There have been multiple accounts created with the sole purpose of posting advertisement posts or replies containing unsolicited advertising.

Accounts which solely post advertisements, or persistently post them may be terminated.

Has YouTube Blocked Your Adblocker Yet??

UPDATE 2It seems that starting today, uBlock Origin is working to combat this Youtube Block. Mine started working again! Lets all thank the devs of UBO for fighting this fight!

UPDATESo as new info comes out, I’ll be posting it here. It seems as if this Rollout Has Several Parts.

Part 1

You get a popup message over top of your video, blocking the screen: https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/pictrs/image/bd0e0c67-f37d-4b82-a5b8-1703542f0af1.jpeg

  • This is the first sign. If you see this popup AND are logged into a YouTube account, your account has been selected.
  • At this stage you can likely close or block these messages with an adblocker.

Part 2

This message will change, indicating that you have 3 remaining videos to watch without ads.

Will insert photo once one has been found

  • At this stage your adblocker will imminently stop working in 3 videos time.
  • Personally using Firefox + uBlock Origin and tweaking filters and updates does not even fix it.

Part 3

None of the video loads now, everything looks blank.

https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/pictrs/image/e37261ac-cf82-4ecd-9481-bea42029a3a0.png

  • At this stage you must tred new ground to avoid ads. I have posted methods in the comments. If you want to bypass this end page, read down there.

End of Update

YouTube has started rolling out anti-adblock to users inside the United States, which means that they are preparing to roll this out to the entire country. Personally, I have been blocked already. I want to gauge how common this occurrence is.

Flynn_Mandrake ,
@Flynn_Mandrake@lemmy.dbzer0.com avatar

I’ve started to just download videos with yt-dlp after grabbing links via Invidious. Using Invidious itself has become somewhat unreliable lately, and this way I don’t have to put up with buffering and can watch in good quality. Cut out the middle men

altima_neo ,
@altima_neo@lemmy.zip avatar

I have to wonder if once the ad blocking gets fully rolled out if yt-dlp will also cease to work?

Flynn_Mandrake ,
@Flynn_Mandrake@lemmy.dbzer0.com avatar

Good question. I’d hope not

ReversalHatchery ,

MPV can directly play yt videos (it uses a built-in copy of yt-dlp afaik), and it’s very configurable. I always watch yt videos with it.

Sometimes it would be useful if it could use a proxy like piped or invidious, but those links don’t work

Flynn_Mandrake ,
@Flynn_Mandrake@lemmy.dbzer0.com avatar

Ooh, I should try that! I already use mpv, so that’d streamline things a bit

ReversalHatchery ,

Consider upping the cache for youtube. By default it is 2 minutes, which is mostly fine, except that if you are speeding through a part with 2x or faster, you may quickly run out of that small cache, because it only loads with the speed of something between 1x and 2x.
And then you may also set up saving the cache to disk instead of RAM, because it may be quite larger. Single config option.
You can make these only apply for youtube videos only with conditional auto profiles. The doc has an example for an automatic youtube profile, it’s perfect.

Flynn_Mandrake ,
@Flynn_Mandrake@lemmy.dbzer0.com avatar

I don’t use the main YouTube website at all anymore. A big reason for this is that I spend a lot of time using a really weak laptop that tends to struggle with the JavaScript-laden abomination that is modern corporate web design. Firefox itself struggles as well, so I primarily use Luakit with Invidious, which runs peachy. I also put together a local html page for my bookmarks that is generated from Yaml using a small C application (which is not optimal, I know, but I’ve been learning C and this was a good opportunity). Whenever something doesn’t work in Luakit, I evade to Palemoon. I also tried watching YouTube via mpv earlier, and it’s great! It runs infinitely better than any web player at max resolution and buffers the whole video. Never going back.

ReversalHatchery ,

I meant too increase the cache for yt videos in mpv :)

But you say it buffers the whole video, so maybe already changed something to do that

But yeah, I agree on your other points. If youtube blocks yt-dlp, mpv and proxies, then I’m done with it.

krimson ,
@krimson@feddit.nl avatar

Do you self host Invidious? I have zero issues with it self hosted.

riley0 ,

I got it once on Chrome. Haven’t used Chrome for YT since. No trouble with FF and UBlock Origin.

Psythik ,

Damn, I just recently switched to Ungoogled Chromium, just for YouTube (still use Firefox for everything else.) I did this for HDR and RTX Video Super Resolution, since Firefox supports neither. Looks like I’m going to have to live without now.

riley0 ,

No trouble for me using Yandex and AdGuard AdBlocker, either, fwiw.

Faceman2K23 ,
@Faceman2K23@discuss.tchncs.de avatar

Just a tip for those of you that do cave to pressure and go with the paid premium option. or already have one but dont want to pay for more accounts or a family account.

You can set up channels or brand accounts as sub-accounts on a premium subscription and they will act like separate accounts with the advantages of premium, so if you have a large family and don’t want to pay for the full family subscription (which only has 5 slots anyway) you can set up a few sub-accounts that each get their own subscriptions, recommendations, settings and all have the premium features.

So if you want to make a premium account for a parent or child, you can do that with one single subscription if you can take the caveat of them being brand accounts rather than fully their own thing.

This works on things like Android TV or Google TV, but you need to log into the main account then switch to a sub account in the app, however, there is no authentication to switch between channel accounts this way, so it’s really only useable for families only. I use this at home to run 4 separate nvidia shield youtube apps with their own subscriptions and recommendations on one single premium payment.

I expect they will change how that works in the future to remove the loophole, probably by charging for channel accounts or having it locked behind some kind of overpriced professional usage tier, but for now, it might be a good option for some.

Thorny_Thicket ,

Many people have also said if you set your location to for example India when signing up for premium you’ll get it basically for free compared to what it’ll cost in europe and it’ll keep working even if your location is elsewhere from there on.

Faceman2K23 ,
@Faceman2K23@discuss.tchncs.de avatar

Yes indeed, and google get less money. however there are some signs that companies are starting to crack down on that.

briongloid ,
@briongloid@aussie.zone avatar

I use Turkey, it’s around $2.50 per month for the 6-person plan.

mosthated ,
@mosthated@feddit.nl avatar

Same. If I really need the website, I now use yewtu.be

American_Jesus ,

Or https:/piped.video

krimsonbun ,
@krimsonbun@lemmy.blahaj.zone avatar

piped has been giving me more issues recently, I think Google’s fighting them?

GivingEuropeASpook ,
@GivingEuropeASpook@lemm.ee avatar

yeah same, only like half of the videos load or play.

Fjor ,

Had the same issues, but decided to host my own instance. Not had a single issue since, plus the latency is great 😏

couragethebravedog , (edited )

I wonder if the people having this issue are using chrome. On FF it has never been an issue for me.

hunt4peas ,

Not there in Edge as well.

NeckarIT ,

I had this issue using Firefox. But updating the block lists has fixed it for now.

couragethebravedog ,

Interesting.

GenBlob ,

Today I started getting ads with no video just audio. I didn’t get the adblocker message yet. Firefox ESR+ublock origin

snowbell ,
@snowbell@beehaw.org avatar

I had this issue but refreshed the page and it has gone away since. I’m guessing that didn’t help for you?

Killing_Spark ,

Works for a few videos and then it shows them again. Seems like the normal YouTube thing where you get ads every few videos

mayo ,

This came up on reddit and one of the members suggested adding the following filter. I don’t know if it works but may as well. (ublock > settings > my filters)

youtube.com,youtubekids.com,youtube-nocookie.com##+js(json-prune, playerResponse.adPlacements playerResponse.playerAds playerResponse.adSlots adPlacements playerAds adSlots, adPlacements.[].adPlacementRenderer.renderer.instreamVideoAdRenderer)

GenBlob ,

I haven’t come across any since yesterday but I’m putting this in just in case

Killing_Spark ,

Yep same, Firefox+ublock origin

riley0 ,

Try adding YT enhancer. I’ve got UBlock Origin and that installed. IDK which one is still blocking ads, but they’re still blocked.

BrownianMotion ,
@BrownianMotion@lemmy.dbzer0.com avatar

Is google that stupid that this will not bring on an onslaught of abuse to circumvent their false god status of the internet? I have already been “part 3’d” and completely bypassed it.

They get jackshit from me now at all. At least before they may have made some revenue from me for viewing the videos, now I am a ghost. No money for anyone. (and in case you are gonna say - I dont care content makers are losing, they are all dumbarses, and if they are supporting yt still and not posting elsewhere, then they are just stupid cunts. The only reason google is doing this is to make more money off of the people who make content, but not upset their already unstable revenue income. If the content providers get antsy and leave, YT loses.

ASK_ME_ABOUT_LOOM ,

Talk about exactly what you did to bypass it!

XYZinferno ,

I dont care content makers are losing, they are all dumbarses, and if they are supporting yt still and not posting elsewhere, then they are just stupid cunts.

You had me until here. If you want to monetize online video content or get widespread appeal, YouTube is pretty much the viable choice atm, save for Twitch which only works if you’re a streamer or Nebula, which even then it alone doesn’t suffice and is very specific. If you plan on trying to “make it big” using PeerTube, Vimeo, Dailymotion, etc. alone, your aspirations may as well be dead on arrival.

Not losing sleep over the money content creators lose over you using adblock is fine, I personally don’t put too much importance on it myself. But to call them all dumbasses or stupid cunts is just unreasonable, given the lack of a proper, popular alternative for most of them to do what they do.

jarfil ,

I don’t agree with the name calling, but many content creators have already set a website, with some outside revenue sources like Patreon, selling merchandise, or other stuff.

They can’t leave the most popular platform, but they can set up alternatives for when it stops being the most popular, and in the meantime also target people who are leaving it already.

XYZinferno ,

Oh yeah, I agree it’s a wise decision for any content creator, especially those who want to make a living from it, to diversify their sources of income. Backing up all content they post on YouTube to other sites as well is also really nice as it contributes to the push away from YouTube without having to risk little on their part as well

Neon_Dystopia ,

I wouldn’t know because I use firefox. Fuck google.

Waluigi ,

Sad thing is that this will affect even Firefox + uBlock

Neon_Dystopia ,

How’s that? They’re just gonna block YouTube? Way to kill their own service.

Chriskmee ,

How are they supposed to run a free service without ads, especially one as expensive to run as a video hosting website?

AzzyDev ,

google has “fuck you” amounts of money, the minority of users using firefox mean nothing to them.

If google was having problems funding youtube, believe me, they’d stop paying creators before that would happen, and then the creators would tell us about it.

Chriskmee ,

Do you really think they would stop paying creators before stopping people from bypassing the way both them and creators make money? It doesn’t take a business major to see that running a free service without ads is only going to cost them money.

AzzyDev ,

I think (unsure) you misunderstand. Google, and any other company’s, main goal is to make money. To achieve this goal, i’m saying that if google were to lose profits from people using ad blockers, they are more likely to extract profits from their creators than sacrifice their bottom line.

If google can’t adequately monetize their services (by losing the ad-blocking war), they can’t monetize the creators. Google is evil, but so is the economic system that causes inconvenience to be the most effective way to monetize content.

This is why i wholeheartedly support things like Patreon, Ko-Fi, etc. because that directly supports creators and means that they don’t have to completely rely on a company that no longer says “don’t be evil”.

Chriskmee ,

To achieve this goal, i’m saying that if google were to lose profits from people using ad blockers, they are more likely to extract profits from their creators than sacrifice their bottom line.

The creators are their product, the adblock users cost everyone money and provide no benefit, why would they punish their product over the users costing them money? The adblock users aren’t the bottom line, they are no benefit, and cost both YouTube and the creators in lost revenue.

This is why i wholeheartedly support things like Patreon, Ko-Fi, etc. because that directly supports creators and means that they don’t have to completely rely on a company that no longer says “don’t be evil”.

That’s great and all, but YouTube still has bills to pay, they can’t just let you use the service free without ads, let you just give money to creators through those other services, and expect to even break even.

AzzyDev ,

“…why would they punish their product over the users costing them money?”

That’s if Google loses the ad-blocking war, hence the second paragraph, unless they manage to stuff web environment integrity/similar into their website, or if front ends like Invidious become more popular.

“…YouTube still has bills to pay…”

That’s true, but I think Google makes enough money from other things (tracking, other website’s ads) that it wouldn’t hurt them too bad. I think the recent crackdown on ad blocking is less from a large profit drop and rather to send a message to avoid the former from happening. Again though, I could be wrong about that one.

In the end though, I just want to watch and directly support my creators without being forced to waste 15 seconds of my life that I will never get back on a product I never have and never will use.

SuddenDownpour ,

By making Youtube Premium worth it, both for users and creators. Make it transparent what % of the YP fee is actually going to creators, make that % actually fair, give extra features to YP users, incentivize creators to ask their viewers to collaborate with it if they actually can afford to. Youtube has reached a point where it has become a public utility, to the point that tens of millions of people use it to supplement their education or stay updated on the news. A website increasingly necessary shouldn’t force someone without a penny to choose between paying what they can’t afford or have their head fried up by ads.

Of course, this idea rooted in civil values is incompatible with an economic actor that sees both creators and consumers as cattle that must be milked as efficiently as possible.

Chriskmee ,

A website increasingly necessary shouldn’t force someone without a penny to choose between paying what they can’t afford or have their head fried up by ads.

If not ads then what is the free option supposed to look like. I hate ads also, but it’s not like it’s sustainable to run free without ads.

SuddenDownpour ,

Wikipedia has no ads yet it has a pretty large amount of spare money, and there are plenty of other free to use platforms and projects. Youtube is not Wikipedia, sure, but Wikipedia has no reason to offer Youtube Premium.

Chriskmee ,

Wikipedia mostly displays text, YouTube mostly streams HD video, which one do you think costs more?

bobman ,

It looks like Lemmy and PeerTube, where people do the hard work because they care and not to make a profit off of idiots with more money than sense.

Saying it’s ‘impossible’ is objectively false and just shows people you don’t understand the world you live in.

Chriskmee ,

Are creators making enough money to get by on PeerTube? The idea is interesting, but I don’t see people making enough to do it full time, and I don’t see how the streaming quality can be anything as good or reliable compared to something like YouTube by relying on P2P.

bobman ,

get by

What does this mean?

Chriskmee , (edited )

Make a living, pay the bills.

bobman ,

How does lemmy make money?

Also, hasn’t youtube been wildly profitable for years? Profit, by definition is excess. It’s what’s left over after all business expense have been paid.

If youtube is profitable, why do they need more profit? Oh yeah, they don’t.

Sorry this needs to be spelled out for you.

Chriskmee ,

As far as I know YouTube is not that profitable, but it’s hard to tell as they don’t release all the numbers.

Do you make any excess money? Do you have any money left over after rent, food, etc? If you do, do you need that money? If you don’t would you like to make more? Nobody wants to live with no excess money, so why should a business?

bobman ,

Woah dude, you’re getting right into my point of projection.

Just because you want to use your excess to get even more excess, you’re assuming that everyone else will. Why eschew luxurious so those who have less can have more? You’d never project that lol, cause that’s not how you feel.

Have a good day, man. Hope I enlightened you a bit.

Gonna block you now cause I feel you have nothing to offer me. See ya.

Chriskmee ,

So you want to live just making ends meet? Don’t care about having a savings account? You would be happy with just enough to get by without any excess? I don’t know anybody who would be happy with that.

If you want to run away from the conversation then go ahead. If you do happen to have some money you don’t want though, since who needs to make more than what they need just to break even even, right? I’ll happily take it off your hands.

Neon_Dystopia ,

Thing is, even with all their efforts they still can’t make it profitable. Not sure if they release the data (doubt). But, YouTube has always been barely profitable or operating on loss. Google bought yt over 15 years ago and haven’t figured out how to make money off it and arguably made it worse with their policies and algos.

Chriskmee ,

Part of the problem might be all those people blocking the ads, which I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s a pretty big chunk of their viewers. No ads means no ad revenue, which means losing money.

mindbleach ,

I don’t care.

Chriskmee ,

Do you care if the service goes down and nobody gets any videos?

mindbleach ,

As if video streaming will die with one site. One for-profit site, that’s not remotely turning a profit. A vestigial organ of an advertising giant, burning money to build dependency and exploit it for control.

BitTorrent used to share more video than Netflix - despite a lack of money, despite a lack of ads, and despite being illegal. Content creators will be fine without this corporate facade.

Chriskmee ,

I don’t know what YouTube’s market share is, but for videos that are not short TikTok style it’s probably like 95%? And they are also in the TikTok short and twitch streaming areas now, so I think it would be a massive blow to video streaming if they went away.

BitTorrent just moves all the costs to the users, and users are typically not wanting to run their own video servers. They might work for tech people who don’t mind running servers or already have a server they are running, but you have to think about the regular user that is probably 80% or more of the market. You can’t expect to get big off relying on users to be the servers.

mindbleach ,

How things are now never ever means change is impossible.

You can’t expect to get big off relying on users to be the servers.

BitTorrent did exactly that.

Chriskmee ,

BitTorrent may have been big as in number of files, but as far as users and having content on demand it never got there. I remember waiting for days to get a single movie, not because my Internet was slow, but because the peers were slow.

When it comes to a YouTube replacement I don’t think you are going to get big relying on users to be the servers. Nevermind the fact that the nature of how BitTorrent works means no company will allow their content on it legally.

mindbleach ,

And nothing’s changed in all those years. Yeah? P2P technology couldn’t get any better than 2004. The fact it was slow sometimes means we’re boned forever.

Corporations already have streaming. I don’t care if they come along. Their content might be there whether they like it or not.

Consider where we’re having this conversation: is big even desirable? Has the dominance of one video platform been good for the internet? I’d say plainly fucking not, if killing ad blockers is even a feasible outcome. When YouTube was its own company there were a dozen competitors of similar size and quality. Google pouring money into one, so it could swallow everything and censor everyone and shove people toward right-wing propaganda, is not exactly ideal.

Chriskmee ,

Has P2P changed much? I don’t think it has really. I use private sites for that stuff now and it’s great there, but the public stuff still seems pretty bad IMO.

Well if they don’t want their content there, then you have the whole problem if it being illegal. Now you have to convince people to break the law, and go as far as to install a VPN or whatever so your ISP doesn’t send you warnings. This isn’t a great start for something to replace YouTube.

I think Big is required for a P2P YouTube style thing to work. You need lots of peers to stream content in decent quality. You need people to knowingly break laws and use VPNs. You need people to run their own media servers, you are asking a lot from people, all YouTube is asking you to do is watch some ads or buy premium.

flerp ,

Oh no! Is the company that makes 70b per quarter and is buying back 70b of shares to keep making more in trouble of only making 80b per quarter next year and not 100b? Poor babies.

Chriskmee ,

Maybe instead of looking at revenue you should look at profit. Revenue means nothing if your running costs eat it all up.

Also, maybe try to look at YouTube Numbers instead of the whole parent company? The patient company being profitable isn’t an excuse for the child company to lose money.

ParanoidFactoid , (edited )
@ParanoidFactoid@beehaw.org avatar

deleted_by_author

    •
    PeterPoopshit ,

    This. When YouTube finally succeeds in making it impossible for anyone to use their website without watching ads, they probably still won’t succeed in preventing people from downloading for offline viewing. When this happens I’m going to invest in making scripts that autodownload stuff ahead of time and I’ll only watch whatever videos are in my home network.

    Im not watching their brainwash bullshit ass propaganda. I’ll find other stuff to do for entertainment before I give in to ads.

    Steak ,

    Fuck ads. I put in a decent amount of effort to make sure I see exactly 0 seconds of ads per day. So far going strong.

    doggle ,

    It’ll be a shame if I have to ditch YouTube. There’s only 2 or 3 channels I would even consider paying for and they don’t have Patreon or anything. I’m less than interested in giving Google a cut.

    jaschen ,

    YouTube algorithm has been garbage for months now. There’s literally no good content.

    mortrek ,

    The site has plenty of good content, just no way to find it.

    kionite231 ,

    Some youtuber link other channels with similar topic/content. I found few new channels that way.

    jarfil ,

    Sounds like the death knell for YT… what’s the point of a centralized platform, if we’re back to links to discover content. They could link to PeerTube.

    HiddenLayer5 ,

    Does NewPipe count as an adblocker? Not yet but I fear its days are numbered.

    3FingersOfMilk ,

    NewPipe+=1;

    viking ,
    @viking@infosec.pub avatar

    Newpipe is accessing the videos straight from the backend. There is no chance to splice any ads into, unless youtube were to modify the source material, and that’s highly inconvenient. And then we’d just use sponsorblock anyway.

    They tried to change the code to access the raw video material many times over, but unless they encrypt it and enforce decryption via keys uniquely embedded in the official youtube app while somehow finding a way to prevent a disassembly to use their keys in unofficial apps, I don’t see that happening.

    DogMuffins ,

    They don’t need to splice ads in, they could just render NewPipe inoperable. I’m sure it would be fairly trivial to detect which page loads are from NewPipe.

    viking ,
    @viking@infosec.pub avatar

    Not trivial at all, else they’d have done that already instead of playing cat & mouse. How would they differentiate whether it’s the official app, some mobile browser, or newpipe? Changing the user agent or cloning a fingerprint from a browser is the trivial thing here.

    DogMuffins ,

    Well if they’re detecting active ad blockers then presumably they’re running some client side js to decode the url if certain conditions are met.

    I don’t think think they’ve been playing cat & mouse with newpipe, they just break it by accident.

    smc87 ,

    Have you heard of shape from f5 or similar services?

    viking ,
    @viking@infosec.pub avatar

    Nope, what’s that?

    1984 ,
    @1984@lemmy.today avatar

    Very good. It will be nice to be off YouTube completely.

    HawlSera ,

    Ublock Origin still works for me

    mah ,
    @mah@hexbear.net avatar

    well, I will stop to use YouTube, and that will solve 2 problems

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