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.
I dont care content makers are losing, they are all dumbarses, and if they are supporting yt still and not posting elsewhere, then they are just stupid cunts.
You had me until here. If you want to monetize online video content or get widespread appeal, YouTube is pretty much the viable choice atm, save for Twitch which only works if you’re a streamer or Nebula, which even then it alone doesn’t suffice and is very specific. If you plan on trying to “make it big” using PeerTube, Vimeo, Dailymotion, etc. alone, your aspirations may as well be dead on arrival.
Not losing sleep over the money content creators lose over you using adblock is fine, I personally don’t put too much importance on it myself. But to call them all dumbasses or stupid cunts is just unreasonable, given the lack of a proper, popular alternative for most of them to do what they do.
I don’t agree with the name calling, but many content creators have already set a website, with some outside revenue sources like Patreon, selling merchandise, or other stuff.
They can’t leave the most popular platform, but they can set up alternatives for when it stops being the most popular, and in the meantime also target people who are leaving it already.
Oh yeah, I agree it’s a wise decision for any content creator, especially those who want to make a living from it, to diversify their sources of income. Backing up all content they post on YouTube to other sites as well is also really nice as it contributes to the push away from YouTube without having to risk little on their part as well
I pay for premium.
I spend like 20x time on YouTube compared to other premium streaming services, knowing the money at least partially goes to the creators and that it’s usually a much larger source of revenue than the midroll ads (and the fact I spend like 40% of my watch time on an iPad) makes it pretty worth it to me. Other than that I use uBlock on medium/high, but if there was an extention that could skip the sponsor segments inside the videos themselves I’d use it in a heartbeat.
It’s a no-brainer. You get a music service at the same price as everyone else. They just add on ad-free YouTube. I don’t get why so many people hate the idea of it.
I’ve had Google Play Music (and YouTube Premium as a freebie) since it launched at $7.99 per month. Folks like me who were grandfathered in at that price just got an increase to $13.99, which forced me to cancel. I can’t afford restaurants or takeout anymore with inflation as bad as it is, and I guess I can’t afford YouTube either.
If you have access to a VPN you can also buy premium for a much smaller price in another region. I bought a year for 16 USD via India.
if there was an extention that could skip the sponsor segments inside the videos themselves I’d use it in a heartbeat.
sponsorblock does that. it’s crowd sourced, so it doesn’t always work with the small channel newest videos, but it’s very good at what it does considering.
It’s quite amazing how well sponsorblock works really. I spend a shit ton of time on youtube and I almost never have to mark those sections of the video myself because someone else did it already.
someone previously marked all breaks inbetween numbers in this 3h video as intermissions. though now I see they’ve been removed and there’s merely one highlight in there
I genuinely think that advertising should be illegal at this point. It’s a ridiculous concept.
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.
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.
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.
How are they supposed to run a free service without ads, especially one as expensive to run as a video hosting website?
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.