YouTube intensifies fight against ad blockers showing pop-ups, and users are frustrated | Blocking ad-block users::undefined
Fuck YouTube
I agree. YouTube can be very useful, but we really ought to be moving to other platforms at this point. Fuck YouTube.
I’ve been using YouTube far more than any of my paid services for years. However I’m ready for a switch. If the YouTubers who I follow switched platforms I’d go with them in a second.
Removed by mod
Patrion and buying merchandise are the ways I support content creators. I’d rather make sure money goes directly to them and not to some corporation that will seize funds or cut off ad revenue at a whim with no real recourse.
I understand the economics behind hosting videos, I also don’t use Adblock. YouTube has taken ads and unwanted content to a new level in the last year and they are driving away viewers. I refuse to support them with a subscription.
If an ethical alternative pops up that has the creators I want I’d be happy to support it.
While buying merch, doing patreon, and other forms are commendable - we watch them on YouTube. Id get protesting the platform if they were making money hand over fist but we already know they don’t make a profit on the platform. Ads and premium are just methods to staunch the bleeding. I understand the ads are intrusive and are getting worse but they’ve only amped them up to compensate for users who aren’t served ads due to adblockers.
I don’t find it unethical to pay YouTube. They pay creators a fair percentage and overall are taking a loss. It’s not greed, it’s trying to stay afloat. Whether or not I support their policy changes, I’d like creators to survive off their work.
Problem is hosting all the video. You either have one host or many (P2P). Both have issues.
And both cost money, neither can exist if everyone circumvents the methods to make money.
YouTube defended their monopoly by running for free. They murdered the growth of legitimate competitions like Vimeo that had healthier business models… Because they didn’t try to run for free.
And now that they’ve saturated the market and killed off all of the serious competition it’s time to profit
Well, frankly, go fuck yourself.
So long YouTube, and thanks for all the fish. 🐬
Do you know why there are no good competitors to YouTube? It’s fucking expensive.
They have a monopoly but for what? They don’t turn a profit. The losses they take on the platform are public knowledge because shockingly, hosting hundreds of TB of data being uploaded per minute isn’t cheap.
The only sites that even spit in their general direction is like, Pornhub and oh boy don’t try to tell me that ‘ad experience’ is better Lol. Youtube has shit policies and even worse moderator decisions but it is widely a fucking charity and I think they have some right to turn it into a business instead.
That article is outdated. YouTube started to become profitable, but it took more than a decade to get there, so your point still stands.
I look forward to the updated source you have on hand. They weren’t profitable in 2009, weren’t profitable in 2015, and the only things to change since then were Premium subscriptions and more ads. What could they have done to turn a profit?
You literally just proved my point.
It wasn’t profitable. And it was free. It killed competition by losing money.
And now, by your concession, they are turning it into a business.
That’s a fundamental change in the service. Fuck that. Either it was always their intent, in which case they were lying scum the whole time. Or it wasn’t their intent and they’ve just decided spontaneously to prioritize profit, in which case it’s greed and betrayal.
Either way, fuck 'em.
… Yes. The strategy of expanding at a loss in order to recoup it later is a… business strategy. What? It’s not even an underhanded one because it carries substantial risk. They ate losses and are now trying to collect on what users like you and I have been enjoying on their dime. Adblockers was to staunch the bleeding and clearly it’s not working well enough so they’re trying new ways.
You’re confusing greed with typical business practices. The grocery store isn’t greedy, they’re trying to keep the lights on and pay employees. This isn’t “Walmart selling items at a loss until local businesses shut down and ramping them back up afterwards” - the data storage needed for this shit is beyond what most companies can do. Amazon with their AWS infrastructure is the only thing that has a shot in hell. The only reason Youtube can do it is by the sheer fact rich ass Google owns them.
Businesses typically collect this thing called money to keep supplying the service you enjoy. Adblockers remove the very essential part of this exchange in which you pay for the thing you’re using. You’ve been stealing groceries and are mad you’re now being told to pay for them.
My confusion is profound.
For sure! Which video site are you using instead?
Xhamster
Lol don’t search for this site
Dear lord there’s peanuses
Peanuses… it sounds like a slang term for Charles Shultz worst nightmare, Peanuts porn 😂
there are a few but they’re all filled with right wing nutters and i doubt their ability to scale effectively
Nebula isn’t full of right wing nutters as far as I know
However, I am broke
Nebula is a gated community, and they don’t let enough people in. It is far from the definition of “You” Tube.
On the other hand when you pay for a service you’re the customer, not the product. That can be an advantage.
i’m not sure nebula can be considered in the same class as youtube though
You’re right, it’s much much higher
Great case of nut job lefty derailing and politicising every topic possible including video platforms.
Ok have fun on bitchute with the Nazis then
wait what does bitbucket have to do with nazis?
I dunno but it explains a lot about Atlassian’s UX, doesn’t it?
Ah yes, the new blue that’s painful to look at unless you’re a true aryan developer
Nothing, I meant bitchute lmao, my bad
Lefties have brain deficiency. That’s all.
Do you mean BitChute? Because Bitbucket is a Git repository solution from Atlassian.
I did lmao, corrected it now
BitBucket? You mate are an idiot. I mean lefty.
ignore the problem then. it’s the same problem that killed voat
So… YouTube then
It’s amusing to see how nobody is able to genuinely answer this question.
The reason while they have all the content, is precisely because they can generate revenue for channels. I much prefer payment through subcription and ad views to annoying in video sponsors and product placements
But on YouTube you get both. If I could pay and not get in video sponsorship along with no ads, then I might consider it. But I will not pay to be advertised at.
Sponsorblock is an extention which can help. It doesn’t detract from the money the creator makes and you don’t see ads for shit you dont want or can’t afford. If you don’t have premium and block ads though, you’re definitely hurting the creator and platform as a whole.
Most creators that have in-video sponsors also have Patreons with sponsor-free feeds.
They have pissed 4channers. You do not piss 4channers. The last time that happened, Trump got elected.
Also they literally go on killing sprees.
Lol
Use Firefox, update the uBlockOrigin extension, update the filters, remove any other adblocking extension in case you have it. Should work just fine then.
I use Firefox with uBlockOrigin and haven’t had to do any manual updates or anything. I still seem to be unaffected by the changes everyone is talking about. Is it a slow rollout or does uBO just silently keep up with it?
It could be simply luck because it is a slow rollout, or it could also be that you got the filter updates on the background. In any case, you know what to do if you ever run into it.
not working for me anymore, I have firefox + ublock and updated the filter, they are blocking now after 3 videos
Same here. That’s not 3 videos per day, but total before it stops playing.
I wonder what tech and it creators say about this change. They will probably see a dip in views, engagement and number of clicks they promised their sponsors.
I was in the same boat, but cleaning out my cookies helped.
Are you signed in?
For now. If YT really wants to end it, they can
How exactly “can” they? They’ve been trying pretty hard for quite a long while now and nothing has ever worked. It’s also pretty logical why they can’t: they don’t control your device, you can do anything with it. Whatever they implement, you can always fake being a normal user. Which is exactly why no one using Firefox + uBlock sees anything of what’s mentioned in this article (as long as no other addons/settings trigger the adblock detection).
Only the environment they do control is affected, which is essentially like “controlling your device”: Chrome.
My pessimistic opinion is that they’ll lobby ths shit out of governments to get laws written which make it illegal to circumvent this stuff somehow. I’m not sure that’s even possible, but it’s my irrational fear.
If it does happen, I’ll convince myself that I don’t care about any of the content on YT. Let’s face it - 99% of the shit on there is emotionless-face-with-open-mouth-and-red-arrow/circle hot garbage. Sifting through that sewage is so exhausting.
A surprising number is videos don’t even need the video component. Just go for a walk, and leave your phone in your pocket while you’re listening to whatever you would normally watch. Try that out and you’ll realize that there’s hardly any reason to see what’s on the screen.
Delaying the video stream for the ad length would do most of the work. Since they manage that server side there is no way to request the video sooner. Blocking technically works, but you would have to stare at a blank screen for the ad duration.
Twitch started embedding ads into the stream video feed. So if you blocked the ad you also blocked the stream.
It’s been really effective at getting me to watch less twitch. I’d love to see statistics on how many people click away immediately after an ad starts.
A streamer I was watching was playing PUBG, made it to a 1v1, and then an ad played.
A good 99% of the chat was just ‘WHAT HAPPENED?!’ and we came back to an empty chair, with the streamer in the background.
I haven’t watched since.
(The streamer won with an insane pan-throw over a small hill, so it wasn’t even a lame win)
I open a stream, get a 45 second ad, close the stream, and go do something else. Congrats, you just killed any enthusiasm I had about your platform.
Preroll ads never made any sense… those first few seconds are when you’re deciding whether to watch that streamer or go elsewhere. An ad makes me go elsewhere without the streamer even getting a say.
Some streamers never use ads, but I think the bigger ones are contracted to do so.
100% of the time I do the same thing. I subscribe to 1 streamer max per month and get ad free there, and pretty much don’t use the platform outside of it
Staring at a blank screen is better than watching an ad IMO.
To be honest, I’d take that over ads. I’d use YouTube a lot less, but there’s some content from creators I like that’s not available elsewhere.
Netflix is able to only serve paying customers.
Sure, granting view credits for ads is a little more complicated, but definitely within googles scope.
So they can block everyone, unless you either pay or watch ads. Unpopular, sure. But they have a huge library and a constant stream of new content, so enough people would put up with it. They can also start soflty, and only tighten the screws later. Lets start with one ad per day.
Sure, granting view credits for ads is a little more complicated, but definitely within googles scope.
How exactly? What stops someone from creating a program that behaves like a normal user earning view credits for ads, but never showing that to the actual user, only letting Google think the user is legitimate? Afaik nothing.
Yes, turning it pay-only like Netflix would technically work, but YouTube itself only works because it’s “free”, so yeah.
There are audits that try to determine if the view credits are legitimate. They’ll cross reference a selection of data (what segments did they fetch, what was the timing like, did each ad checkpoint get crossed, etc) because companies don’t like paying for ads that arent watched.
That can all be faked, just grab all the segments at a timing that would match playing it. This is why Google wants to do that trusted client thing, because there’s no way to guarantee that a user is watching something on their own device unless the software and hardware on that device prevent it and the server makes the user prove they are running that software and hardware and nothing else.
They can easily embed ads into the main stream, so ad blockers will have nothing to block. Not sure why they haven’t done so already.
Because those can also be skipped. They are required by law to label sections of ads. This labeling can be read to figure out how long the ads are and thus be skipped. That’s how twitch ads are blocked.
The label can be a part of the stream as well. There are no issues to stream everything and make it non-blockable.
Then how hard would it be to use some pattern-based image recognition to detect this label? Not very hard, I have a friend that does something similar at work.
Lol, good luck with that!
If they did that then they’d have to re-encode videos for each veiwer (which would require an insane amount of processing power), or give up on tracking and have contextual only ads.
Their only real option is to have ads as separate files and then use the magic JavaScript to tell your computer to play one file then the next, which is where adblock comes in like “naw, let’s not do that”.
Not really. That’s not how modern streaming works. No one sends plain files like it’s 2000.
I didn’t mean like they just strait up embed video.mp4 on page for the video, but as far as I understand on their backend they still have actually video files of various resolutions and such that they serve to you.
Even if the page isn’t giving you a copy of a strait up file in the way it might in 2000, the player is still pulling a copy of a pre processed video file stored on YT’s servers, and in order to have the ads as part of that same file in order to make adblock very hard to implement they’d need to re-process it any time they want to show an ad that hadn’t been already inserted into the video.
I could be completely wrong tho, I don’t work at YouTube and haven’t built a video sharing site before.
That’s not how it works. I don’t know exactly what YouTube is doing, but it’s not serving files at all. There are several options available today, perhaps the easiest one to look at is HLS.
In short, the streaming server splits video files into small chunks. Then instead of sending you one huge file, it sends you a HLS playlist. Your browser reads the playlist and starts playing small video chunks one by one. If you want to navigate somewhere inside the video, you don’t wait for the whole file to be downloaded, instead the browser will simply skip lots of chunks in the middle until it lands on the one you want to watch. That’s also how changing video resolution works - the browser doesn’t re-download 4K video after downloading 1080p video, it just stops at current chunk and switches to a higher res one for the next portion of the video.
So, few important things:
- There’s no big video file.
- There’s no real-time video processing.
- Chunks can be of varied time.
- You can create any playlist and insert whatever chunks you want from your existing chunk library.
This means that YouTube can create a new HLS playlist on the fly, send you 10 chunks of the your video, then send 3 chunks of the ad video, then 42 chunks of your video and 5 more ad video chunks. There’s no need to decode/encode anything. And you will never know what the next chunk holds. They can also add ad chunks at random moments, so you won’t be able to auto-skip them like you do with sponsor segments.
The real question is why Google is not doing it already.
Yes, they can, it will probably become a cat and mouse situation. The main idea is to put pressure on people that will not take the time to keep looking for alternatives or new solutions and will simply pay up or watch the ads.
Fuck it. I’ll just say this instead. It’s time to break up the tech monopolies. Google, Microsoft, etc.
TRUST BUSTING: 21st CENTURY EDITION! FUCK YEAHHHH
Of course most everyone here would agree, but the likelyhood of that ever happening is incredibly low.
Well of course. Now what ?
Yeah, good luck hosting a high quality video streaming service for free and eating up millions of dollars in losses.
then don’t do something for the benefit of humanity if you can’t handle not having infinite line-go-up. Numbers aren’t easily found but it looks like they generated north of a billion in profit, not revenue, profit.
If a billion, after all bills are paid, is not enough. Give it to someone to whom a billion is enough.
Wut?
companies enshittify themselves not to make money but to make more money than they did 3 months ago, repeat indefinitely.
If you didn’t have to meet that metric, and were happy with generating a billion dollars a year and didn’t have to make it 1.3B by next year, and 1.6B by the following, then you wouldn’t have to shittify your product to do so.
So when people are like “oh but poor YouTube won’t make any money if they make their product user friendly” don’t mean they will make no money, it’s that they will fall short of making 30% more money than last year and “only” make 10% more than last year.
(all numbers made up for illustrative purposes only)
all numbers made up for illustrative purposes only
That’s your problem here. YouTube’s revenue growth is less than 2% YoY. That’s below inflation. Meaning they effectively lose money.
Where did you get that number from?
And Inflationary costs are taken into account before profit, so no, they aren’t losing money.
YouTube is a public company, all numbers are publicly available.
Youtube was doing it for years before Google acquired them.
YouTube only existed for about 20 months before Google acquired them
It didn’t exist that long. And it didn’t allow you to watch 4K or even Full HD videos.
Breaking up big tech doesn’t mean that we all have to host our own YouTube.
It doesn’t. But you need to have a replacement. So, go ahead, and create a free video hosting!
They don’t have to be dicks about it. Neither do you.
87.7% of the users watch on mobile, they are this mad about 12.3% possibly having access to an adblock.
Do you mean 87.7% use the YouTube iOS/Android App or 87.7% use their smartphone to watch YouTube? Because in the latter case you also can use ReVanced, Firefox + Adblock, Invidious, etc.
Invidious (and other front ends) wouldn’t be effected by this
This is web and official app
I watch on mobile and have all ads blocked. There are multiple options a ton of people use
Insert smug “I run YouTube with Firefox with adblock installed” comment here. I’ve not seen any of the anti block stuff yet
[Laughs nervously in NewPipe]
deleted by creator
I was fine with ads a couple years ago, but the number, length and frequency of them keeps ramping up. This wouldn’t need to be such a struggle if they just were reasonable about it.
Me : clicks a helpful tutorial of 5 minutes. YT: here have an unskippable ad 5 seconds. Me: annoying but the creators have to make money somehow I guess. YT: and now here’s your skippable ad. Me: I just want this to be over with. YT content creator: Hello guys this video is sponsored by Raycons. 10 seconds blabbering on the product, skip skip Me: closes video.
Sponsorblock might be helpful for you on some of that at least.
Sponsor lock is a godsend
Use Revanced on phone. Works like a charm.
Does anyone else kinda miss when youtube was more informal, random, less edited, and more janky? Nowadays everybody has a title card, and a two minute intro greeting, high-end camera setup, and tightly rehearsed script. It’s like they all decided to just recreate the unnecessary bloat and ceremony from classical television, for the sake of “appearing professional” or something?
For example, a tutorial doesn’t need to begin with a “Hey guys, it’s your pal ASDFGHJKL. Have you ever got your foreskin trapped in a whatever and yada yada yada? Well today I’m gonna show you how to blah blah blah. Now let’s get into the video. But first a word from our sponsor Lockheed Martin…”
What’s with the “today”? I’m always watching it “today” by definition. And I wouldn’t have clicked it if I wasn’t in that particular predicament. Why not just immediately start showing the solution?
There is no being reasonable in a capitalist society. The only thing that matters is profit potential
It was never reasonable. Not ever.
If you’re old enough to remember the original need for pop-up blockers you would know that. Just 30 screens pop-up in a cascading order filling your screen with crap. Auto play video, auto-installing toolbars (Thanks
ObamaMicrosoft).I definitely remember those days, a lot of sites were just unusable, and I hear some places like the Fandom wiki are returning to that level.
I believe there is a small amount of ads it’s acceptable to live with, I do accept that content needs to be paid for somehow, but corporations can’t seem to ever accept a limit for themselves. Even though YouTube is already perfectly profitable and has been for years, it continues to escalate. Not to mention the rampant data-tracking that there is all over the place that people just accept because it’s invisible. Or that Google is working to weaken ad blocking and enhance tracking at a browser level.
It doesn’t matter if you made 1,5 billion dollars last year. If you are not making 2 this year, you are a bad business and should declare bankruptcy.
They would never not ramp up the ads, even if youtube was the most profitable thing ever.
There is something fundamentally wrong with Capitalism. Watching the unhinged ways corporations behave pushes me further to the left every day.
deleted by creator
corporations can’t seem to ever accept a limit for themselves.
This is the result of competition. When success is measured relative to others, it’s forever a moving target. Under this definition of success, self improvement is equally effective as sabotaging another. And as we can see, it’s not just businesses sabotaging one another. If a business can get away with sabotaging its own consumers, as it can in the case of a monopoly, a cartel, or regulatory capture, it will.
I kinda get your point, but is there even any competition when it comes to YouTube? Everybody pretty much accepts it’s the only viable publicly available online video publishing platform. Who are they even competing with? Twitch and TikTok work in a completely different ways that don’t really supplant it. Vimeo and Dailymotion are so small they might as well not exist. Seems like they are still keeping at it even bereft of competition.
And injected in the most halfassed points of the video. Surely they have the technology to figure out a better way to time the ads.
They definitely do and they did do that for a while, but apparently it changed.
Oh really how does it work now?
Unfortunately there’s too many people that just roll over and take it at much higher levels than is reasonable. They’ll stop when the normies start to walk away, and from what I can see that sits at about the Idiocracy TV scene level.
Removed by mod
Lol look at me change to piped
Cough invidious cough
Took me all of 30mins to spin up a local invidious instance. Worth every second
I installed a userscript today that plays ads in muted embeds hidden behind the actual player so that it effectively and quite literally blocks them while still leaving actual ublock disabled on the site. works pretty well.
EDIT: https://greasyfork.org/en/scripts/477464-beta-youtube-no-preroll-ads-undetectable
If I wanted to learn how to do that what should I search for?
not on my computer at the moment so I don’t have a copy of mine to send you but this one looks like a similar premise.
Do you mind updating with what you use when you get the chance? I think this solution is great, currently im using firefox with ad blocker but I do feel a bit quilty as some creators I enjoy dont get the ad revenue they deserve but it seems this way they still would get paid.
Sure thing. I’ll update my comment at around 2:30pm pacific time.
Revanced still going strong on mobile, which is where I watch YouTube 99% of the time.
Firefox and UBO still block all ads for me on YT and I’m not being blocked.
Same. YouTube started detecting UBO for me, but a quick UBO cache refresh and it was good as new.
…what? This headline makes no sense.
They could have fixed it with 1 word: “YouTube intensifies fight against ad-blockers BY showing pop-ups and users are frustrated.”
For some reason headlines don’t like to use prepositions.
anti-lgbtq headlines smh
Hahaha, had to reread the headline to understand what you said.
Yah, I still don’t get it.
deleted by creator
Users complain but 99% of the 0,01% that actually use adblockers will just continue, just like how internet “boycotts” always end, by going back to the dystopian status quo
https://www.statista.com/statistics/351862/adblocking-usage/
similar stats to elsewhere.
you should probably not pull numbers out of your arse
not only is this a seemingly random site that needs you to use an account to access part of the information, all you need to do is not look at a random site that pulls stats out of their arse like you say, they dont explain where the data comes from, they dont explain anything.
I dont need to pull random ass data from that sketch site, this small amount of legwork is far more than necessary nor what you deserve for being a dick about it: (lets not forget you just say “elsewhere” without showing us, well, anything)
firefox addon site users:
ublock origin: 6.713.504 adblocker ultimate: 2.286.976 adguard adblocker: 991.481 block site: 518.605 adblock plus: 4.236.338 ghostery: 1.104.375 adblock for firefox: 1.166.799
everything else is too small and inconsequential to mention, same with github, thats a total of 17.018.078, firefox usercount FROM firefox, about 188 million
https://data.firefox.com/dashboard/user-activity
since webstore doesnt use proper numbers we can only assume but:
adblock best adblocker: 10million+ adblock plus: 10million+ adaway: 2million+ ublock origin: 10million+
thats again, only super roughly but 32 million users compared to chromes rough 3.3 BILLION users
both of these may nto be exactly 0.01 % sure, but we are all inconsequential and mean nothing compared to the total count of uers, who barely know what a browser is, let alone what an adblocker is.
Google is not going to all this effort for a rounding error
Or maybe this is a proof of concept for completely blocking adblock across the web. YouTube is just a demo.
That can’t really be done to people who don’t use chrome. People who use chrome are morons though and might not realise they can just switch software.
“All this effort” is not a big investment for Google, and that rounding error is worth several millions. I’m sure the small team they put together is worth it even if ad blockers are very small.
Companies want to pursue growth, and every million is worth grabbing.
Here is another article on the study for north American stats. WSJ might be a capitalist shit rag but they rarely publish nonsense data
http://deloitte.wsj.com/cmo/are-consumers-adlergic-a-look-at-ad-blocking-habits-1522728141
That’s where the approx 30% for NA comes from.
Idk how accurate those addon numbers are, they’re probably not capturing stats for global numbers but user accounts are.
deleted by creator
When I read something like that, I don’t think “hey those are actual stats, wow!”. I actually think “hey those are actual stats, whoa!”. Kidding.
You’re being pedantic for no reason
It’s a generalization and their point was not the numbers. It was that in the past people complain about this kind of atuff, Google ignores it and people move on. Google probably even still continues to grow.
However, I think things have been shifting and that may not even end up being the case. Look at Unity.
Yes. Remember when everyone would leave reddit because of the API tax? 😂 reddit, front page of hypocrisy.
We’re here, aren’t we?
I left after over a decade. Haven’t been back and won’t.
I did fucking leave.
Plenty of people actually did leave reddit, myself included. It wasn’t the API tax though, that was just the beginning…
Really hoping some IPFS alternative takes off. Youtube has already been tanking in quality but no one changes because its a monopoly on online videos.
And if Twitter has shown us anything, it’s that people legitimately won’t leave a crappy platform unless there’s a significant popular and better alternative that can scale immediately to demand.
Not sure how an IPFS option would work. I get the bandwidth issue slightly goes away as we’d all kinda share that cost but not really. IPFS isn’t really free storage. Of all media shitty compression video is big and anyone who forgot to tune their torrent upload and accidently seeded something for too long knows you’ll run out of monthly bandwidth allotments very fast.
peertube is already pretty good. The commenting liking and sharing all work with activity pub. there is also owncast for live streaming. I understand peertube maybe implementing live streaming too.
It appears YT is the new cable television. Let’s see if it follows it to the grave.
I’ll watch from the sidelines, enjoying my subscription to nebula.
I was annoyed by this. Check out FREETUBE which is a private youtube client for pc, mac and linux. No ads and 100% private - take that google
