YouTube has been spotted testing server-side ads, which could pose a problem to ad blockers.
All of these issues have reportedly led to an increase in ad block uninstalls, leaving users with the choice of YouTube Premium or sitting still until that “skip ad” button appears.
Oh yes, I totally believe that people are opting to delete their ad blocker, that works on not just YouTube but the entire internet, simply because YouTube has become obstinate and difficult. Who the fuck wrote this article? And how much are they getting paid by Google? Do they really think we’re going to buy into this bullshit and follow suit?
it’s total bullshit. For example if you use ublock origin every now and again sure you might get ads that pop up, but AT MOST that lasts for a day, generally it’ll last a couple hours as the team at ublock update their lists to block ads again. There’s no need, literally zero need, to remove it from your extensions. and at worst, like I got yesterday, you’ll just see a black screen that buffers for a bit before the video plays. the ad is still blocked.
you can also circumvent most of this if you use freetube. OR if you just want music the youtube-dl script on linux. I also ditched spotify for youtube-dl as I can also download entire playlists with it.
if I understood it correctly UBlock original would be totally unable to block server side ads right now
Just FYI I have a user driven plugin that skips self promotion in videos, wirks like a charm most often. I bet someone will make one that detects and skips ads even if they’re added randomly.
Sponsorblock, i have it too. it might break if they add ads server side. though im sure sponsorblock and ublock would find workarounds. those workarounds dont exist yet tho afaik
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www.youtube.com##+js(json-prune-fetch-response, playerAds adPlacements adSlots playerResponse.playerAds playerResponse.adPlacements playerResponse.adSlots, , propsToMatch, /player?)Click on uBO icon > ⚙ Dashboard button > Add the filter(s) in “My filters” pane > ✓ Apply changes > Open new tab and test again.
from the reddit page idk if it works but most comments say it does
and if it does, that’s fucking hilarious
this will have taken a team months of work and one ublock dev just threw it in the toilet within an hour
ok, so i added this code to my ublock origin filter list, then went to youtube, and the injected ads were still showing up in about half the vids. closed firefox, reopened, same. rebooted my win11 machine, now the injected ads are NOT showing up any longer. not sure if youtube switched it off because they’re still beta testing this bullshit or if the code is working but it SEEMS to be working. if it stops i’ll come back to edit this comment. thanks for the tip man!
The ublock origin guys are wizards, I tell you…
I am amazed how they didn’t spell like others did in that market.
Prolly should donate.
So in theory… can reVanced come up with something like this,
NewPipe works, so I’m sure reVanced can/could do it as well. SmartTube (Android TV exclusive) also implemented it weeks ago, I never have seen a single ad.
👑
Do I need to add this filter or are the uBO devs going to update the extension to include it ootb?
i’d be shocked if they didn’t update it but i just timed myself doing it and it took less than 10 seconds
I stll haven’t get any ads with just stock ubo but when it does I’ll try this filter, thanks
This worked for me. Thanks!
I’ve been a premium user for a while now and the platform has never been shittier than now. I pay for premium but I see integrated ads in videos and nowadays YouTube sneakily includes actual product videos in your home feed as if that’s not an ad. Recommendations have sucked for so long that I don’t remember the last time I watched something good on it. Inclusion of yt music was the thing that kept me on the subscription but shit man
How is this bundling even legal. YouTube ist pretty much a Monopoly and they are using this fact to push YouTube Music. If that’s Not anti competitive behaviour what ist?
How is this bundling even legal.
It’s not being prosecuted, so its legal. Everyone’s been properly paid off. If push comes to shove, Clarence Thomas will get a new RV and any lawsuits will be dismissed, but for now only the EU seems interested in internet regulation.
“Its not an rv. Its a motor coach.” - Clarence Thomas
It’s not being prosecuted, so its legal.
How most regulations work, actually. From food to consumer electronics. And yes, that includes your bad dragon.
I think the EU should step in and force Google not to bundle Music.
Inclusion of yt music was the thing that kept me on the subscription
Same here. I was struggling to get the ad blockers to work consistently, so I said fuck it and canceled Spotify and subscribed to Youtube. FWIW YT music does a much better job of choosing random music that I like; Spotify just plays the same shit over and over again.
I feel like YT music plays the same things over and over again, so good to know that switching to Spotify won’t be any better.
I’ve tried every music streaming service out there with their premium subscriptions and they’re really not that different. After a month of usage they all loop the same songs over and over again. It seems YouTube also adopted this because it’s been recommending me the same things over and over and over.
Tidal has new music playlists straight from Tidal and they’re genre specific, which is quite different from Spotify. They’re in a set place within Tidal, so you don’t have to search for the new playlists either.
The sad thing is that it appears a lot of people only like listening to music that they already know. Out of the people I know, I’m the only one that hates listening to the same songs over and over again. I wonder if that’s why many people only seem to like music from their teenage/young adult days 🤔
I miss GPM. YouTube music is full of community-made playlist that are actually YouTube video playlists, so you’ll start one up and have all the music video intros, interrupts, and extra sound effects and shit that get thrown in.
I started a Disney playlist for my nephew in the car, and you could hear all the sound effects from the movie over the actual soundtrack.
I haven’t seen any of that. For me, Youtube music is almost exactly like Spotify experience-wise.
I think you can disable non-music videos from the settings, maybe you did that
On mobile, which is where I primarily use YT, the official app with premium doesn’t even have sponsorblock or dearrow or blocking shorts. It’s genuinely a worse experience than revanced which is free.
If I was to pay for premium, I’d want the above features at the very least.
Do you use Android? Stop paying for premium, just install ReVanced and “fix” the official YouTube apk. It also works with YouTube Music.
No, unfortunately I switched to an iPhone to limit Google’s tracking endeavors. I love Android, but Google has ruined it with constant tracking in my eyes.
I agree with you, but if you still use Google services, including YouTube, you’ll still be tracked.
Monopoly.
I would rather pay an ad-block company a monthly subscription than give it to YouTube in blackmail. This will just be another salvo in a never ending war.
I used to pay for youtube premium. My logic being that I was using an adblocker anyway, and I wanted the content creators I watched to get some kind of revenue for my watchtime. Youtube stopped taking my money a while back, and I can’t be bothered to figure out why. These days, there’s so little content that I find interesting that I spend more time scrolling than I do actually watching videos. It’s only a matter of time until I just stop regularly going to youtube.
I paid for it until they basically doubled the price.
I paid for it before they removed Google Play Music. I was on one of the plans that was $8 for both Google Play Music and YouTube Red.
Too Much engagement slop being pumped into the feed and you can’t block offenders on teevee app…
WTF I lay for this. If I don’t want to see some clown, I should be able to block.
I report them for misconduct and it seems to reduce the spam but they come back in few weeks amyway…
Like no I don’t want linus, I don’t want brownlee apple whore… Just stop.
YouTube tests server-side ads to make
your coveted blockerYouTube obsoleteftfy
But do you have a viable alternative in your back pocket?
I’m pretty happy with Nebula. I tried it back when it was still bundled with curiosity stream but now I just subscribe to nebula.
It obviously isn’t anywhere near a full YouTube replacement, but it’s pretty good.
Yeah, Nebula is quite good. Really like Curiosity Stream too… I subscribe to both.
But alas, most channels I follow are Youtube only and not likely to change :(
I have a pile of shows on my media tower to watch instead.
Honestly… How much has Google spent trying to counter people skipping ads?
Is it less than the amount of potential profit if everyone was forced to watch ads?
This seems like that situation recently where NYC paid a million dollars to enforce people to pay for train tickets, which was less than twenty thousand a year in lost revenue.
Watch how quickly I drop your fucking platform lmao. Please give me a reason
Or just one more thing to add to the open seas of piracy. Or start supporting nebula?
Although this would be the case for piracy, as a better means to support artist, because I pirate my music. I do attend more live music venues which gives more revenue directly to the artist
When the YT apps stopped working a few days ago, I just continued watching on Nebula until the apps were fixed. Only went back onto YT to read discussions in video comments
Yeah they risk making their platform obsolete to many users.
And where will users go? There are no alternatives. Other platforms don’t have as much content, require you to pay, or both.
I can’t vouch for others but I’d rather just stop using the service all together if I can’t do it ad free. I’m not inclined to pay for YouTube either, already pay for too many services. People existed just fine without Youtube. They can again.
Pornhub, or touching grass. Either order really.
I’d been paying for premium YouTube for a few years, the family plan had a massive spike in price and I’d had enough from there. Been using Grayjay for the past few months only watching a couple of channels, but if this goes live it will kill the platform for me.
The bundled YouTube music sub really doesn’t sell it for me either, sure it’s got some more niche music compared to other platforms but it’s not a drop-in replacement (especially for the better half).
All and all I’m probably one of the few that will tap out of the platform, will be interesting to see the fallout.
Have you considered paying for their ad free service?
YouTube: creates the problem
This guy: have you considered paying them for the solution?
If you pay me MORE money, I won’t shit on your lawn
If you pay me more money I’ll shit on your lawn less often
Like many other business they offer an ad funded service and a paid service. I understand this is Lemmy, and people love getting things for free. But if you don’t like ads, have you thought about paying for the service?
they offer an ad funded service and a paid service
Just because they offer a paid service doesn’t mean it’s reasonable for me to pay for it. For example: if the cost was $1000 a month it would not be reasonable to respond with “why don’t you pay for it?” Because that’s not a reasonable price.
If a person doesn’t find the price reasonable then it is reasonable for them not to pay.Watching ads is also a cost. It costs time. Each person has a threshold of how many ads they are willing to watch before the cost is too high, at which point it is reasonable for them to no longer pay that cost.
YouTube is constantly increasing the ad time trying to find that point just before people get sick of it.
if you don’t like ads, have you thought about paying for the service?
I remind you that the person you originally replied to said they were done watching YouTube. Not that they were insisting on getting it for free. They find the ad cost too high, and the paid service cost too high, so they will not use the service. That is a perfectly reasonable response and a response of “why don’t you pay for it” is not helpful, irrelevant, and shows you aren’t listening to what is being said.
For the record: If I believed there was even a chance that my watching YouTube with an ad blocker caused the tiniest noticeable amount of loss to YouTube’s finances, I would set up a tab streaming YouTube 24 hours a day on mute. So no, I also will not be paying them for premium either.
I agree with all your points, not using the service is absolutely an option. I suggested paying for premium because that was the option that made the most sense to me. I hate ads and love YouTube. For me, the value I get from a subscription is much higher than other services I pay for. I’m subscribed to probably 500 YouTube channels and probably watch between 50-100 hours of content per month.
What’s the Lemmy equivalent of /r/hailcorporate?
That’s funny, but I love content created by individuals and small teams, especially the maker/engineering channels. I’ll take that over corporate produced media any day, even if it means paying a corporation to serve that content to me.
They also have one of the best business models for creators, meaning people producing content can do it full time and make a good living off of it, instead of doing it as a charity and producing mediocre quality videos.
They had a service I paid for. I paid for youtube without ads. Just that. And then they changed prices and made me pay for something that I did not need, YouTube Music. So I canceled.
They had me as a subscriber, they just wanted more money and lost me.
And I block ads. Not specifically for youtube, but for all sites and apps that I can. I use Blockada and most days the number of blocked tracking cookies goes over 1000. Laat 24 hours it is 3426 trackers blocked. Is it really necessary that I am being tracked that much?
I don’t think so, and I am not even talking about malware, or crypto ming scripts that will be loaded as ads. Most ads are not checked properly so I have no idea what malicious bullshit I can get on my systems without even asking for it.
If I find something that I use a lot and adds value, I will donate some money. For example, I support some creators on Patreon.
And ads always do their best to be loud and intrusive. And if I have a guest at my house that is loud and intrusive, they don’t get invited back. The same with ads.
Remember when ads were just a small rectangle on youtube? You clicked it away and that is it? That was the way. Serve ads in a normal, non intrusive way and I can handle them just fine.
Yes, and it took less than a minute of googling to find “I’m paying, why do I still see ads?”. There’s also someone in this thread complaining of the same.
Premium also has lots of ads in your feed (disguised as product videos) and videos include sponsorships ads.
The problem with that is they will eventually introduce ads to the paid service as well.
Have a sneaking suspicion that google is doing the classic spend 100 dollars to save 1 cent type scenario, cause all the money they’ve dumped into this anti-adblock shit? theres no way its less than what they’ve not made from adblockers.
Especially when all this money could have been spent on improving their ad service so people don’t have to view 2 hour ads, or malware laden bullshit, or just blatant pornographic advertising.
but why spend money moderating their own service, when they can spend 10x the money trying to force their open septic tank of a service on everyone.
It’s what happens when you hire MBA grads and they’re trying to find relevance.
Maybe… but in the long term advertisers aren’t going to be willing to spend as much on a platform if they know that ads are easily blocked.
except ads are blocked everywhere when you have an adblocker.
and people have adblocking because ads are cancer
Because as are everywhere.
and they carry malware.
and they are obnoxious, if not straight pornographic.
Moderating the advertising would do far more for making adblock useless, than starting a petty dickslapping war they wont win.
I remember when I first downloaded an ad blocker. For quite a while I didn’t bother, ads didn’t bother me and websites need to pay for hosting somehow. Then I encountered an ad that SCREAMED “HELOOOOOO” any time you moused over it and I immediately downloaded an ad blocker and haven’t been without since.
Fuck advertising companies, they are the reason ad blockers are so prolific. If ads aren’t bothering you then you’re not noticing them, meaning they’re not doing their job so ad companies will develop new ways to bother you with them until you refuse to take it anymore.
I jumped on the adblocking train after the 3rd time my system got struck with nasty malware (back in the windows XP days) from infected ads.
I finally said fuck it, downloaded adblockers, and never looked back.
and every time i’ve been without adblockers since (new computer/new format, working on someone elses, etc) I’ve continually been reinforced about the necessity of adblockers.
Ad moderation won’t happen until there’s a unified group which can moderate ads and can’t gain from being more permissive. Basically, advertisers need to unionize against their own common interest to increase the quantity of ads.
This has kind of happened already in the form of sponsorships, where each ad is vetted and can be rejected on a case-by-case basis. Each presenter is acting alone in this case however, letting bad sponsors slip through. Bad sponsors are often slammed on in feedback though.
Perhapse if advertisers could remove their heads from their posteriors for a moment they might see that neutrally read ads with no music would drive far fewer people to block them, but this could only work if all ads on a platform were limited in this way, and such regulations could be reliable and specific enough to make blocking more hassle than it’s worth.
I’m having difficulty imagining a blocker driven agreement though, as any level of leeway for ads would all but require compensation, and that’s 99% of the way to corruption already.
However, this all could only work if for-profic companies could be convinced to not seek every possible profit at every point immediately, which is unlikely.
advertisers dont even have to do anything.
Google just has to grow a set of fucking balls and say “No, this ad is to loud/obstructive/annoying/disruptive/downloads malicious code, It will not be run on our service”
but Google’d rather take money from PragerU than moderate its ads to remove the need for adblocking
Google runs AdSense, they’re exactly one of the advertising companies I’m talking about. I agree that they’re in a great position to enforce regulations on ads and build trust, but why do that when you can just eliminate all the alternatives?
I have a personal rule that anything advertised on YouTube I will never buy.
all I ever see advertised on youtube, during the brief times I have no adblocker (mostly when I’m working on other peoples computers and making sure audio and stuff is working) are either 2 hour long fake documentaries/talk shows/etc pushing some bullshit product
or PragerU pushing racist bullshit.
In fact, the overwhelming majority of it is PragerU pushing racist bullshit.
If you remove all other reasons for adblocking, Not seeing PragerU bullshit and not letting google make money off PragerUs racist bullshit is still an incredibly valid reason for adblocking.
I mean I’ll settle for the ad being blacked out and muted while I wait for the content. Or have it play elevator music while I wait.
or do some back end trickery where they can buffer the video for longer than youtube allows, then selectively clip out the ad parts so you can continue to seemlessly watch.
I wonder if the server throttles that ads so you can’t 2x the playback speed. Sounds like a good way to detect when the ads are being served.
they cracked down on adblockers, adblockers got better.
They’re trying to get around adblockers again, adblockers will get better again
I will pay for an adblocker before I pay for an ad provider to stop harassing me
Chad uBlock Plus dev doesn’t even want our money.
Chad Raymond Hill who refuses to accept donatoins or sponsorships of any kind.
That being said the people that maintain the filter lists I believe, don’t quoute me on this, you can donate to a few of them. Really depends if they mention it on their githubs though and you pretty much have to go about finding them on your own as there’s no real centralized list of all the people that contribue to the filter lists.
That’s correct. uBlock Plus’ Github says he won’t accept donations but give instead to the unsung heroes maintaining the lists on which his software depends.
YouTube shell company running highly effective subscription based ad blocker! Hahaha I could see it.
If anything, adblock taught me about pi-hole, which brought me into the raspberry pi world.
And id rather spend money on that.
adguard for windows, which is also available on CrappleComputers and I think it’s also on linux
I’m not so sure. Once they are embedded in the video they become hard to block. Twitch is like this now.
And yet there are userscripts you can use to block out twitch ads. I haven’t seen one for months now despite not being a subscriber.
I’m holding out some hope, since twitch is live but YouTube is pre-buffered, but they could still block loading past the ad on a timer or a key computed from hashing the decoded frames of the ad, idk
I give it 5 hours from mass release before ad blockers catch up.
If they make it shitty enough I just wont use it.
Imagine what YouTube could be if they spent all this cash on improving their service instead.
Nothing that can’t be blocked by sponsorblock.
And if that doesn’t work we’ll find something else. Even if we’d have to download the same video multiple times to compare and strip out the differences.
Google may have plenty of nerds, but the world will always have more.
Server side ads sound more expensive for Google to me. I’ll just use some future plugin that blacks out the screen or whatever if it comes to that.
Sounds like a price increase is coming our way!
They are coming your way for sure. Cause I’m not paying a dime 😉
Wouldn’t sponsorblock be enough?
No, the ad timings will vary
In fact, it’s likely that it might fuck over SB in general, if they don’t compensate for it
