { skipButton.click(); return; } currentVideo = document.querySelector('video[class*="main-video"]') if (currentVideo !== null && currentVideo.duration <= 5) { currentVideo.muted = true; currentVideo.play(); currentVideo.currentTime = currentVideo.duration; } } })();Lastly, ensure the “Automatically execute the script when YouTube is loaded in a tab” box is checked, and press Save
I’ll add more methods as they are discovered!
Please note that posting the script has html-encoded && <> and similar characters so you’ll have to replace those with the correct ones (or just get the script from GitHub)
Why would this work when others get blocked? Is it a novel way to block YT ads that’s not popular? Because I think YT isn’t looking for specific extensions but looking for certain kinds of behavior.
This method lets ads load for half a second but then get skipped instantly. i have not personally found a way to 100% block ads once ive gotten their block page.
I use greasemonkey to do a similar trick with the skip and dismiss buttons. But added random delays up to 2 seconds in an attempt to mimic a human clicking the button.
Also instead of an interval running, you can use MutationObserver and a callback to only run the code when the DOM changes and adds the button.
Thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you!!! ❤️
For those who don’t know: VLC also takes a YouTube video address as input (in the menu: Media | Open Network Stream…).
VLC is so damn good
This has not worked for me in a very long time.
You can also pipe yt-dlp into vlc if that suits your fancy.
Your vlc is probably busted and could use a reinstall. Happened to me once. It still works.
Mpv works just fine for me
Strange, that doesn’t work for me
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Sad thing is that this will affect even Firefox + uBlock
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How are they supposed to run a free service without ads, especially one as expensive to run as a video hosting website?
I don’t care.
Do you care if the service goes down and nobody gets any videos?
As if video streaming will die with one site. One for-profit site, that’s not remotely turning a profit. A vestigial organ of an advertising giant, burning money to build dependency and exploit it for control.
BitTorrent used to share more video than Netflix - despite a lack of money, despite a lack of ads, and despite being illegal. Content creators will be fine without this corporate facade.
I don’t know what YouTube’s market share is, but for videos that are not short TikTok style it’s probably like 95%? And they are also in the TikTok short and twitch streaming areas now, so I think it would be a massive blow to video streaming if they went away.
BitTorrent just moves all the costs to the users, and users are typically not wanting to run their own video servers. They might work for tech people who don’t mind running servers or already have a server they are running, but you have to think about the regular user that is probably 80% or more of the market. You can’t expect to get big off relying on users to be the servers.
By making Youtube Premium worth it, both for users and creators. Make it transparent what % of the YP fee is actually going to creators, make that % actually fair, give extra features to YP users, incentivize creators to ask their viewers to collaborate with it if they actually can afford to. Youtube has reached a point where it has become a public utility, to the point that tens of millions of people use it to supplement their education or stay updated on the news. A website increasingly necessary shouldn’t force someone without a penny to choose between paying what they can’t afford or have their head fried up by ads.
Of course, this idea rooted in civil values is incompatible with an economic actor that sees both creators and consumers as cattle that must be milked as efficiently as possible.
A website increasingly necessary shouldn’t force someone without a penny to choose between paying what they can’t afford or have their head fried up by ads.
If not ads then what is the free option supposed to look like. I hate ads also, but it’s not like it’s sustainable to run free without ads.
It looks like Lemmy and PeerTube, where people do the hard work because they care and not to make a profit off of idiots with more money than sense.
Saying it’s ‘impossible’ is objectively false and just shows people you don’t understand the world you live in.
Are creators making enough money to get by on PeerTube? The idea is interesting, but I don’t see people making enough to do it full time, and I don’t see how the streaming quality can be anything as good or reliable compared to something like YouTube by relying on P2P.
Wikipedia has no ads yet it has a pretty large amount of spare money, and there are plenty of other free to use platforms and projects. Youtube is not Wikipedia, sure, but Wikipedia has no reason to offer Youtube Premium.
Wikipedia mostly displays text, YouTube mostly streams HD video, which one do you think costs more?
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Part of the problem might be all those people blocking the ads, which I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s a pretty big chunk of their viewers. No ads means no ad revenue, which means losing money.
google has “fuck you” amounts of money, the minority of users using firefox mean nothing to them.
If google was having problems funding youtube, believe me, they’d stop paying creators before that would happen, and then the creators would tell us about it.
Do you really think they would stop paying creators before stopping people from bypassing the way both them and creators make money? It doesn’t take a business major to see that running a free service without ads is only going to cost them money.
I think (unsure) you misunderstand. Google, and any other company’s, main goal is to make money. To achieve this goal, i’m saying that if google were to lose profits from people using ad blockers, they are more likely to extract profits from their creators than sacrifice their bottom line.
If google can’t adequately monetize their services (by losing the ad-blocking war), they can’t monetize the creators. Google is evil, but so is the economic system that causes inconvenience to be the most effective way to monetize content.
This is why i wholeheartedly support things like Patreon, Ko-Fi, etc. because that directly supports creators and means that they don’t have to completely rely on a company that no longer says “don’t be evil”.
To achieve this goal, i’m saying that if google were to lose profits from people using ad blockers, they are more likely to extract profits from their creators than sacrifice their bottom line.
The creators are their product, the adblock users cost everyone money and provide no benefit, why would they punish their product over the users costing them money? The adblock users aren’t the bottom line, they are no benefit, and cost both YouTube and the creators in lost revenue.
This is why i wholeheartedly support things like Patreon, Ko-Fi, etc. because that directly supports creators and means that they don’t have to completely rely on a company that no longer says “don’t be evil”.
That’s great and all, but YouTube still has bills to pay, they can’t just let you use the service free without ads, let you just give money to creators through those other services, and expect to even break even.
Oh no! Is the company that makes 70b per quarter and is buying back 70b of shares to keep making more in trouble of only making 80b per quarter next year and not 100b? Poor babies.
Maybe instead of looking at revenue you should look at profit. Revenue means nothing if your running costs eat it all up.
Also, maybe try to look at YouTube Numbers instead of the whole parent company? The patient company being profitable isn’t an excuse for the child company to lose money.
How does lemmy make money?
Also, hasn’t youtube been wildly profitable for years? Profit, by definition is excess. It’s what’s left over after all business expense have been paid.
If youtube is profitable, why do they need more profit? Oh yeah, they don’t.
Sorry this needs to be spelled out for you.
As far as I know YouTube is not that profitable, but it’s hard to tell as they don’t release all the numbers.
Do you make any excess money? Do you have any money left over after rent, food, etc? If you do, do you need that money? If you don’t would you like to make more? Nobody wants to live with no excess money, so why should a business?
Woah dude, you’re getting right into my point of projection.
Just because you want to use your excess to get even more excess, you’re assuming that everyone else will. Why eschew luxurious so those who have less can have more? You’d never project that lol, cause that’s not how you feel.
Have a good day, man. Hope I enlightened you a bit.
Gonna block you now cause I feel you have nothing to offer me. See ya.
So you want to live just making ends meet? Don’t care about having a savings account? You would be happy with just enough to get by without any excess? I don’t know anybody who would be happy with that.
If you want to run away from the conversation then go ahead. If you do happen to have some money you don’t want though, since who needs to make more than what they need just to break even even, right? I’ll happily take it off your hands.
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This. When YouTube finally succeeds in making it impossible for anyone to use their website without watching ads, they probably still won’t succeed in preventing people from downloading for offline viewing. When this happens I’m going to invest in making scripts that autodownload stuff ahead of time and I’ll only watch whatever videos are in my home network.
Im not watching their brainwash bullshit ass propaganda. I’ll find other stuff to do for entertainment before I give in to ads.
Fuck ads. I put in a decent amount of effort to make sure I see exactly 0 seconds of ads per day. So far going strong.
This is such a better use of their time and dollars versus improving their service to make it more attractive to customers.
If this is the change that really sets them financially straight, then I would say they have a failing business model.
You are not the customer. You are the product.
Yes, but if they destroy their products (aka drive users away) their real customers (ad companies) will pull out.
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Less viewer numbers to show to advertisers.
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Just ask Twitter/X or what’s left ot it.
capitalism (or at least the weird version of it used in the tech world) is about short term profit. if they get good numbers from this, they can make future projections of an imaginary increase over the years and make the ad companies happy for a while. they do not care about breaking the product in the long term
This is such a better use of their time and dollars versus improving their service to make it more attractive to customers.
Making their service more attractive to customers is precicesly what they’re trying to do.
It’s just that an advertising agency’s customers are not the folk who watch, read or hear the ads, it’s the folk who pay for the ads.
I am not sure if it will work out like this though. The amount of ads they are forcing down peoples throat is isane. Eventually it will make people consume less videos and with that less ads overall.
I am not sure if it will work out like this though. The amount of ads they are forcing down peoples throat is isane. Eventually it will make people consume less videos and with that less ads overall.
Sure, could be - but keep in mind that they have all the relevant usage data at hand. Any decrease in service popularity among users (or indeed any kind of user behavior) is immediately visible to them. They have the means to know exactly what annoyances the market will bear.
And considering that YouTube still holds a de-facto monopoly on video discoverability within the entire anglophone internet I feel like it’s safe to say that the market will likely bear a lot more annoyances :P
And thus the enshittification cycle completes
If premium cost $5per month I’d pay for it, u use YouTube all the time
No way in hell it’s worth $15 a month though, their pricing is completely brwindead
Just make a (digital) trip to India and get family of 5 accounts for about 1$ a month per account. This the way I did it.
I agree. It’s around $22 NZD and that is just too steep. They have a slightly cheaper one but you can’t background play with it. I’m sick of being nickel and dimed at every possible opportunity and then hearing about how these companies are making record profits.
I won’t give a penny to the evil google.
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Nope, not available her ein the states.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s): https://piped.video/premiumlite
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source, check me out at GitHub.
It’s $25/mo for family. I hate that I pay for it, but I use music, and I mostly watch YouTube on a streaming device, so I’ve never been able to use ad blockers. $15 for the fam felt worth it, but $25 has me rethinking. Maybe I can configure YT-DL to get the shows I care about on my Plex
Any android based streaming device can run SmartTube (formerly SmartTube next). On an Android phone you can patch the YouTube apk with revanced, which also gives you full access to yt music.
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From what I read on their own report, less than 2% use adblocks.
That is depressing
So you know that the people watching YouTube aren’t really considered “customers” by google in the traditional sense, right?
I feel like we can ignore this and it’ll mostly be a non-issue. Hopefully I don’t have to eat those words later.
YouTube can detect common current adblocking methods, and use this to hinder you now, prompting to comply with them. If you do, they win. You pay for no ads or you have an exception in your adblocker.
As another comment mentioned, it’s a cat and mouse game. Adblockers will get ahead of it. So just wait it out.
