1y ago

YouTube is cracking down on consumers’ favorite loophole - Adblockers

www.thestreet.com /technology/youtube-is-cracking-down-on-consumers-favorite-loophole

YouTube is cracking down on consumers’ favorite loophole - Adblockers::undefined

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1y ago

YouTube is cracking down on consumers' favorite loophole

www.thestreet.com /technology/youtube-is-cracking-down-on-consumers-favorite-loophole

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91 comments

I can really understand YT wanting to push ads because I know how expensive their servers are and all that, but I just can't get over how many ads there are. Two ads before the video starts is already pushing it, and having ads in the middle (which can be many times depending on the video) is far too much. If they crack down on adblockers I'll likely use alternative frontends like piped. No way I'm watching 6+ ads in one sitting.
- I think when they were trying to push the YouTube Red streaming shows there were a few times where they put in full episodes of shows as pre-roll ads. They were skippable but an hour long TV show as a pre-roll is just obnoxious.
  
  I've also seen some Indian rap music videos on preroll lmao
- I'm in the same camp. I was generally fine when it was an occasional skippable pre-roll ad before some videos. But the last time I watched a video without a blocker, there were two unskippable ads at the start plus two more each at the 7 and 14 minute mark of a 20 minute video.
  This hour has 22 minutes indeed.
- Same. If it wasn't for my adblockers, I'd have stopped using youtube long ago.
- Holy crap. I had no idea YouTube was that bad. I guess my ad blockers work better than I thought.
  It's going to be a never-ending cat-and-mouse game from here, I guess. And then eventually Google will make Chrome required with their trusted platform bs.
- The problem is that there's no competition. There's no real YouTube alternative that content creators can post to.
  
  That's because video hosting platforms aren't profitable. Anyone that's trying to do what youtube is doing will either have shortcomings or go bankrupt.
  
  Not just that, but anytime there is an alternative it gets flooded with neo-nazis, grifters, scammers and other garbage that would otherwise be banned on Youtube. But because the platform is small and uprising, or they were designed specifically for that purpose, they look the other way.
  
  And the reality is there never will be anything that can meaningfully compete. Not anymore. Youtube has inertia. It’s not just that content creators get part of the advertising or that Youtube functionally advertises their channels based on related content algorithms. It’s also that youtube has over a decade of historical material. It’s the largest collection of video content in the history of the planet. Ever. By far. The age of “people are going to ditch your service for a competitor’s” is long gone. We are squarely in the age of the solid internet, which is ruled by a handful of very large, very powerful corporations, who do not really have to worry about “new competition,” because the scale of their operations is so vast, so well established as a part of the culture, and so astronomically expensive to maintain that nothing new could ever hope to compete.
- and all that,
  What's that?
  
  Lawyers and copyright issues-- the legal system, they are probably always bombarded from all sides by the legal industry and content creators on copy right issues.

update your rules, made the popup go away on my ubloick origin <3
addendum: a how to:
left click ublock origin
click the three interlocking cogs
select the filter lists tab at the top
click purge all caches
click update now
refresh your youtube tab you just encoutered the popup in and press f5 or refresh the site otherwise
before i had the popup on each video, after no more.
- Can confirm, this advice came direct from the developers of UBO and it does work.
- Doesn't work anymore. I've had to use piped video for the past 2 days.
  
  maybe talk to the author of ublock origin instead, i just commented on how i fixed it on my machines which all sit in europe :D
  idk what crazy gunk google-australia is up to that makes it not work for you

if the forcr me to watch ads i will finaly leave that platform
- And where will you go?
  
  Peertube has a great import feature.
  
  nowhere, starting to think this shit is toxic af
  here hoping youtube goes under
  
  Bruh, your not gonna believe this, but the ducks at the park are free. if you use one of these, you can download all the ducks you want. I downloaded 9000 ducks so far.
  
  I heard there's this stuff outside called grass.
  I intend to touch it.
  
  peertube
- And what will they have lost?
  I mean, I get your point, but why would they care
  
  Users who don't directly pay for a social service where user content and interaction is the business are still valuable. They share videos around, they comment, they contribute to it being the place where everything is happening. There's a reason all these tech platform companies spent so long in the honeymoon phase of monopolization. Without the network effect of people on their platform, they have nothing.
  They still need a way to overall make profit from their users, but they aren't losing nothing by losing people who adblock.
  
  Social media sites live or die on their contributors & users. If they make it too obnoxious even for established people to use the site, they're going to look for alternatives.
  Then the content will start to leave, and the users will follow, and then you're like, "Sorry, I've never heard of Digg".

As far as I can tell, they aren't doing a very good job. I've seen the notice that an ad blocker is not allowed, and even without upgrading the ad blocker I use I can still just click the close button on the notice and it goes away and I can continue to watch uninterrupted.
If Google does figure out how to prevent people from using ad blockers on YouTube, I think it will help me break my honestly unhealthy habit and reduce the amount I watch, or perhaps even quit entirely, since there are far more ads on YouTube than there were in the past - especially if you also include sponsor ads that are embedded in videos.
- I have been enjoying Nebula. If Google manages to kill ad blockers, I will probably just go live over there.
- I wouldn't be surprised if they are using the information recorded from people who click the close button to better train their algorithm for detecting adblockers.

I feel like i would hate ad less if they let the creator know when and ad was comming. It would be kind of like TV was; "and I'll tell you this after the break". Because those midrolls usually just break a sentence in half!
- Well seeing how little tv people watch now I doubt it would be a success. I can't and will not put up with midroll ads (why I think tv is not seen as much as the past).
  It is odd that youtube managed to regress to a state worse then a more or less dead media, but the line has been drawn.

Loophole? Piss off with that language, I control this machine and what is shown on it.

So far, I can dismiss the popup in Firefox and keep watching, but I dread the day that this doesn't work anymore.
- It's a fairly straightforward cat and mouse game. The only thing that has the potential to make it complicated soon is Google's Web Environment Integrity API.
  
  As long as Firefox keeps doing their thing and doesn't adopt Google's bullshit....

YouTube is fighting a losing battle
- That really depends on what their goal is.
  From a business perspective it's not worth fighting to eliminate 100% of ad block uses. The investment is too high. But if they can eliminate 50% or 70% or 90% of ad block uses with youtube? That could be worth the effort for them. If they can "win" for Chrome and make it a bit annoying for Firefox that would likely be enough for Google to declare it a huge success.
  People willing to really dig all the way in to get a solution they desire are not the norm. Google can be OK with the 1% of us out there as long as we aren't also making it possible for another huge chunk of people to piggyback off it effortlessly.

It's not a loophole, it's a necessary security function.

havent seen this popup on Youtube. currently using librewolf with ublock origin. maybe i'm not logged in.
- An updated uBlock Origin will remove the popup
  
  Like I said, I haven't encountered it yet.
- If you only use uBlock default blocking lists then it won't come up. If you use any other list, like Easylist or Adguard then it comes up immediately
  
  I have NextDNS with Adguard and some up-to-date filters applied on it.

These ad block users should be considered the cost of doing business and they should be careful with targeting them.
This kind of thing springs users into action to either find or use work arounds or create a alternative platform.
- No one can create an alternative platform. Youtube costs far far, far too much to run. This is why everyone failed. Google subsidised it for what, 15 years? Before it got any level of profitability and even then, nof really. Google derives other value from it, like feeding data into their ad profiles, but no one else needs that.
  It's also clear that workarounds will stop soon as Google has installed Web drm directly into chrome
  
  People are already leaving chrome just for that reason. Google underestimates just how fast people will bail on a platform that goes off the rails.
  
  Peertube already exists and it's better because a creator can host their own content without having to host everybody else's content and therefore keep the price manageable. If a creator absolutely blows up mega huge then people watching the same video at the same time will be sharing the video with peers and load balance
  
  You'd be surprised how things can change, and quickly. It's not going to be a overnight win for another platform. It's going to have to start from the ground up, in probably a decentralized way, but it can happen.

Anyone like me who haven't even seen this ad block warning?
- Still nothing. Firefox with ublock origin and ghostery running in parallel.
  On my phone I'm using newpipe, on my tv smart tube next, so those are clean by default.
  
  It's been hit-or-miss for me (Firefox w/ uBlock). It seems like Google's pushing updates at irregular intervals. Clearing the uBlock cache and forcing an update usually does the trick for me, though. I'm guessing they'll burn the volunteers out eventually, though.
- I started seeing it on my work computer that's vpn'ed into another part of the country, while logged into my work Gmail (which has no real history).
  I'm not seeing it on my personal computer, which is logged into my personal Gmail.
  Both are using ublock.
  I think the rollout is very selective.
- Everyone I know who has gotten it is outside of the US so far.
- I haven't but I can make it appear by turning on the Block ads feature in YouTube Enhancer (so no one can tell me it's "slow rollout"). So far Filterlist devs are doing a great job at blocking them, just like they always have on every website that is commonly used and isn't a malware or scam site (not great examples of Anti-adblock sucess since they're usually added to malware filters once detected).
- Never seen it at all.. I presume it's only some users currently.

https://freetubeapp.io/

we will win, sail the high seas
- Pretty sure most YouTube videos will be hard to pirate. Big creators sure... But most others I doubt.
  
  It is trivial to download youtube videos.
  
  I wasn't really referring to downloading, but rather Smartubenext, and Revanced
  
  I wouldn't say hard, just that nobody pirates them because they're easy to ad block.

Yup, and thats why im leaving YouTube indefinitely

I'm using Firefox with uBlock Origin and I have yet to see that popup
- You will. I didn’t start getting it until three days ago.
- I've been getting it off and on the last few days, oddly only on one PC still running 10 but everything else with FF/UO is up to date. Nothing on two 11 machines so far, with all signed in on the same google account.
  ¯(ツ)_/¯
- refresh your filter cache <3
  
  I don't need to, I don't see any popup, I can watch videos on YouTube just fine without changing anything in uBlock Origin's settings or manually updating it.

I've been using LibreWolf with uBO for a while, havent seen anything yet.

It has been a long time coming - might be we're in for another dark age of the net at the current pace of things.
A way around will be found, it always is, until then consider archiving the things you enjoy to pass the time while we wait.
- I have a feeling it'll probably due a great deal of harm to the idea of Anti-adblock being "actually effective". Up until now it's only really been used by a handful of News, file download, and... Mature content... sites. Places with smaller userbases and less traffic where the effort for bypassing them is lower or just not discussed due to the small size or nature of the site.
  It's not really the case here though. So in one way or another this is going to fail.
  I would definitely recommend people start backing up YouTube videos from older creators because I imagine that after this they'll be looking to reduce costs and that likely means purging inactive channels or channels that cost more than they make.
- This thread is full of fixes, and i havw another one that im not seeing anyone mention so its not lost yet!
  
  None of the fixes work or atleast don't work for long. I've tried everything. Moving to a different front end etc. don't really count as a fix to me because then you'll also lose your video recommendations.
  
  I'm noting down fixes as I find them, and so far they are effective. However, our fixes face the same dillema as their changes - what one person can contrive another can work around.
  We have the advantage of numbers, so we generate a wider range of work arounds, but our opponent can also see those work arounds (we share them freely) and so has an easier time countering them, i.e. they are faster at reversing each individual fix.

91 comments