YouTube is Losing The War Against Adblockers

AnActOfCreation@programming.dev to Technology@lemmy.world – 1170 points –
howtogeek.com
  • YouTube is intensifying efforts to combat adblockers, including blocking video playback and warning users of potential account suspension.
  • Increased ads on YouTube have driven many users to adblockers, hurting both YouTube’s ad revenue and content creators reliant on ad-based income.
  • Despite these measures, many users are leaving YouTube or finding workarounds, leading creators to seek alternative revenue streams off-platform.
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The other day I visited youtube without any add-ons and concluded I'd rather do anything else than use youtube under those conditions.

legit, if youtube ever beats ublock origin, i'll just stop watching youtube

Its an all out assault on half your senses without an adblocker. Literal torture.

The entire web is like that without an ad blocker these days.

I miss those cheeky gif banners from the 2000s

[With hindsight] The commercial use of the internet should never have been allowed.

I want the internet to be a network of digital libraries...communication, public events and sharing space...personal pages...services...the commercial motive starts from there and eventually consumes the rest :/

I reckon without the rule changes in 1993-94 allowing commercial use that the internet would have turned into a significantly more useful utility with higher quality innovation than the advert laden train wreck that we have now.

Ok, apparently it wasn't as gradual as I thought, there was a determining moment in 93-94 with Netscape and HTTPS that made secure transactions possible for e-commerce.

For this to happen, everyone using the internet should know HTML or there has to be a easy to use, MS Word-like web designer. And there should also be easy to use, free web hosting providers (neocities exists).

Owning a website as a non-techie should be normalized and be portrayed as "cool"

Do online multiplayer video games count as a commercial use? I kind of like those

Yt-dlp download script + text file with fav channel urls + jellyfin.

No bullshit, saves bandwidth.

Also look into invidious.

They were serving videos with ads spliced in, basically DAI in podcasting industry. I’m not sure how that experiment went, but if that’s how they’d serve the videos, downloaders will have ads embedded as well.

Yt-dlp supports sponsorblock, i am not worried.

I also dont even need tools for this as my usual style of watching is with my fingers on the arrow keys to skip back and forth

I actually don’t know if/how the ad block people worked around it or if YouTube pulled back. The problem with DAI on podcast and in stream ads is that the ads aren’t always 1:05~1:35, the ad could be longer or shorter, then the next ad won’t necessarily start at the same time, and most definitely won’t end at the same time. So sponsor block won’t know precisely where the ads are, thereby making it much harder for a crowd sourced solution to accurately skip embedded ads. Hopefully they figured out a way, but as mentioned earlier, I don’t know what happened to that experiment.

Put it on a VHS, then use one of those VCRs that removes the ads for you.

YouTube had beaten ublock origin for a while so I resolved to using invidious.

I've had YouTube Premium since the days when it was called YouTube Red, so like a decade. I've grown used to not seeing any ads from Google and anytime I watch a video not using my account it's torture.

Same here. FreeTube for desktop and NewPipe are all you need though if you don't want to pay and/or have access to music.

Tubular is newpipe + sponsorblock BTW

I use pipepipe but it's less stable

I haven't tried that yet. I think Libretube also does SponsorBlock too & have seen it on F-Droid.

Ya I think you're right.

I use pipepipe over tubular because it let's you change the ugly red YouTube banner to black (enable eye protection)

As a recent YT premium-tryer, it's amazing how many ads they put in that aren't obviously adverts - comparing between non-premium and premium browsing.
Not sure I'll keep YT premium beyond the free trial, until I find more decent content producers. Even then, it's skipping those video's paid promotion segments.
So it's like paying for a streaming platform to not get ads... But still getting ads

I agree... however, that is an issue with the content creators relying on using content promotions. I have noticed when skipping ahead in videos that it usually indicates in the progress bar where the promotion ends. If the content producers utilized other ways to contribute and I liked them enough, then I'd do that. YouTube now has a subscriber only feature that should help with this. There are also extensions that are supposed to block sponsors too. I don't think YouTube has implemented any functions to make blocking sponsored ads more difficult, especially for paying users... who knows though.

You‘re part of the problem then. It only got so shitty in the first place so they could trap people in the Premium subscription that will get increasingly more expensive and less useful.

That‘s where Youtube Premium comes into play for many fools who don‘t really know about adblockers. Google‘s goal isn‘t to destroy the website, but to turn it into a much more profitable Netflix subscription based on user generated content. Sadly the enshittification of the biggest video platform will continue because enough people are willing to pay a lot for it. The site will not improve until there are mainstream alternatives that actually take revenue off Youtube.

It’s so bad that I 1) refuse to pay for premium so I don’t enable the behavior and 2) ended up sideloading an alt YouTube app on iOS that just doesn’t display the ads. YouTube hasn’t been able to block that one yet as it spoofs as the original YouTube app. Totally unsanctioned and a pain in the ass to keep the certificate alive but worth it. YouTube is actually enjoyable again. All that because the ads interruptions were constant. If it was every 15 min or so I wouldn’t care, but every 5!? Get the hell out of here!

Same.

I came across someone who uploaded a 90 minute video as an ad as well.

I remember watching some video, falling asleep for a few hours, then waking up to a livestream of an ad. One of those "skip after 5s" but it was a livestream, so it just kept playing. I couldn't believe it!

Pro tip, LLMs do an excellent job summarizing YouTube videos now. I've never liked YouTube content, the incentives for creators are perverse and discourage conveying accurate information simply in favor of drawing out every video to maximize ad opportunities. About 95% of the content I might have been interested in could have been better conveyed in a 1-2 page blog post and read in 2 minutes instead of stretched out into a 15 minute video. Having a robot summarize that content is so much less irritating.

What do you use for that, fetch the transcript and just feed it to the LLM of your choice? Or are you talking of the actual LLM watching and summarizing?

I've always just used chatgpt for both tasks. I'll ask my SO, she does more of this and she might have better tools to suggest.

You could pay for YouTube Premium

I'm just glad someone is thinking of the shareholders

I forgot... where can I get my free data center with petabytes of storage & 300TB/s fiber interconnects?

I get what you are saying, but the balance is off.
YT premium costs (edit) more than a streaming service per month.
There are no industry leading movies or series released exclusively on YouTube.
YouTubes benefits of premium is "not being delivered 'skip after 5 seconds' live streams" as an ad that will play indefinitely (or at least for hours).
Also, streaming services provide much better series discovery. Ie, find a show you like and easily discover the start of that series, then binge watch the entire series in order.
YT premium is basically a "play next" queue, 1080p, and no ads.
It doesn't (AFAIK) support creators any more. It's literally just a fee to not-be-inconvenienced, and it's not great at that

Yep.. i actually looked at Subscribing. But.. It's basically mostly amateur hour and the subscription costs a huge amount.

Even worse, I don't believe creators even get revenue until they exceed sufficient subscribers. So most people are actually paying youtube to put benefit from other people's video's which they have no involvement in.

When did this change? AIUI creators got a larger cut of YouTube premium views compared to ad share.

Not sure if its subscribers or views.. But, I tried to monitize one or two of my videos, and it wouldn't let me because I don't think I had enough views or something.

Wait, are we acting like YouTube isn't profitable now? If I'm going to spend money on videos it'll be a content creator owner platform like Nebula

Is that what they are trying to do? Push crap ads and try to kill adblock to get a little extra user share to pay for yet another subscription?

PS: let me add that I also watch TV and the balance between quality of content and ads and their placement is much better (yes, some countries are worse than others with this). I don't know what they are doing in youtube ads, but it's anti-human (not just the ads, but the design too: super slow loading, tricks you into clicking the wrong content). Like they don't want you to "pay" by watching ads, they want to torture you until you subscribe, go away or get adblock.

I don't care if you block ads... but to act like Google owes you and that you deserve free content is called entitled.

Google certainly acts like it owes me nothing indeed, that's why it will never be good enough to pay to watch.

It's only a matter of time until the premium users get ads. Just like Netflix, and cable TV before that. You will inevitably wind up paying to be advertised to.

Netflix has ads now? I thought that was only for their lower tier service? I had to cancel Netflix cause they haven't came out with two more seasons of Stranger Things yet.

Google makes enough money evading taxes already. Not gonna help them make more.

I don't care if you use ad blockers. I get annoyed when people publish articles like... "Google is losing the adblockers war" cause then advertisers are going to start pushing harder for Google to actually prevent adblockers entirely, which they could have done already. Thus far Google, despite issues, does quite a lot of good things... Android is the only open source OS out of Apple & Windows. Android lets you install third party app stores. Chrome (Chromium) is open source... etc.

These users writing this content don't even develop the apps to block YouTube ads. If you've ever explored the APIs by YouTube, then you'd know that Google despite pushing ads for users without blockers, is still rather friendly to third party apps.

Advertisers couldn't care less about adblockers. Advertisers don't pay if the ad is blocked.

I'd pay for YouTube Premium Lite if it didn't state "Note: Ads will still show on music content and outside of videos." and if that'd make them stop harvesting all my data.