YouTube's plan backfires, people are installing better ad blockers
YouTube's plan backfires, people are installing better ad blockers
cross-posted from: https://lemdro.id/post/2883134 (!android@lemdro.id)
There are no better adblockers, uBlock Origin is all you need and is already updated to bypass it.
After YouTube started filling their search results with mostly shorts, I stopped using it for new stuff. It's terrible now.
Yeah youtubes attempt at being tiktok is just awful and they don't even have options to not have shorts show up in the feed. On top of shorts just being inferior versions of regular videos without functional controls
This is what gets me. Wanna show me shorts? Ok. But why the fuck am I not allowed to rewind a couple of seconds if I want to? It's an artificial, completely useless limitation that had no place in 2023.
So, no thanks.
Most of my browser addons are aimed at making YouTube usable. Hiding shorts is priority one
I started blocking those from appearing when they first showed up. There are a number of ways to do it. The Blocktube extension is one.
if you click ublock, select the settings cog, then in the tab that opens select 'my filters', you can enter the following to do the same thing:
www.youtube.com##.ytd-rich-section-renderer.style-scope
Personally I avoid installing too many extentions as they are quite literally apps that auto open whenever you just want to browse the web (regardless of if you're going to youtube, you're computer runs a youtube specific adblock)
Thank you for this
I switched to FreeTube and now all the shorts are on a separate page I can switch over to if I feel like watching them. It's also got SponsorBlock built in. Now I can enjoy youtube with a clean, faster interface and google isn't tracking a damn thing. All because google got greedy and made their user experience shit.
Google didn't get greedy, it's doing what it's been doing for years. Before resorting to plunging us into Matrix-like pods, they're trying to squeeze some more data out of users.
I only wish PiP worked the way it does in Firefox, not in Edge/Chromium. I like to have my browser next to full height video on my ultrawide, but PiP will not go beyond 1080 pixels tall.
Yeah, I hate how crappy search now is.
It'll show me a couple of videos, then shorts, then some kind of recommendation list. If I actually want to do a complete search for the thing, and only the thing, I'm looking for, I have to go to advanced options and specify I'm looking for videos. JUST videos.
I don't even care about the shorts showing up in search results. What really irks me is that you get like 3 videos related to search results, then some random unrelated shit, 3 relevant videos, more unrelated garbage, and then the rest of the actually relevant videos. I am specifically searching for something, just show me the damn thing.
I found an extension that gets rid of the shorts, thank god
Also if you have enhancer it has an option to turn off the shorts bar and convert shorts to real videos.
for real the discovery is terrible. it's all junk and it's a waste of my time.
the shorts tend to be so bad and pointless. occasionally there is someone who makes an effort, but the number of low effort and garbage ones made me stop looking at shorts ever.
Didn’t know about SponsorBlock until all this started. So many just found out ad blocking is possible.
I only heard about AdNauseum because of this whole debacle. It blocks ads, hasn't temporarily broken (as far as I have seen), and I set it to "click" 80% of all ads it sees.
I have probably screwed whatever profile they built on me, cost the ad buyers money bc clicks, hurt the conversion rate for purchases to cost google money, and even possibly made money for my favorite creators and sites (depending on how they're paid).
Though someone lmk if I am misunderstanding something about it.
Holy crap, now that is causing massive damage to advertisers. I didn’t know this existed either. If everyone used it, the entire internet would collapse because most of it is for-profit now, unlike 30 years ago (when I made my first site in notepad).
I discovered SponsorBlock after installing Smart Tube Next on a FireTV.
The other person's been downvoted pretty heavily so I'll volunteer to accept some.
Sponsorblock is a shitty tool for extremely selfish people that only hurts small-time content creators. You can't argue about your data privacy, malware, corporate profits, or Google. Sponsorships are literally the least invasive and most direct form of financial support the average person can get for their content without you paying them directly. YouTubers do it because Google is already fucking them over. There's absolutely no higher justification for it beyond annoyance at an extremely minor inconvenience and a sense of entitlement to the work of others.
You people would go to a little league baseball game and tear down the banner for Tom's Auto Care if you could. Not every attempt at making money is evil.
The creator isn’t losing money. They get paid to do the sponsorship. Skipping the segment has no effect on how much money they get because they already got it.
You people would go to a little league baseball game and tear down the banner for Tom's Auto Care if you could.
If someone came out and shoved the banner in my face and didn’t let me watch the game until several seconds had elapsed, yes, I’d tear the banner down too. Because it’s unacceptable.
But no one does that. The banner sits there in the outfield on the wall being unobtrusive and not interrupting the game or the flow of the game. That’s acceptable.
Make the ads unobtrusive and not interrupt the flow of the video and I don’t care. The problem is YT / YTers don’t do that. That’s why Sponser Block exists.
Sponsor block is a different beast. Should we really be doing that to our content creators? No, definitely not. Is it them or the advertising company that suffers?
Edit: Actually really surprised about this. Couple weeks ago people are sticking up for YT premium prices. Now, you are against helping the creators you watch.
The company, because the creator gets paid either way
If you weren't planning on paying for the product, the creator won't take any hit from you using sponsorblock. In fact, the advertiser won't either. Nobody will be hurt by it, because it was a massive waste of your time to start with.
Huh, Sponsorblock is basically muting TV ads like in the old days.
Why should I be forced to watch a sponsor almost always totally unrelated to the content I seek to watch, and that the YouTuber decided to upload?
My favorite aspect of sponsorblock is blocking the incredibly repetitive ubiquitous script that every single channel copies of like, subscribe, ring the notification bell.
You can still use sponsorblock and configure it to not skipping sponsor segments if you want, and still enjoying the benefits of automatically skipping useless segments such as intro, outro, subscription reminders, self promotion, recaps, etc.
You're absolutely right. Sponsorblock directly harms the average people making content, it has nothing to do with Google.
It's gross and reveals how much of the complaining about ads has absolutely nothing to do with privacy or malware or corporate profiteering or anything like that. These people are just nakedly selfish.
Wear those downvotes with pride. They mean you have a conscience and feel empathy.
Whatever, either i have to manually switch forward or sponsorblock does it for me. Second option is less annoying.
I watch YT about once a week and usually an hour or less. Premium isn’t worth it for that low of use. Sponsors, I skipped, always. I’ve never once purchased from a sponsor. I also skipped subscribe crap manually (I’m not logged in, I can’t).
SponsorBlock just does it for me, kinda nice. The creator gets paid by viewership so I have helped when I watch.
Lemmy isn’t seen by 98% of the public so my mentioning it hardly spreads further awareness. What did spread it was YT themselves cracking down. It made news headlines and my own mother asked I come over and install one.
YT Streisand Effected themselves. They demanded we not use them and got more people using them because of it.
Now, my mom won’t see Google ads anywhere, not just YT. What a smart move because I know there’s probably a million new UBlock users.
The content creators get paid the exact same whether I skip the sponsor segment or not. YouTube doesn't track that, or not in a way they share with anyone else at any rate. Sponsors aren't going to pay the content creators less due to skips since they literally cannot see who skips the segment.
In other words, it doesn't hurt the content creator in the slightest.
There’s also the option of biting the bullet and paying for YouTube Premium.
No. Never. I'd rather stop using YT at all than giving in to coerced user-tracking.
I mean, I might have considered paying for YT premium if I thought it offered some value (other than disabling ads) but I won't sure as hell pay for anything that any company is trying to blackmail me into.
I mean you didn't buy it before so why would you now? You don't need excuses. You just don't want to pay for it. Own it.
I use it because YouTube music is included and it's great while driving, it allows background play even with the screen off (I'm talking about mobile).
There's something more, but nothing that a pro user cannot already do with third tools.
But that's the wrong way around. They don't want you to pay, they make their money through advertising. They make far more money from advertiser's paying to put up ads than they ever make from people paying for premium.
Same as with Facebook now bringing in an ad-free version (in the EU anyway) - they charge higher than is reasonable so that people will opt for the ad-supported free version instead.
It's not that you are blackmailed into paying premium, it's that you're encouraged not to as a way of explicitly consenting to ads.
Basically, you're damned if you do, damned if you don't.
Abandoning YouTube is seriously more difficult than abandoning other "non-fediverse" general social media platforms, since it's got so much useful content that gets straight up ruined by the company that owns the website.
I doubt PeerTube is anything better than Vimeo, at least for now, things can improve after all.
At this point, I don't even care about the user tracking. I just don't want to sit through unskippable ads anymore. Especially when it's the same ad over and over again.
Well then you're in luck, you have a lot of options for removing ads before giving money to YouTube.
I love that all the centralized social media networks are scrambling to become shitty for profits right around the time users are realizing that they don’t need centralized servers to host their user-generated content. Users can take their content wherever they want and let these platforms die.
I'm not sure if we manage to do the same for video though; hosting these costs a lot more.
Maybe we don't need 4K 60FPS video to show Mr. Beast giving away more crap. Just because we can up the quality, doesn't mean we should. Or maybe client-side real-time AI upscaling will make this a non-issue.
Is there some reason you can't start up a decentralized content hosting platform. Just let anyone with a spare hd and a spare pc at home join up?
Like I guess I don't really want anything illegal on my PC.... Maybe this plan is awful.
This 100%. Look at forums. Back in the early days, there were lots of little independent forums. Sites like Reddit took over because you could easily keep your identity across multiple forums and see the content from all your communities on one page. We gained convenience, but didn't think too hard about what we were losing or who we were losing it to. Then along came enshittification and we are collectively realizing what we lost. Federation is of course the solution. As I see it, the only missing piece is monetization. Platforms like YouTube make it easy to monetize page views, Twitter / X is doing the same. That's much harder in the fediverse.
Patreon for monification?
Ads suck. And honestly, if we had less content creators, they'd be fine. There are a lot of absolutely degenerates out there. Let's cull the herd a bit and let us speak individually with our wallets.
you could easily keep your identity across multiple forums and see the content from all your communities on one page
RSS feeds have provided this experience for years. The problem is that a lot of sites stopped serving RSS feeds for their content. But sites like rss.app and openrss can be used to get RSS feeds for sites that don't have them.
It's like we're reverting to the days you would go to homestarrunner.com, illwillpress, etc to see content from people you actually wanted to see content from. Honestly looking forward to it
Youtube is a perfect example of why ad blockers exist. They use ridiculous ad volumes and spy on their users for data to sell.
uBlock Origin FTW!
I love that, in a competition between a corporation worth hundreds of billions of dollars and a FOSS project, all Google managed to do was annoy uBlock Origin users for like a week. I just had to manually update the extension and restart my browser a few times.
I have been lucky, no ads, no message. Probably my region gets the updates so late uBlock has already compensated.
If the numbers ghostery and that are posting is true then overall it's working out as intended.
And they increased the fucking price for YouTube premium.
I don't think they did a proper cost-benefit analysis for this one. Feels like the new CEO learned of ad blockers and put down a diktat.
No, I think the advertisers learned of ad blockers and started putting pressure on the new CEO. "Why am I paying you $X,000,000 for an ad buy that people can just block? And you're not doing anything about it?!"
So they put some development resources behind it, make some noise, get the internet in a tizzy, so the advertisers feel like they're being heard and listened to and some progress is being made. Then later they can say, "hey look, less than 1% of ads are being blocked on our platform but views have gone up by 6%, so we'll only increase the ad cost by 5% this year and call it even."
Boom, everyone wins and they can drop it, at the cost of just a little bit of their dignity and self-respect.
Meanwhile, Youtube engineers and uBlock Origin volunteers are in a war of attrition, updating both the website (youtube, to block ublock) and uBlock Origin (the ad blocker, to unblock the ublock blocker) multiple times a day every day
I feel like uBlock Origin has been coming out ahead more often than not. I haven't had to manually refresh my lists for the last few days.
Yep, it's going to be a constant game of cat-and-mouse from now on. Google isn't going to relent on this.
Reminds me of the IM wars back in the latter 90s / early 00s. At one point, briefly, AIM and Trillian were pushing updates to negate each other every few hours.
Ublock Origin works
Brave is ass
Spread the word to install firefox based browser, use different frontends to block youtube ads in browser, Invidious and use piped youtube apps on android to block youtbe ads: Newpipe
is there a way to simply install a addon in firefox to redirect all youtube links to piped links?
Anything that can be done to destroy youtubes monopoly is a good thing.
Not going to happen with self hosted stuff. People really have no idea how much storage or bandwidth YouTube uses.
Personally I just use Redirector because all the add-ons specific for invidious are either broken or set to instances that are dead!
Thanks for the newpipe suggestion!
piped for desktop and libretube for mobile also a great option
And my work profile on my phone tells me to get fucked :(
Dammit
...or you can install firefox on android with uBlock origin and many other extensions, and use mobile youtube website
I'm using Firefox and ublock on Android and it's great but YouTube via mobile browser is definitely the worst experience after the official youtube app. LibreTube, NewPipe, PipePipe are all better options. Revanced is probably the best in theory but takes more work to get running. These are just the ones I've tried but there are even more options. I'm currently using PipePipe and it's great.
I had uBlock Origin installed since forever, are people just finding out about it?
More like most people don't have the patience to learn the difference between uBlock and UBlock Origin. Also, a lot of people just install Ad Block because they you tell them to install a ad blocker, they just install the one called AdBlock.
Not really making fun of it, just genuinely curious. Are people still installing Adblock Plus? It has had an Acceptable Ads Committee for over a decade now. What were people using if not that?
Haha look at these people who doesn't know everything in the world from birth!
Adblock plus was the standard for so long until maybe 5 or so years ago when they were bought out or something and they were hinting at letting some ads in. I think only the very online people switched to uBlock Origin before Adblock Plus tanked itself. That is all from hazy memory but it wouldn't surprise me that normies got recommended Adblock Plus and used it until it didn't work right only to seek out better options now that youtube is serving them so many ads.
NewPipe in my mobile and FreeTube in my desktop. Fuck you Google
it's only a matter of time before those don't work anymore
It will always be a technology race. And it's one that so far the content platforms have lost.
Especially given they always abuse the upper hand when they have it, motivating the coding community to solve that problem right quick.
Been using these apps for years, when YT does their crap the community gets it fixed and rolled out within a few days (worst has been two weeks).
Lots of thankless devs and contributors dedicated to preventing YouTube from screwing us over!
True, but there will be New Solutions. Or no YT for me at least. I am not willing to watch a single stupid add. Not one.
This is the way.
They should fucking do an experiment - 2€/$ a month for an ad-free subscription and 3€/$ a month for higher video quality+no ads subscription. I would fucking pour my money into it.
Oh wait, that would not solve lack of sponsorblock. I guess I am not interested then...
They literally had that experiment with Premium Light. €6 for ad free watching, it was all I needed. But they literally sent out a mail they were stopping this tier right before they started implementing more anti-ad blocking measures.
Oddly enough, the "lite" subscription was introduced in some other countries during the time they shut it off in the launch countries.
I wonder if they're testing willingness to spend using the cheaper sub, then pulling it if it turns out people are likely to buy the pricier plan once the lower tier isn't available anymore?
2€/$ a month for an ad-free subscription and 3€/$ a month for higher video quality+no ads subscription
sponsorblock
This is basically Nebula lol, minus the video quality tiering
Nebula can only afford to do that because basically nobody who subs to nebula actually watches the videos on it. They did a video about their revenue model and people treat it as a way to support the creators, not to actually watch content
Nebula is pretty awesome and the type of content is great. I miss some light entertainment content though, so the network effect is at work. Still, nebula is the only streaming platform I'd consider subscribing as their policy is great and they do provide good value.
Meh I had nebula a couple years ago and it had some missing features and fairly poor depth of content. The same few bits constantly being pushed. I'm hopeful it improves but I wasn't using it.
They'd absolutely 100% be losing money with a $2 ad free tier. Ads make significantly more than that per user per month. Same with your """solution""" for higher res video. Bandwidth is goddamn expensive.
I agree, but they'd get a large number of users to subscribe.
And then maybe they wouldn't complain when they raised the price to $3. And a few months later maybe $3.50. Then $5.
A few years ago, people wouldn't have paid over $15 for a standard Netflix tier without 4K. But the way to boil a frog is to make them nice and comfy in lukewarm water, then keep increasing the temperature slowly... So even if they lose money, maybe a low price for the ad-free YouTube could make sense, from a business perspective.
Plus, no way would it ever stay at that price. Nothing ever does. The only service I pay for now is spotting, and that's just to have ad-free music on my half-hour drive to work.
I completely agree the price is far too high.
I actually do subscribe but only because I get a deal through my mobile network that, long story short, cuts the price by two thirds.
I can’t understand their pricing policy at all. And they’re doing a terrible job at explaining their cost basis if it’s actually what it costs to serve video to us (highly doubt it).
Linus Tech Tips did a nice video on that: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MDsJJRNXjYI
But it should not be done by LTT, but by Google.
Just this morning all the posts (here on Lemmy) were about how everyone was uninstalling their adblockers.
That article was full of such blatantly misleading crap. Headline talks about record number of adblocker uninstalls, but the actual data says it was an uptick in both installs and uninstalls. In other words it was people cycling through different adblockers trying to find one that still worked.
I actually removed a lot of ad blockers from all my devices once I found that uBO could do it all. That could be what they are seeing from others as well, perhaps!
And that didn't mention ublock origion, the blocker that still works...
It did at the very very bottom. I almost missed it.
IDK why anyone uses anything else. It has street cred, it improves response times, it is ideologically just about blocking ads
I use tracker blockers and containers too, but every machine that has been in my hands for more than 10 minutes has it installed
Stupid Wired article was stupid.
It's like war propaganda, both sides are eager to claim they're winning lol
Not everybody is.
That's the thing, even if 95% of users currently using ad blockers block ads anyway or leave the service, YouTube still wins big.
They aren't worried at all about alienating users from which they can't extract ad revenue. Those on the margin that turn off ad blockers or subscribe to a paid plan are the target, not everyone else.
This doesn't make sense because they have the monopoly on video now. By monetizing a bit they are creating a a huge demand for a competitor, risking their monopoly.
I want to believe that you are right - but don't think you are. I wanted to switch over to rumble. But, except two, none of the creators i regularly watch are there. Fine, let's try Odysee: geoblocking my location atm.
The only reason, why i use other platforms is Grayjay. It aggregates content from wherever you want and creates one feed. If it wasn't for this app, i'd probably only use YT with better adblocks.
That is the extent of their monopoly right now.
Having a monopoly is why it makes sense.
Who else is gonna spend billions building up a legitimate competitor in a extraordinarily expensive business where almost everyone loses money?
Part of the value of a service is the size of it's user base, not just the size of the monetized user base. Right now, Youtube is just about the only game in town, but if half their users just Leave, even if it was the half that used effective ad blockers, the value of the site as a whole, for creators and advertisers both, is diminished.
That's true to all extent, but the more present online folks do end up driving behaviors about regular users as well. There was a tube when even having an ad blocker at all was a "power user" thing, now everyone does it. If they fail to accommodate the people that will put energy into circumventing ads then they will just find and normalize a new work around.
It's similar to content piracy. You will never get rid of piracy altogether, but if you make content accessible and affordable you can mitigate how common it is.
For YouTube, they need to balance how intrusive the ads are against how easy it is to get around them.
That's exactly what they're trying to do. They're trying to make it harder to get around them while maintaining them more intrusive.
So today I've seen this article saying YouTube failed and another saying they've succeeded because of record uninstalls of adblockers.
inb4 those uninstalls were just because they were installing better adblockers. /j
because of record uninstalls of adblockers
That's how you know it's bullshit, because every major ad blocker allows you to disable per site. There's no need to uninstall. The claim that they're being uninstalled was written by uneducated propagandists.
Considering that, after Netflix enabled anti account sharing, they got an increase in subscriptions, I've lost faith in humanity, and believe YouTube will succeed in the same way
But that's because most people watch Netflix through smart TVs and those TVs are closed systems that don't have apps, or very limited ones. Trying to get people who barely understand how to operate their remote to stream from their computer or other device, isn't going to happen.
Well, it would be bad to admit that it was a failure.
who could have seen this coming
I don't know what the whole fuzz was / is about, it's years now that I unwillingly watched ads, anywhere. So easy, piehole, newpipe, avoid any Microsoft shit, you just have to be ready to learn a bit, it's not rocket science. Ok, rocket science helped, but that's not the point...
I have to learn??!! Fuck it where do I sign up for you're pro or whatever
/$
Based, fuck YouTube
I agree sadly most of the content is there already
I dont even mind ads when its like one minute for 20 minutes of footage. Pluto TV is free to use and has commercial breaks but they never really bother me because they aren't that annoying and i get a lot of MST3K before I watch them. Youtube ad are cancer in comparison.
Seriously, I wouldn't even bother futzing with adblockers on my Android TV if it was reasonable, but fucking 45 seconds of ads for every 5 minutes of content is just ridiculous. I almost wonder if it was all an experiment to see how much they could get away with...
They probably expiremented an answer to that question and came to find it was: "not enough". So now they become desperate to get out of the reds.
Same the normal ads aren't much of an issue for me, especially since some are skippabke. But about a year or so ago, I was getting 30 minute ads. They were skippable, but if I was just playing the shows in the living room while making dinner in the kitchen or whatever, I had to constantly go hit the button on the remote or be stuck watching 30 minute infomercial for a product I'd never even consider buying. Are they still allowing these long ads?
that's the funny part. i also didn't mind ads once in a while, but when i started looking for a YT solution i not only found one but i also found sponsorblock. i didn't know of it before the YT bs. now i just don't see ads at all. thanks YT!
The race is on. Bitch.
reminds me of how bugs develop into superbugs after building resistance to antibiotics
That's a good example of unintended consequences. Another is alcohol becoming really dangerous on the black market once Prohibition happened in the US.
Drugs going through that now. I took some stuff in college. No way would I touch it today. Fentinyl in everything.
Good, fuck those greedy bastards. yt-dlp + mpv with sponsorblock FTW, bonus points for stopping using a YouTube account altogether and using RSS feeds for your subscriptions instead.
Bro... How to setup RSS feed for YouTube subscriptions...
Just replace CHANNEL_ID with the ID of the channel you want to get the RSS feed from (to my knowledge it's only limited to the last 15 items) : https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=CHANNEL_ID
Or using curl and sed : curl -s youtube_channel_url | sed -n 's/.title="RSS"\shref="[^"]./\1/p'
mpv with sponsorblock
How?
Look under Sponsorblock Options https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp
In your mpv.conf you can just add ytdl-raw-options sponsorblock remove all
Don't watch it. I mean they have to make money. I block ads I don't care and I'm not making up bs to justify it. I don't cause I want to and I can.
I'm more than happy to support my favourite content creators by other means, be it simple donation or merch. I will never subject myself to stupid ads, no matter the reason.
What happened to the idea of small, non-intrusive banner ads? Of course it's not realistic to expect those on YouTube and they bring much less revenue compared to in-your-face video interstitials per impression, but I'm much more likely to whitelist those.
What happened to the idea of small, non-intrusive banner ads
You answered your own question:
they bring much less revenue compared to in-your-face video interstitials per impression
And shortsighted profit driven thinking - can make a load more money now even if some users are pissed off, don't worry about long term user retention. Oh what!?! The usersbase is pissed and leaving/blocking things, better double down to keep them profits high in the mean time...
Can't believe I'm actually missing the days of the "you're the 1000th visitor" banner ads.
They don’t make any money.
I will never submit.
I went the route of accepting their 2-month trial of Premium, and immediately disabled it from continuing after the 2 months. Hopefully that's enough time to come up with an acceptable solution that works the way I want it to. Honestly, if Premium was like $5/month, they'd get my money. But for almost triple that? Fuck no, never happening.
Triple for now. After a while they will quadruple it. People will be a paying 100$+ on subscription fees
There was a post yesterday saying that the price of YT Premium Family in Australia is almost literally doubling next month (+88% IIRC). People from a few other regions reported similar. Completely insane.
Firefox with ublock / Libretube / Libretube with Sponsorblock / Newpipe / Piped website if not on mobile.
EDIT: I currently use Firefox with uBlock on desktop and Libretube with Sponsorblock (integrated) on android.
Does any of those support YouTube shorts?
Firefox with ublock without any problems, and on my smart tv with smarttubenext I see them as well.
Newpipe on android doesn't seem to show them, but I haven't really looked for it either, maybe I'm just missing a setting somewhere.
Yes / yes / yes / no / yes
Shorts are basically YouTube videos forced into a custom UI. There are still ways to force Shorts to load in the default UI.
So the article.claims that Youtube's plan backfired because uninstall rates on some AD blockers increased and a percentage of those users cited "YouTube" as the reason.
I don't know if it's just me but that's a massive stretch. I would like to hear numbers from YouTube themselves before jumping to any conclusions. These companies operate on scale and usually have enough data to back these decisions. Can it go wrong, sure. Has it already backfired. Not sure.
My ad blocker was working so well I didn't even realize I had it installed and blocking ads on YouTube. I don't mind watching a few ads as long as it doesn't get out of hand.
I actually used to have all ad blockers turned off for YouTube because I wanted to support all my favorite creators on there. But then YouTube took away the daily suggestions because I don't let it track my history. So I said "fuck it" and turned all the adblockers back on.
Now I just support the creators I care to via Nebula and their various Patreons.
took away the daily suggestions because I don’t let it track my history
the funny thing is, if you go to a non logged in session, the suggestion page works fine. It was such an arbitratry grab for the user to consent to them collecting your data. I just bookmarked the subscriptions page and only go there now
Same I had no idea what anyone was talking about.
I just wonder how much of Chome's browser share Google is willing to lose over this.
I quit YouTube because the ads were overwhelming, and quality content is so rare.
There is a ton of quality content, I watch 3 hours a day and can't make a dent on my "watch later" queue.
News, popular science, hobbies, humor, tech...
There's tons of old movies and TV shows on YouTube. That alone is hours of content worth watching if you can block the ads.
I'm guessing this isn't what YouTube had in mind when they started this campaign.
To quote The Joker, "It'll be funny if it weren't so pathetic...oh, what the heck, I'll laugh anyways!" 🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣
I really like freetube on desktop, since I have liked the move towards less dependency on accounts. And freetube let's me have a custom feed without needing an account.
And I love the built in sponsorblock and channel blocking feature too.
+1 for FreeTube. It's so customizable. Besides the ad blocking and sponsor blocking by default, there are SO MANY features and interface improvements. Never going back.
I was looking at freetube as a potential solution, as at a quick glance, it seems to do most of the things I want. But honestly, I doubt it will be long before they start implementing systems to block such apps from being able to access YouTube content.
i have yet to see a single anti-adblock pop-up on youtube lmao
Me neither. I've tested Brave, Firefox and LibreWolf+uBlock Origin on desktop. Nothing. Firefox, Iceraven, Brave and NewPipe on Android. Still nothing.
What gives?
Well, besides YouTube giving us videos without ads...
I got them on Firefox with Ublock Origin but only with my VPN on US or Canadian servers. Then a few days later, even on those servers they disappeared. Haven't seen one since those first few.
Someone please add a vivaldi-like tab tiling feature in Firefox so I can switch to it and leave the chromium cancer away.
Hey using Firefox here too, but why Chromium is so bad?
Tab tiling?
Being able to show multiple webpages at once in the same window
On windows, Firefox + uBlock Origin. On Mac and iOS, Safari + Adguard.
why not firefox + ublock on mac? safari's so obnoxious to use
I switched to this a few days ago, and it was working great till last night. Now youtube just comes up to the Ad Blocker Detected message and nothing plays. Edit Nevermind. I just discovered that Firefox had also installed AdBlock for some reason without my knowledge. I removed AdBlock and it works again.
Or use Orion, which is Safari but better
Plus Pi-hole on just about any device (just to be sure).
But it does not help against YouTube ads trough
Seriously just use invidious. Ad-free + doesn't hard consume your resources
Somehow, I'm not even able to see ads on my system. I have firefox with ublock, sync on my three systems macOS, linux and windows. Not a single ad in years. I've tried to disable ublock, just to see the mess, and it still wont play ads. Lol. Anyway, I will stop watching youtube before watching ads. I always watch the sponsor thing tho.
Does your browser block ads by default? Some browsers come with their own adblocker.
I have a ton of extensions installed on firefox. Mostly pivacy stuff so I guess I have some kind of other adblocker active.
With sponsor block on I dont think the internet makes a cent off of me. I am probably just leeching resources. Which is good.
How did YouTube become the monopoly it is? Seems they were always riding Vimeo’s coattails and have been rewarded handsomely for it.
How did YouTube become the monopoly it is?
Back then Google was "do no evil", and they had the infrastructure and the finances to support an endeavor like YouTube.
For some reason, I'd never heard of vimeo until YouTube was already the default video powerhouse.
Google was willing to lose money for awhile.
indeed, this is this unfair advantage to these silicon valley behemots.
Storage, YouTube has way more data (crap) uploaded to it than vimeo.
From my perspective it was ease of use. I remember back in the day ( ~2009 ) that youtube became the defacto standard because its ui was simple, it loaded quickly, it was straight to the point, free, didnt require login and you could upload content straight from your android phone after recording it. So sharing was pretty much instant.
After that they came up with policies to help people create actual content ( reward content that had thought put into it, reward creators etc ) which helped with the rise of quality content and make youtube in the youtube it was today.
Vimeo is not for the same purpose. It's more B2B. I read somewhere that after a certain threshold they start billing you for views.
What prevents them from going in video adds? Technically difficult? Or what?
Sponsorblock basically already bypasses this.
In video ads = no relevant ads based on the user. Less relevant ads = less revenue generated for people paying YouTube for hosting those ads. Thus, people would pay less to YouTube to host ads. Thus, less profits for YouTube.
Plus as another dude said: Sponsorblock.
I think it wouldn't be that dificult to figure out what is interesting for people watching the video since channels themselves already usually have a target audience. If I am watching a video from a dude who focus on video games or tech odds are I'd be more interested in tech adds. But if Google REALLY wants to know what we need/want then yeah maybe you're right. Shit it happened so many times me just saying the word pizza would set off a pizza ad later in my phone. These mfers want to inject ads in our souls.
Why can't YouTube just render the video on the fly with the relevant add?
There's no reason they can't mix relevant ads in the video stream itself. It's just technically more expensive and complex.
In video ads, even those by the content creators themselves, can generally be dealt with using SponsorBlock. This is community driven, users mark the segment of the video that's just sponsor filler or credits or whatever.
You can even get a NewPipe fork that includes SponsorBlock.
I think doing that with programmatic ads would be difficult. Maybe hard coding a specific creative would be feasible.
jesus christ dude
They think they can do whatever they want but companies have been shown wrong time and time again.
As a read yesterday "we have learnt from history that we don't learnt from history".
Hah. Eat shit and die youtube.
Send email to your fav. Youtubers to start a channel on Odyssey. Hope we get a comparable alternative. Odyssey is pretty good. Load time is less and video quality is great. Just need content creators. Does anyone know if Odyssey pays its content creators?
Like a week ago, the company behind Odyssey lost a lawsuit and will be shutting down. As of now, no one knows what happens to Odyssey in the future. Maybe some other company buys it and continues to run it. Maybe it changes into something totally different. Maybe it just shuts down.
Odysee is based on Lbry, so content creators can get crypto that is openly tradeable for regular money. So yes.
Yeah you heard them - Firefox.
Lmao
Cry more, google
Streisand effect
Umm no, NewPipe is not a website. That would be invidious/piped.
Idk if others are unaware, but there is a simple way to just google a video and not get ads. That is all i will say.
Vivaldi's stock built in ad blocking has still been working for me, have yet to see an ad.
Honestly, Google did this to themselves with not properly vetting the advertisers that they sell space to, and with oversaturation of ads.
If they'd have stopped granting ad space to scammers and malware spreaders, and if they'd have stopped adding advertisements at the line most people find tolerable (which seems to be a single ad between videos... not multiple at a time, and certainly no mid-rolls), they wouldn't have triggered quite the level of ad blocking that they did.
I see this "problem" that they have as being entirely of their own making.
Technology circumvention and copyright infringement are just about the only power consumers have against the near monopolies and cartel like behavior from the tech/media industry since our government regulators have been neutered.
I am grandfathered into a family Premium plan from the old Youtube Red days. The price is close to doubling come April. In the absence of competition or government intervention to punish anti-compeitive, anti-consumer behaviour I will be relying on ad-blocking and other circumvention measures next year. I am willing to pay a fair price but costs of living have gone up a lot while incomes for regular people are stagnant. The executives running these companies are completely disconnected from reality.
YouTube is like a time killing drug. I'm trying to get rid of it. Any advice?
Books aren't feeding as much off of the FOMO angle of stuff
If you're looking for advice for a less-addictive video service, and you want to support creators, Nebula.
New Pipe is also a great little YT client, less addictive in that there's no suggestion algorithm, so you need to know what you want to watch.
Don’t install an ad blocker. You’ll be looking for something else in no time.
NewPipe, just see what you want to see
but i saw another article saying that adblocker usage dropped by like ... meh i dunno 80% or some awful figure that I didn't want to believe.
i'd rather live in the version of the world where this one is true, that nobody is installing adblockers, but i know better (sometimes) than to simply succumb to confirmation bias...
if youtube were smart though, it'd make ads less shitty, intrusive, and obnoxious.
If you read the article (or the comments), you'd know the title is misleading. People are uninstalling ad blockers because they're installing better ones.
I saw that one from Wired but didn't post it because the body itself referenced increased installations of some adblockers. The title seemed like a strange conclusion to draw from it all.
I commented elsewhere, but the headline was referencing an 80% rise in uninstalls during the month, but the article itself revealed that there was a matching rise in installs during that same month. In other words it was people uninstalling their old adblockers and installing a new one, cycling through them to find one that worked.
Next logical step is to modify the uploaded video itself to contain ads around the video frame or on automatically detected clear surfaces in the video.
Controversial take but:
As for myself personally, I watched YouTube with ads for the last 2 or 3 years, and more recently I decided to start paying for YouTube Premium.
YouTube Premium made sense for me because:
Before all of that, I used to use YouTube Vanced (RIP) and NewPipe, both great though not entirely legit ways of bypassing ads and downloading videos. I still use the latter to archive the really good content I come across.
If you're ok to pay for YouTube, but it's too expensive for the value you get out of it, there are alternative approaches. You can spoof your location and buy YouTube Premium in another country, like Turkey or India, and get it for as low as $2 a month. Google doesn't crack down on this much at the time of writing.
I can understand your point of view. I was grandfathered in at $16 a month for the family plan for years since I was around from the beginning. Then I got an email telling me it's going up to $22 a month. I used premium for music and ad free only. I don't care about movies or anything else. I would still happily be paying for premium today at the understandable $16 dollars but they got greedy so now I use Revanced and pay nothing. I am also trying out Grayjay since it combines a lot of platforms.
Oh wow that really is expensive. Americans do make more money on average than Europeans, but goddamn does your stuff cost a lot of money sometimes.
I think it's €15 here?
EDIT:
Ah, for the family plan. Just reread. Not sure what that is here.
YouTube provides two ways to "pay" for your content: with ads, or by paying for premium.
Not quite, unfortunately. You can pay by watching ads in addition to being surveiled, or by paying for premium and being surveiled potentially even harder (because you have to have an account with personal and payment information). Google does not stop tracking you and selling your profile just because you pay for Premium, so it's not an option for me.
I hadn't thought of it from a privacy perspective.
I couldn't imagine using YouTube not signed in because of the dogs**t recommendations you get then. I imagine if you're signed in the privacy loss is not significantly less than if you paid for Premium too.
I also use GMail so I'm already f***ed from that. I've basically given up on privacy at any other time than when I want to do private things, and I use a VPN and private browser.
They're absolutely within their rights to try and block ad-blockers. And users are fully within their rights to circumvent the blocks in order to protect their privacy and the security of their machines and the data on them, as Google has proven repeatedly to be either uncaring or incompetent when it comes to ensuring the ads they serve aren't spreading malware.
And users are fully within their rights to circumvent the blocks
This is factually false (depending on your country).
From a quick Google search (ironic) the following seems to be true:
Blocking is not, in itself, illegal. However, circumventing restrictions on content, like what YouTube has added recently, is.
See this article: https://blockadblock.com/adblocking/adblockers-dont-break-the-law-except-when-they-do/
I just made my own extension to get rid of ads. I didn’t want to wait for other blockers to figure it out so I found a way that worked for me.
But yeah, get fucked YouTube.
So what was the way to ultimately crush YouTube ads?
Oh I definitely don’t have a better plan than ublock origin folks, they are still the best. But there’s also a way to programmatically exploit the skipable ads to instantly skip without any countdown shenanigans. It’s not blocking the ads but I never see them. And it was a good stopgap for when the shit first hit the fan.
YouTube will win this battle.
About time. I'd believe they are losing when Chromium market share sees a dip
These tech companies have underestimated their utility. They are mostly providing mindless time wasters. If you try to charge money or create inconvenience, people will look for something else to do.
Their attention is your lifeblood, and you’re actively giving them reasons to look elsewhere. The VC grow-at-all-costs business model is fundamentally flawed. It doesn’t scale when profitability becomes a priority.
👍
My attention is all the currency YouTube will ever get from me - and it should be enough. If I post videos to YouTube (for nothing in return) and I talk to people about videos I saw on YouTube or link them to videos - then I am a net gain for Google and they should treat me as such. If anything, they should be working (nicely) to try to get me to want to pay (or view ads) and just be thankful I'm there if I don't pay (or view ads). Instead they've chosen to work at ensuring everyone is so goddamn pissed off at their bullshit that they'd rather make it their full-time job to never give them another dime. Good job, Google! Smart!
Edit: Oh look, half a dozen lectures about how Google has to make money somehow. Hi there YouTube shills, I thought I would see you here.
Look I hate YouTube ads too, and ads in general, but let's say every user of a service is like you. Attention is all the currency they'll ever get from you, that's totally cool, absolutely. I'm totally that way too. But they've got to make money somehow, so if you're not the paying customer, someone else has to be.
I'm not saying it has to be ad sales either, but if we want a world in which we can use services for free without ads, we need to come up with an alternative way for them to make money. It has to come from somewhere, and by the bucketload.
If every user thinks like you, then it doesn't matter how many people you talk to or share links with, you're not a net gain on their service, you bring nothing to it.
Why should they, or anybody, be thankful that you honour them with your presence, if you contribute nothing of value? What makes you so entitled to use somebody's product for free with no strings attached?
Ads suck, I'm eager for us to move past them once we figure out an alternative that keeps products in business and us receiving things for free. But we can't deny the reality we live in right now either. Even huge companies like Google (who yes, do suck) have to make money to survive.
I will quite happily pay a reasonable price for the privilege of avoiding ads.
I understand why people block ads, even though they are a a free tier, even if I don’t agree with it.
The fact that the cost of YouTube Premium almost doubled overnight is making me rethink my ethics, when my current subscription is up for renewal, I will be reassessing whether to cease watching YouTube, watch YouTube with ads or determine another way of supporting content creators.
You sound like you'd pay someone "with exposure" for their work.
I pay for Premium now since it includes music streaming which is convenient to use. If they raise the price too much, I'll absolutely just go back to mp3s and deal with the ads on YouTube and just watch less content on there. $15 is about my cap before I do that.
Youtube produces almost none of their own content, instead they rely on other humans to create that content.
Use your ad blocker if you want, but stop treating youtubers as google employees (they’re not, they often have a much more frustrating relationship than you do) and start supporting them through other means.
To you, those people are just helping you waste your time. if that’s your real argument here, stop wasting your fucking time and do something else more worth your precious time, or start supporting content producers directly through non-youtube methods. Or just stop fucking watching.
Those people aren’t on youtube because they’re buying into corporate google dick-wrangling, they want to produce videos and have them get watched, and youtube is a place that hosts their videos for free AND gives them ad revenue share for hosting youtube ads.
You aren’t some hero for adblocking youtube but still watching it. google won’t notice your small dip in their revenue, but the youtuber who made it will.
Wanna support the people who entertain you (or, i guess, “waste your time”, if that’s what you consider entertainment to be — if all you want is to waste your time, don’t ads do the same thing for you?). Pay them directly for their content. Want to take a fake stand that supports nobody but yourself and your own inconveniences, install an ad blocker and boast on the internet about how you’re totally fucking over google and the people who create youtube content by doing so. But don’t treat yourself like some hero for doing so.
You could've stopped after the second paragraph.
If content creators provide 90% or even 60% of value to YouTube, why is Google a trillion dollar company while major content creators are fighting for scraps that fall from their table? Why are content creators who aren’t in the top tier compensated so little for what they bring to the table?
YouTube is nothing without content. Unionize. Stand together and get paid what you’re worth.
Who are you gonna defend next, the landlords?
Lol what an unhinged rant.
Thank you me for using Adblock. You are welcome me. Couldn't have done it without me. I am my hero. Thanks me.
The modern Internet community has an interestingly illogical take on free services. Either use them or pay for an alternative. But the average user has grown up on free services and will happily insist on having their cake and eating it too