Poll of the Day > Youtube started serving me Ad Blockers are not allowed on Youtube.

(+) Yeah! (+)

I started seeing ads even with ublock a while ago, so I started using a second ad blocker, too, which took care of it... although everything is a bit laggier these days.

captpackrat posted...

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/user_image/7/0/7/AAQwHjAAE80r.jpg

tbh, it's an interesting issue because the point is 100% valid yet sites also need to monetize somehow. Although a 100% premium model is an option, it'd kinda lock a portion of the population out from content.

I'm still only using ublock, but I've had to update it a second time today because it blocked a video on me.

Count_Drachma posted...

tbh, it's an interesting issue because the point is 100% valid yet sites also need to monetize somehow. Although a 100% premium model is an option, it'd kinda lock a portion of the population out from content.

Realistically, if enough people were blocking ads that it was actually jeopardizing sites' financial viability, those sites would have gone 100% premium a long time ago. The fact of the matter is that, as much as "if everyone blocked ads these sites would die!" is an accurate statement, not everyone blocks ads and those that do represent an extremely tiny minority of those that actually click on them (so even if they're hypothetically forced to view them and ad views go up, click-through rate goes down because they get ignored). Viewership stats are also valuable regardless of whether or not ads are blocked, plus you get word-of-mouth advertising and other forms of social engagement that can rope in views from people that don't block ads, so it's not like there's genuinely no value in adblock users using the site. This may change as adblock use increases, but that's mostly because ads are just straight up getting worse across the board (both in terms of intrusiveness and in being outright dangerous), so that's 100% on Google et al for refusing to take responsibility for the ads they deliver to people.

Really, the issue here is not that sites are in grave financial danger, it's that sites are trying to keep their revenue growing indefinitely to keep shareholders happy. If it were just about making enough money to stay afloat, safe, less-intrusive ads would be plenty. Instead, they keep looking for new ways to push the envelope for revenue and new corners to cut so this quarter can be bigger than last quarter, and that means periodic campaigns like this to convince shareholders that they're doing something about this "grave threat" to their profit margins. Capitalism, ho!

BlackScythe0 posted...

I'm still only using ublock, but I've had to update it a second time today because it blocked a video on me.

Yeah, I've had to update three times now over the last two days now after going for like a week with no issues.

Sahuagin posted...

yeah I keep getting that too... not sure what to think about it. the last time I tried youtube ads I got a really disturbing (and dishonest) PETA ad, and that pretty much solidified my choice to use an ad-blocker.

That chance is always prevalent though in any form of advertising. I got a pretty dishonest videogame ad. Don't think i can hate all advertising forever, just the scammy ones.

captpackrat posted...

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/user_image/7/0/7/AAQwHjAAE80r.jpg

Where does the national UK cyber security centre say that?

https://www.ncsc.gov.uk/blog-post/ill-make-you-offer-you-cant-refuse

And it doesn't seem to be talking about video ads on YouTube, but other website advertising which may include video. Youtube video ads don't work quite the same way iirc

The method used to check for adblock is apparently illegal in scandanavian nations. There's already a lawsuit in progress by somebody who's willingly eating the lifetime ban from all things google in order to press the lawsuit for us all.

All hail the martyr.

Looks like Youtube is going to war again. Pages don't even fully load.

Judgmenl posted...

Looks like Youtube is going to war again. Pages don't even fully load.

There was a time last week on my PC when YT ads wouldn't load, instead the screen would just show nothing for 15 seconds, then play whatever video I wanted to watch.

Still working for me. Guess I'm one of the lucky ones.

Nightwind posted...

The method used to check for adblock is apparently illegal in scandanavian nations. There's already a lawsuit in progress by somebody who's willingly eating the lifetime ban from all things google in order to press the lawsuit for us all.

All hail the martyr.

Really, adblock-blocking should be illegal everywhere unless the sites practicing it take responsibility for the ads they serve.

VIdeos from my subscription page don't load anymore (unless opened in a private browser) but ones from the homepage does?

Edit: keeping them open long enough makes them work

Yeah YT has entered a new blocking phase for me. Directly in-video rather than the popup-thing.

So the current thing is that they are blocking accounts from viewing videos. You can literally open up a private tab and view videos with ad blocker but you cannot view them on your account. How stupid is this?

I can get past the block if I keep updating ublocko once a day. now what I'm getting is like a ~30 second delay for each video, whether I have ublocko on or not. guess i'm not 100% sure if it's related or not.

30s? The pages might take 3-5 minutes for me to load.

is it like a soft-ban? I'm going to try updating ublock each day before I watch a video, rather than getting the 1 blocker prompt and then updating. hopefully that minimizes any bans I might get. (what bs this is...)

I also backed up my favorites list which is almost the only thing I would lose if I lost my account...

except for my subscriptions I guess, I just thought of... better try backing that up too

I have no idea what is going on, the current theory is that it is a kind of shadow ban, where all you need to do is switch accounts or view videos as logged out (e.g. with private browsing). Also none of this affects people who use things like MPV's feature to play youtube links.

I suspect at some point someone is just going to create a browser extension to play Youtube videos without Youtube's frontend (there are sites that do this but they're all kinda eh).

I think someone had the idea that if you change the video source to a different domain (like the legacy google video domain) it solves the problem. I might see if I can hack together a userscript to address this.

Keep in mind I think embed links youtube.com/embed/<video id> are unaffected by this, which might be an easy solution (just create a userscript redirect). I'm about to go to bed, but I could probably do this in 10 minutes in the morning as I already have a redirect script for shorts.

Since they're rolling the anti-adblock out in waves I'm starting to think I just haven't been hit by it yet. Because I haven't seen any of the notices and I'm still not seeing any ads, and all I've done is update ubo to the current version. I haven't even had to manually update the ubo filter list. For me nothing has changed, which now has me a little worried.

https://openuserjs.org/scripts/Kraust/Youtube_Embed_Redirect

Will test it some more if the issue happens to me again.