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.
They are rolling this out in stages to users worldwide, It happened to me 3 weeks ago, on Brave, Firefox, and on Chrome. I had to junk Brave, update firefox, flush out my extensions (remove them) and reinstall, and now I run 6 different ad blocking and tracking extensions and its back working again. You should also know that Adblocker Ultimate are also involved and working on blocking their extension from working so they can sell premium app, which is now an app that runs on your computer, not an extension anymore.
6 adblockers?! Have you looked into uBlock origins customisable block lists? You can combine at least 3 blockers with that. Additionally you could add custom block lists.
Edit: clarifications and spelling errors.
unlock origins customisable block lists? You can combine at least 3 blockers with that
I’ll look into it.
https://filterlists.com/ - list of auto-updating filters, makes it very easy to add one. Make sure to use one with a good rating.
Yeah, do it. uBlock is great in terms of performance so you will feel how much faster browsing is after uninstalling the other add-ons. You can also block known scams or websites known by pirates to be unsafe. It can also block cookie popups (but I don’t care about cookies might be better at this).
I also suggest Redirector, which lets you can set up custom redirects such as
Pattern name: YT Shorts in normal player
Example URL: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/ExmplVid-ID → https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ExmplVid-ID
Match pattern: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/*
Redirect to: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=$1
It is very powerful and can also replace multiple extensions. For example, it can percent-decode URLs, which enables me to prefix a URL with ar[space] in the address bar and redirect me to the archived version of that site. Just add https://web.aarchive/web/*/%s as a bookmark with keyword ar. (This trick is useful for making custom “search engines”, which would often require yet another extension.) However, this trick is not enough alone because it goes to https://web.aarchive/web/*/example.com%2Fpage and Archive.org needs a decoded URL. So notice that I used the nonsense address web.aarchive which Redirector will detect and correct using this rule:
Pattern name: archive percent-decoder
Example URL: https://web.aarchive.org/web/*/example.com%2Fpage → https://web.archive.org/web/*/example.com/page
Regex pattern: https\:\/\/web\.aarchive\.org\/web\/\*\/(.*)
Redirect to: https://web.archive.org/web/*/$1
Process match: URL Decode
This is quite concerning. Hopefully the adblocker extension devs are able to bypass this. I expect a cat and mouse game eventually.
It will be a cat and mouse game, which YouTube will loose in the long run. Don’t remember the name, but there is a very clever solution: They download all the ads so YT thinks you are watching. However, ads are never shown to you. This is extremely hard to detect and it muddies the data collection of Google since you watch and click everything.
IMO: This is a net loss for YT/Google. Their collection of data looses value. And advertisers wont be willing to pay the same amount for clicks, since a registered click is not necessary someone who watched and the targetting got worse…
Worst case of this solution is you might have to wait before watching your video. It wouldn’t be unreasonable for google to refuse to send you the video until $ad_duration has elapsed.
Still beats watching ads though. I could queue up a bunch in a “watch later” playlist and have a program get them all ready for me.
