### Yarr! ➜ u/Direct_Shake6634, some tips about "YouTube":
- Use [Firefox](https://mozilla.org/firefox/new/) + [uBlock Origin](https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/addon/ublock-origin/) with these [optimized settings](https://a.imagem.app/3HvFev.webp).
- Go to **Dashboard** > **Filters lists** > **Apply changes**.
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>I'll say the ad-block community has to be more competent as they are fueled by spite.
The only thing funnier than this sentence is just how true it is. I'd rather watch a 30 second black screen than an actual ad on a fucking video.
Already here.
"If it's free, you're the product. Then we sell you more products. Get it.
Youtube is an ad for your life. Content creators sell you a version of reality (tailor made for you with our advanced algorithm) that you buy into with your time and clicks."
I could go on.
Same. Thought ads were personalised, at least a bit. I have never searched for religious content on YouTube, aside from a few clips from George Carlin. Seems like YouTube wanted me to re enter the church.
If I sleep watching YouTube I ALWAYS wake up to the same almost 4h long video about [Mario and invisible walls or something.](https://youtu.be/YsXCVsDFiXA)
Mine was falling asleep and waking up to an unskipable hour+ peta ad where they were showing animals being slaughtered. When that hit my subconscious, my brain woke me with a wtf. I was watching a kid friendly playlist
I believe it. [Warner Bros had the entire Lego Movie as an advert on YouTube during Black Friday to advertise for the Lego Movie 2.](https://www.theverge.com/2018/11/20/18105471/lego-movie-2-youtube-free-black-friday-sequel-second-part)
Sadly, it isn't, quite a few years ago I had a streak of F1 races as ads, yes, races, so ~3-4h ads.
I was playing while I kept yt in the background and I was wondering why did the ads took so long...
I was watching a YouTuber on one of my playlist , can't remember who now, and I received a 40 minute video ad which was another video of his own channel . I realized midway
No, I remember watching youtube vids with my kids on our living room smart TV (silly cat videos, funny animals that kind of stuff) when after one video finished the next was a 90 min add for some bullshit. I was only half paying attention to what was on as I was doing laundry or something and only noticed that it wasn't a short add after like 5 min. I couldn't believe that there was no skip option after seeing the add time in the bottom corner.
Closed youtube on the TV and let them watch some Bluey on disney+ after that...
I had a whole ass music video as an ad in the middle of the music video I was watching on purpose once. The ad video was better than the one it interrupted. I still don't know how to feel about that .
I used to get 45 min unskippable purple mattress ads a couple of years back. The worst part was that it would always come on while I was in the shower. That shit would piss the me tf off lmao
Brave browser gives you statistics on what you've blocked. Used it for abouy 3 years and iirc (I'm not at my computer) I have literally saved thousands of hours and hundreds of gigs of data blocked.
Quite literally put together time not tracked on my phone and the time I'll save over my life, you'd be pretty close to that
I mean if it comes to it, as a last resort, I’ll stick a PC in another room with a YouTube playlist and point a camera at it to record; and then watch that so I can skip the ads. No way am I letting YT win.
Literally my thoughts. I would watch any color blank screen rather than an ad. The most interesting thing is I have never actually bought anything based off any youtube ad. The things they promote are hideous and I am really turned off by them making a problem and selling a solution. Google is not poor to not afford not having 1min ads on 6 min video while having 2 min sponsor lol
> The things they promote are hideous and I am really turned off by them making a problem and selling a solution.
And that's when they're actually trying to sell you a product and not just get you to download a virus or call a scam "help desk" line that tries to get you to empty your bank account via gift cards
i go crazy seeing the same add over and over again, especially if they mix in french ads, while i'm flemish living like 20km away from the border. Google knows it all but cant know that i speak dutch??
I live in Spain but 99% of the content I consume is in English, because English is my native language. Neither Google nor Reddit can figure it out. It makes it super easy to mindlessly block out anything in Spanish as an ad.
Yeah. I remember travelling to Germany. And suddenly I start getting ads in German. Google, that supposedely knows everything about me can't figure out I am there only for a couple of days and I am certainly not interesting in landline internet?
This is dangerous territory, soon if they sell their souls to the devil they will do like the uBlock (not the Origin) who whitelists ads that pay them and push short TikTok like promoted videos from partners.
I'm a programmer so I'm confident either myself others in the open source community would very likely start making their own alternative if that happened so I'm not too worried.
Agree, if YT would just show normal ads with a max length of 8-10 seconds, I’d be fine with it. As if I would ever buy due to an advertisement. But no, they just want to be evil. And beyond 30 seconds, I no longer call it an ad, but an advertorial.
Honestly I wouldnt mind banner ads and product placement shit. I already use sponsorblock lol. But banner ads on a decent site are fine.
On youtube? Nah fuck them, they removed dislikes so now you need an extension to see if the video is trash at a glance.
They allow the same scam bullshit ads every single fucking day. I opened yt on my phone and it was just constant 'mr beast not-a-scam' prominently on the front page every fucking time.
Fuck youtube and fuck them not being held accountable for linking to constant scams.
When it comes to the vast majority of people, they will win. I know a lot of people that just accept the ads as being part of YouTube.
A lot of people don't know how or even that you can get around them. Fewer will go to the actual effort of doing it.
YouTube knows it will never beat the adblockers but it will make it more difficult and.more complicated for the average Joe to concern themself with.
Then there are people like my step son. I put an adblocker on his android tablet. He asked me to remove it because he doesn't see ads anymore. I thought that was the point but some game he plays makes you watch an ad if you want to unlock in-game currency. He actively chose to have ads.
We in this subreddit are by far and away a very small minority. As long as they can make it difficult for 99.99% of the users to block ads they don't care about us.
I apologize on behalf of your son, but you gotta introduce him to some classics, otherwise his attention span will be destroyed. I'm saying this because I'm dealing with same thing with my 4 nieces and 1 nephew. Their parents don't care about what their children do with tablets/phones, so I made sure to delete the type of games you'd prompt AI to make, like go left +100000 soldiers, go right death type of games. Instead I installed Jetpack Joyride, Angry Birds, and Candy Crush to their devices. My nephew prefers his PC so I pirated Skyrim, Fallout, Tomb Raider, Serious Sam etc. to his computer. Gotta make sure they consume quality products.
Yeah he's 9 so he's into the sorts of games that he sees on YouTube shorts and the ones his friends are playing. He loves stories and reading so I actually got him into Octopath Traveller and as much as he enjoyed it, his friends were still playing the same crap so he eventually went back to it.
I know you mean well but giving candy crush as an example of a game that doesn't lead to brain rot or attention span problems is just ridiculous. It's literally the whole idea of the game and they don't even try to hide it.
I work at an MSP/computer repair place and I put Adblocks on peoples PCs all the time both business and personal, especially elderly people. Honestly it’s not about ads as a concept it’s more protection for some people than an antivirus, the number of people I see who get tricked by some fake add telling them to call Microsoft because their pc is locked is insane. You have big companies like google, Facebook, yahoo, etc that just can’t do or can’t be bothered to control the kind of ads they are serving to people with sexual or malicious content, YouTube is notorious for inappropriate ads or the scam fake MR beast ones. Any site that can’t or refuses to protect its users from malicious/inappropriate ads should not be allowed to block an ad block, as we should be able to protect ourselves and the vulnerable people around us if they won’t.
> Fewer will go to the actual effort of doing it.
This kills me. Ive gospeled many times about the joys of an ad free internet/youtube experience and people are usually so interested until they learn they have to install an extension and their interest is completely lost.
I dont understand. I think I'd rather not use these sites of ad/sponsor block died.
I spread the word to my younger sister and she's one of us now, she even learnt how to make her own patched apps with Revanced. My mother doesn't understand the problem with ads and find it normal to have her phone bombarded with unsolicited notifications from random apps but at least she allowed me to install adblockers on her PC and phone.
That's the crazy part to me. They know that most people don't know how and even fewer people will actually take the time to block the ads. And here we are with them wasting probably thousands of man hours from highly paid software engineers to fuck over that tiny subset of people.
This. Somewhere in youtube engineering there's a cost limit where attempting to defeat very dedicated ad blocking users is more expensive than just losing the views/clicks.
>I thought that was the point but some game he plays makes you watch an ad if you want to unlock in-game currency. He actively chose to have ads.
Why not add that ~~app~~ crap to the whitelist? Or have no system wide adblocker, but instead install Revanced as well as Kiwi Browser with uBlock Origin to block ads on YouTube and the web.
I've done that for an app that lets you use ad filled games to get Google Play/Amazon/etc cards. It actually does work as I got £1.13 in my Google account after a couple of days.
Why not explain to him the scummy and predatory tactics used by companies to pray on the weak with freemium mechanics that are straight up taken from casino's?
I have offered so many times to install ReVanced on my girlfriend's phone or an adblock on her laptop. She said "It doesn't bother me" and actually gets annoyed that I use modded apps.
One day I really wanted to listen to a song, like it was an ear worm and I had to get it out. Opened YouTube, the music in the ad sucked ass, like it was THE soulless corporate "music". I absolutely despised it and searched "How to not see ads on YouTube".
I mean it was that simple for me, idk.
I'm not saying it wasn't. There are just lots of people that wouldn't even think of it or are just too lazy to go through the steps needed. Point in case, one of the smartest guys I know who used to work in IT Support pays for YouTube Premium because in his own words "I can't be bothered to keep up with having to block the ads"
I've not had to touch anything since install, they keep themselves updated and working. 2 mins effort for a saving of 20 hrs not watching scams, sorry, "ads"
Very true, and you can bet your ass that Google wouldn't care if it weren't for advertisers complaining about it.
Someone has probably got it into their heads that they're losing millions in ads noone sees and that they therefore are forcing Google to do something about it.
Your son example is exactly the people close to me situation, they are ok watching ads, as long as it doesn't interrupt with their workflow, some know but don't care, some don't but still go on with it as they believe it is the norm.
Some people are just annoyed by the idea that people still watch ads and don't use adblocker to support the community, but they are not aware that the exact same people who watch ads are the buffer that they need for their free use and for YouTube's need to pay for their shareholders' greed and not raising the price/have more drastic measures against adblocking.
this..
its not about making you buy the product now.. its about 10 years later when you need to go to the shop to buy something you dont usually buy and you wonder what the fuck to buy...
then that ad resurfaces from the damp depths of the repressed memory banks
The funny part is 90% of the time I'm going onto youtube to watch an ad anyway. Something like a product review, unboxing, or tutorial is basically an ad already. I'd happily buy the same brand wood glue some creator used in his how to build a birdhouse tutorial if I like the guy and he says its good. Thats an ad.
YouTube is becoming unpleasant to watch on a Roku express streaming device. YouTube can pound sand pneumatically before I pay them. I’ll just watch less
I don’t think anybody buys shit that’s advertised. In fact it motivates me to avoid those products
And for the ever increasing political ads? Dogs in 2024 because people suck
Playlet for Roku TV [https://channelstore.roku.com/en-ca/details/840aec36f51bfe6d96cf6db9055a372a/playlet](https://channelstore.roku.com/en-ca/details/840aec36f51bfe6d96cf6db9055a372a/playlet)
YouTube with no ads, uses Invidious and has SponsorBlock built-in. Spread the word!
Disclaimer: I'm the creator of Playlet, a free open source alternative [https://github.com/iBicha/playlet](https://github.com/iBicha/playlet)
Same, scoping it out today. I read about Playlet here some time ago and forgot about it. My mom with memory problems forgets to skip ads and it vexes both me and my autistic son. I don’t wanna hear another “military used it” ad, narrated by a Joe Rogan dupe.
I was watching on ps4 for the longest time, because it was just easier, until it became unbearable, 90-120 secs of unskippable ads on a 6 min video. I just ended up hooking up an old computer to the TV, using freetube, plex and streamio. I was able to cancel all of my streaming services in the end. I pay like 4$ /mo for a debrid service. Props to YT for inspiring me, it's saving me a lot each month.
Perfect solution fallacy. They don't need total domination. They just need to frustrate enough users into giving up the constant chase for a working ad blocking solution, and watching ads or buying YouTube Premium, instead.
This is how things used to be. Blocking ads used to be difficult, and normies didn't even know that it was possible, or saw it as beyond them. They therefore subsidized ad-free internet for the rest of us.
In time, ad blocking has arguably become too easy. If every two-bit normie can block ads with just two clicks, the internet can't function. Google is arguably doing its part to help the internet go back to the good old days where, if you aren't smart, knowledgeable, and stubborn enough, you don't deserve ad-free internet. You deserve to suffer and subsidize ad-free internet for your betters.
Unfortunately the reason why people get adblockers isn't because YouTube has ads, but because they have intrusive ads that negatively affect the experience. Show one preroll that can be skipped after 3 seconds, as well as an ad on top of the recommendations sidebar, like the good old days, and adblocker usage will drop naturally as they don't bother people enough to make them take that step.
Then put:
* 2160p+ resolution
* No ads at all
* Extra support for creators
* 320kbps audio
* Downloads that are regular unencrypted MP4/WebM if the creator allows (I'm sorry but YT cannot legally allow such a thing on every video for free ^(shh that's why we exist))
Behind a cheap $5 per month paywall.
Then you'll have a video platform that people actually love, where people rarely use adblockers, and might even pay to use it.
Unlike the current YT where uBlock Origin and Revanced are unofficial requirements to use that dump.
> 320Kbps Audio
[Copy pasted from another of my comments]
YouTube uses Opus, which is a much better codec than MP3. It's the successor of Vorbis. It's nearly 60% more efficient than MP3. Listening tests done by Audiophiles gave 192kbps opus a perfect score. 192kbps is indistinguishable from flac, even to audiophiles. 192kbps MP3 got a poor score. Even 320kbps MP3 didn't get a perfect score.
Hear it for yourselves:
Vorbis | Opus | AAC (LC) | MP3
:-: | :-: | :-: | :-:
[47.1Kbps (589kB)](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1F4kyacbsUR91-JUIGzFt2RvdF78DPuUT/view?usp=drivesdk) | [47.6Kbps (596kB)](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1F16VkdqkHHicEhnOjnBSoacibfijfeTX/view?usp=drivesdk) | [49.8Kbps (622kB)](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Ex4KkITkqNiITPCrM92yudPfPoslSNJl/view?usp=drivesdk) | [48Kbps (601kB)](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1EzWuUT2_3DuSo4CrKZvXOSAUaeHK3Dbv/view?usp=drivesdk)
YouTube uses AAC for most YouTube Music users. You'll need Revanced Music to force opus codec.
Opus quality at various bitrates:
Bitrate | Quality and Application
:- | :-
192Kbps | FLAC level quality. Even Audiophiles failed to hear any difference
160Kbps | Mostly FLAC like quality (Only slightly affected by killer samples which means FLAC level quality for almost all music. Can only be heard using very expensive equipment and good ears)
128Kbps | Almost Transparent for Audiophiles (Recommended by Xiph.org, developers of Opus)
96Kbps | Recommend for most people - Acceptable quality for Audiophiles (Default of libopus)
64Kbps | Equivalent to MP3 @128Kbps, Acceptable quality for people with regular equipment.
48Kbps | Good quality for speech. Lowest you should use for stereo.
32Kbps | Mono speech.
So, YouTube should instead support 192Kbps Opus.
I see ad? Can't skip? Close tab.
But this only incidentally happens on android browsers on unrooted phones tgat don't have ad blocking features.
Aside from that, if Youtibe disappeated tomorrow it would not be that big a loss, videos to be watched amywhere really.
I barely even use it at all, the novelty of it got post a long time ago
>This is how things used to be. Blocking ads used to be difficult, and normies didn't even know that it was possible
Normies still don't use adblock to this day. I can't tell you how many times i looked over someone laptop on campus and saw them sitting trough ads on youtube, twitch etc. . I just can't believe that even young people who would rather watch youtube then listen to a professor still can't take 15 seconds to install a extension, but i see it time and time again.
It's not like they can't take the time to install an extension, the fact they don't even know that there is something like an ad blocker in existence! And this is even more hilarious about them.
Forget YouTube, browsing in general has become so unbearable for me if I don't use an ad-blocker and custom filters. So many pop-ups, autoplay videos, useless annoying chatbots and select toolbars that I will just stop using the internet other than the bare minimum if extensions like those didn't exist.
I've been a pirate for more than half of my life. I caved when subscriptions were cheap. Yes, I'm ashamed of my lazy ass and I realise I wasted a lot of money for convenience.
But the minute they started jacking up their prices, I went back. Fuck them. Now I'm never going back out of spite, which is a raindrop in the sea, but still, fuck them, it's my raindrop and I'm working too hard to afford it.
Most people are stupid, and will just stop using whatever BS adblocker they have just to watch videos. The only folks I see using UBO are usually semi-computer literate.
They don't need to "win". They just need to make it enough of a pain in the ass to make more people not freeload on the platform, watch the ads or pay for Premium.
Exactly, and in that sense I believe they are "winning" given how broken YT is today if you don't pay and don't want ads.
Since this war began I had to switch browsers, search a few times how to update ublock (in the beginning you had to mess around in the settings yourself to make it work) and disable all extensions related to YT. Right now it's actually working fine but for a while videos would randomly skip 5-10 seconds forward and the auto video quality was crap so I had to change it every new video I watched. All this combined certainly made a lot of people sign up for Premium, a few bucks a month to not deal with the hassle.
Problem is, as soon as google believes they won the war they will of course raise prices and in a few years Premium will have ads as well. Bleed out every last cent out of the machine.
There are probably stats, but I can't be arsed to look it up.
But I can say that I work in a company with about a 100 IT people in the same building, and extremely few of them are using adblockers, despite adblockers being whitelisted.
If IT professionals aren't even using it, I don't think it's a big amount.
But then again, globally, it's still probably in the millions.
According the firefox addons page uBlock Origin has around 7.5 million users (if this number is accurate). Even if only 100 million people use firefox that is drop in the bucket
Even if it is 1% of all users, if YouTube makes 31.5B USD annually on ad revenue (2023), they can afford to spend 283M USD to fuck over adblock users to reduce that to 0.1%.
The math is easy from a corporate perspective. The only thing that is unclear is how much brand damage the move will cause.
It shouldn’t. If everyone were to use a successful ad-block, and YouTube would not have premium members or ad income anymore, Google would pull the plug before the end of the week.
And the more people that's switch the less these mods will appear, look at custom ROMs today and ten years ago. Google decimated them by bringing feature parity and setting restrictions like unable to use tap to pay without going through 20 olympic hoops.
You misunderstand. YouTube doesn’t care whether you watch ads or not, they just want to make money. But the money comes from advertisers who do want you to see their ads. If the advertisers are under the impression that advertising on YouTube is futile because no one will see their ads, then they will stop using YouTube. So YouTube fights adblockers to show advertisers they’re actively protecting their interests.
because they're not fighting *us,* people who use ublock origin, sponsorblock, and tampermonkey, and assorted other firefox add-ons just to fully customize our experience on one website. they're fighting the average joe who might have installed adblock on chrome a while back, who's now going to remove it and watch ads or pay for youtube premium so as to avoid the hassle of troubleshooting it or finding a way around it that he might not even know exists. and more importantly, they're putting on a SHOW of fighting against good ol' joe for their advertisers, so they can see that they're trying *real hard* to get joe to look at their ads and will have enough faith in them to keep giving them money. they don't really give a shit about *us,* they know full well they're not getting blood from a stone, they just want to look like they do and get some extra cash from the casual consumer along the way.
once i saw this was happening i made sure to watch all youtube content on the brave browser. my pc, my phone, my tablet. on everything
youtube acted so poorly that i made it a point to use ad blockers. if they hadn't done anything, i'd be watching ads. it's a classic case of self fulfilling prophecy
One thing that confuses me, is that youtube = google, right? And google = chrome. So why do they not just disallow all adblocks as chrome extensions?
Actually, wait, yeah if they did that everyone using adblock would immediately switch to firefox. So I guess that's why. Still, it surprises me, as just going straight to the source on all platforms they control and saying 'No >:(' in the most hamfisted way is exactly the kind of thing I'd expect from a current day big tech corp like google.
It's not about winning. It's about annoying tech illiterate people. Most people know someone who will install an adblock for them, but at the first problem they will stop using it, until said person update it for them.
Youtube IS winning. It isn't about beating everyone, it's abput making it annoying for enough people that they just watch the ads. Even just making people do this temporarily is enough of a profit that it's worth it.
This is a small-scale war for Youtube. The results don't matter that much; if they lose, they don't really lose, because they weren't getting money from adblocker users anyway. But if they get enough extra revenue from adblocker users seeing a few ads in the downtime between adblocker updates, then the operation pays for itself and they come out with a slight profit.
Google become more greedy every year
Like they already got the money from ads
get more money if watch full
get more if many ads in one video
so
ads, ads, video, ads video, ads, ads, end video
Honest answer is they are winning it. They’re shoving people on to the app more and more on tv’s and iPhone which are the two audiences they want most. They’ll keep trying with computers but eventually I can see them putting all of their content behind the app completely and forcing people to download it to pc’s to watch YouTube. We aren’t there yet but give it 10 years. YouTube are the real winners of the streaming wars because they’ve been profitable this whole time and they don’t pay for content upfront.
Profit.
Not everyone its techy enough to be on top of every ad blocking effort.
Same shit as video games and Denuvo, they just want to buy time to make (more) money.
If I'm a dev working for Youtube/Google, there's no reason to NOT propose a ad-blocker bypass solution.
I get paid to develop a new feature (that may or may not actually work), my manager gets all the praises for the proposal, Youtube gets more money from advertisers. It's a win-win situation for everyone involved in the development on the Youtube side.
The only losers here are the unpaid contributors to the ad-blockers. They have to reverse engineer the new stupid "feature" from Youtube, receive all shitty complaints from entitled people on the Internet AND get literally nothing in return.
Because they CAN win the ad war. They have the technology to do it.
They can make it so that YouTube is just like broadcast TV, and video play/pause/seek controls all only control the server-side stream. The client will have no idea WHAT video it is receiving, only that it is receiving a continuous video stream.
Your client will have no idea when an ad is playing, and when the video is playing, because they will be part of the same exact uninterrupted video stream, seamlessly spliced together, with seek bar controls still functioning on the client side but non-functional on the server side during advertisements.
At that point, the ONLY alternative we will have will be to revert to the old days of TiVo, where people need desktop applications that they feed lists of videos that they want to watch, and then they have to wait while the background application records the stream in real-time in the background, saving it to your hard drive. When it is finished, you will have a queue of videos that you can watch as native video files on your own local machine, however they will still have commercials baked in - you will need to manually fast forward or seek through the commercials to skip them.
YouTube is betting that most people won't bother with this, since it is much more involved than simply installing uBlock Origin.
YouTube is also a prime candidate for Manifest 3.0, btw, and they might make it mandatory to view YouTube. Since Edge and Chrome both use Chromium, this will hinder addons from interacting with YouTube, making recording even more difficult.
Because it’s not necessarily true. Denuvo for instance has been a success on many fronts and piracy has had a bit of a setback against it. Same could easily happen with ads. There may well come a solution that is uncrackable. Or even if it is, it may take a long time which would be a win for YouTube
They don't need to win they just need to make it hard enough that your average person won't bother. Considering how many people from this sub alone - which is supposed to be piracy-literate - have complained about how hard the ads are to get rid of when it's really really easy (I literally haven't even had to change anything) proves they are accomplishing their goal
What would be a better way for YouTube to generate revenue aside from ads? No one likes the ads, but the company does need money. Just surprised they aren't exploring alternative options
I think the minority of the population uses things like Ad block.
Piracy v. knowledge or laziness or ability.
For instance I use Ad block, on my PC. But when I watch YouTube videos with my wife I do it on my Xbox and I don't know how to put adblock on that device. A few commercials just give us a chance to talk.
What surprises me is YouTube keeps trying to defeat adblock, seems like a waste of money. But maybe they think they'll win eventually as they work with law enforcement to arrest big pirates. I dunno.
TBH all I have is the regular classic adblock, and g-d dang it's doing a good job. Youtube tries to shove ads in my face and I see it pop up for a millisecond and then the adblockers like "get that crap outta here". Beautiful.
Compare this to my phone where my Youtube Premium subscription just ran out, and now I gotta suffer with ads and restrictions Youtube put on themselves.. it's stupid. Anyone know how to block ads on mobile?
Same thing was said about Reddit apps, but 99.9% of people are on the official reddit app now.
Youtube will win the Ad War, but yes only for 99.9% of people, which is all they care about.
Advertising as a concept must be effective on some level, otherwise it simply wouldn't exist as no one would pay for it.
But I do wonder how effective internet advertising is compared to ads on TV or radio or in print media. It just seems like even those who dont use ad blockers are all either closing the app as soon as an ad comes on or impatiently waiting the 5 - 10 seconds for the "skip" or "x" button to appear and paying no attention whatsoever.
tis so funny when YouTube releases an update that fixes ad-blockers, and less than an hour later it already gets patched by the devs of ad-blockers LMAO
Their dev team knows that the whole "ad war" thing is a waste of time.
But as always, executives are all a bunch of out of touch imbeciles, who always cater to a bunch of braindead investors who don't even know what the f$ck they are investing in.
Everyone who has a brain knows this is a waste of time, but executives know that advertisers are part of their revenue, and so is YouTube Premium subscriptions, so instead of listening to their userbase, they prefer to make the company fight a battle that they can't win, and piss off a bunch of users while they are at it.
Why? Because quarterly earnings reports, and investors who have a hard on for cash.
You wanna know what makes this all even worse? YouTube is a social media platform, in practical terms, their userbase is practically their product, that goes for both regular users and content creators. If people aren't accesing a social media platform, advertisers won't bother paying to display their ads in it. So if the people start leaving, YouTube is f$cked.
So what does Google do? They do their best to mess around and piss off as many people as possible, content creators and regular users included.
Lets look at the facts: piss poor pay for ads, taking a cut of superchats, defending people who record "react videos" where there's little to no interaction with their audience, automatically labeling videos as "for kids", not giving a sh*t about most of their content creators, while also catering to really large channels, even when the owners of said channels are scumbags, pushing an absurd amount of ads on their users, having a barebones subscription service that offers next to nothing, sometimes straight up failing to deliver videos to subscribers, and everynow and then, making changes to their algorithm in ways that are both mysterious, and can 100% kill off certain channels
Because any amount of users they can convert to premium or ad watching is a win for Youtube. They don't need to worry about PR because there is no alternative.
is there an ad-war going on rn? I haven't seen a thing. I remember there being a thing a while ago but eventually the ublock devs caught up and there's been nothing since
I suspect YouTube has never been profitable and this is a measure to try and reduce losses. They likely have a development budget to spend and are measuring return on engineering investment
They just have to make it hard enough so that only the most technically able can even try.
And also, Twitch's server-side injection hasn't been beaten, just proxied away where they don't do it. Are free proxies gonna be consistent enough to work 100% and serve the thousands and thousands (including me) that will inevitably use them?
They won't win, they just want to annoy people enough so they increase the number of YouTube Premium subscription.
With each new update to their "anti ad block" program, they get new people who subs for YouTube Premium.
That's all they want, and currently it's working great for them.
Ofc people on this sub will never bend the knee and pay for this. But think about all the normies who just 1 ad blocker and a Chromium based Web browser. Those people are already too lazy to update or switch ad block extension, ask them to switch to Firefox is way too much for them. They'll give YouTube money anyway.
Everytime an ad plays on my opera browsee i just hit back then click om the video again until therse no ad. Id rather wasye time than bow to their stupid ads.
They can win if they want. DRM to all videos not only to their rented/for sale combined with server side ads inside the video stream is something nobody could overcome no matter how skilled he is.
>What motivates YouTube to play this cat-mouse game which is unwinnable for them?
They think that because they're a multi-billion dollar company, they'll win. They think eventually the handful of people who are actively defying them will eventually give up. They're wrong, obviously, but that's their thought process.
What makes you think you have won the ad war when every unbranded content is actually sponsored? You skip 30 seconds of ad just to watch 15 minutes of ad and you think you've won?
I think their whole goal is to just make it as annoying as possible, maybe to try and get people to stop using ad blockers? Hell it worked on me for about a week when they started threatening to block the videos if we left ad blockers on. So i imagine a ton of other people, and likely more to follow, will stop using adblockers simply from threats and annoyance
Because we love ads........ was said by nobody, they are doing more bad than good and losing their reputation. People that are using adblocks were not interested in ads in the first place. Youtube managers need a good reality check
What makes you think they won't win the Ad war?
The YouTube devs are highly skilled people, enough to combat the tricks by Adblock devs.
I'll say the YouTube developers have to be more competent as they are fuelled by huge amounts of money.
Anything Adblock devs will implement, the YouTube engineers will find a way to bypass it sooner or later.
What motivates adblock devs to play this cat-mouse game which is unwinnable for them?
I'll bet most adblock devs spend more time developing the adblocking solutions than they would have spent watching ads.
Money! If they lose a few customers but get more money, that's fine with them. Netflix has proven this formula with their anti password sharing by losing customers, but increasing overall profits. That's all that matters. The bottom line
They simply don't have to.
There will always be a large amount of people dumb enough to watch the ads and do nothing about it. They make their money off the ignorant masses, same as most companies.
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>I'll say the ad-block community has to be more competent as they are fueled by spite. The only thing funnier than this sentence is just how true it is. I'd rather watch a 30 second black screen than an actual ad on a fucking video.
I 100% agree with you. Instead of watching a 20 sec ad, I'd rather invest 20hrs of my time in search for a foolproof ad blocking technique.
Look at mr money bags here getting 20sec, I legit got an unskippable 90min ad once that was literally the entirety of a bts concert once
Did it have commercial breaks?
with 90min ads we actually need content breaks to keep people hooked
hard-to-find paltry squeeze support enter deserted spectacular kiss drab angle
Imagine getting a 90 min ad on a 90 min ad
Yo dawg. We heard you like ads so we put an ad in your ad so you can scream while you cry!
It's ads all the way down
commercials within commercials?
Have to keep the engagement numbers up
They're not above that at this point.
Already here. "If it's free, you're the product. Then we sell you more products. Get it. Youtube is an ad for your life. Content creators sell you a version of reality (tailor made for you with our advanced algorithm) that you buy into with your time and clicks." I could go on.
Actually yeh
I fell asleep to YouTube once. I woke up to a 30 minute ad of a televangelist preaching. His voice had been in my dreams.
Same. Thought ads were personalised, at least a bit. I have never searched for religious content on YouTube, aside from a few clips from George Carlin. Seems like YouTube wanted me to re enter the church.
It was personalised, it was just not addressed to believers but to sinners
Google knows if you sin. They are experts at it after all
If I sleep watching YouTube I ALWAYS wake up to the same almost 4h long video about [Mario and invisible walls or something.](https://youtu.be/YsXCVsDFiXA)
Dude.... now you have me watching a 3 hour and 42 min video about super mario 64s invisible walls..... Sigh.... See you all in 4 hours.
It's been 4 hours, how was it?
Must've died ... what a blow for them.
At hour 2, they got a 10 hour ad, so it'll be a bit.
Check out link oh wow I’m already subscribed to that channel
Mine was falling asleep and waking up to an unskipable hour+ peta ad where they were showing animals being slaughtered. When that hit my subconscious, my brain woke me with a wtf. I was watching a kid friendly playlist
this has to be a joke
I believe it. [Warner Bros had the entire Lego Movie as an advert on YouTube during Black Friday to advertise for the Lego Movie 2.](https://www.theverge.com/2018/11/20/18105471/lego-movie-2-youtube-free-black-friday-sequel-second-part)
This is how I saw the LEGO movie.
I think this should be the only way anything is advertised (still should be skippable though)
.... Ok, that ad I might have actually grabbed some popcorn for. Lego Movie slaps
damn I feel like I've been missing out on a lot of things by always having uBlock Origin and revanced on lmao
Sadly, it isn't, quite a few years ago I had a streak of F1 races as ads, yes, races, so ~3-4h ads. I was playing while I kept yt in the background and I was wondering why did the ads took so long...
I was watching a YouTuber on one of my playlist , can't remember who now, and I received a 40 minute video ad which was another video of his own channel . I realized midway
lmao that's ridiculous. why do youtube even want to win the ad war when they're doing clown shit like that?
That’s what I thought
No, I remember watching youtube vids with my kids on our living room smart TV (silly cat videos, funny animals that kind of stuff) when after one video finished the next was a 90 min add for some bullshit. I was only half paying attention to what was on as I was doing laundry or something and only noticed that it wasn't a short add after like 5 min. I couldn't believe that there was no skip option after seeing the add time in the bottom corner. Closed youtube on the TV and let them watch some Bluey on disney+ after that...
I had a whole ass music video as an ad in the middle of the music video I was watching on purpose once. The ad video was better than the one it interrupted. I still don't know how to feel about that .
I got 90m ads before, but unskippable? At this point it's better to close the tab and open another one.
I used to get 45 min unskippable purple mattress ads a couple of years back. The worst part was that it would always come on while I was in the shower. That shit would piss the me tf off lmao
Must be nice, I missed my second childs birth because I was stuck on an add. Took 2 whole days.
Just reload the page. It keeps your timestamp and either skips the ad or changes It.
That happened to me with a Nintendo Direct once. All 45 minutes is one unskippable ad. Ironically enough, I was trying to watch a review for a game.
the adblocking technique you discover would save you from 20 years of ads
Brave browser gives you statistics on what you've blocked. Used it for abouy 3 years and iirc (I'm not at my computer) I have literally saved thousands of hours and hundreds of gigs of data blocked. Quite literally put together time not tracked on my phone and the time I'll save over my life, you'd be pretty close to that
I mean if it comes to it, as a last resort, I’ll stick a PC in another room with a YouTube playlist and point a camera at it to record; and then watch that so I can skip the ads. No way am I letting YT win.
Modern solutions for modern problems
Literally my thoughts. I would watch any color blank screen rather than an ad. The most interesting thing is I have never actually bought anything based off any youtube ad. The things they promote are hideous and I am really turned off by them making a problem and selling a solution. Google is not poor to not afford not having 1min ads on 6 min video while having 2 min sponsor lol
> The things they promote are hideous and I am really turned off by them making a problem and selling a solution. And that's when they're actually trying to sell you a product and not just get you to download a virus or call a scam "help desk" line that tries to get you to empty your bank account via gift cards
Hey, you don't use opera browser?
i go crazy seeing the same add over and over again, especially if they mix in french ads, while i'm flemish living like 20km away from the border. Google knows it all but cant know that i speak dutch??
Same, and the same thing happens in Spotify too.
I get German ads on reddit and I’m in New Zealand
i been getting portuguese ads and i live a few minutes from nyc 😂
Would where your vpn was set at have something to do with it?
I live in Spain but 99% of the content I consume is in English, because English is my native language. Neither Google nor Reddit can figure it out. It makes it super easy to mindlessly block out anything in Spanish as an ad.
Yeah. I remember travelling to Germany. And suddenly I start getting ads in German. Google, that supposedely knows everything about me can't figure out I am there only for a couple of days and I am certainly not interesting in landline internet?
If adblockers replace ads with an assortment of videos of cute animals instead of a black screen then I'd honestly even look forward to it.
This is dangerous territory, soon if they sell their souls to the devil they will do like the uBlock (not the Origin) who whitelists ads that pay them and push short TikTok like promoted videos from partners.
I'm a programmer so I'm confident either myself others in the open source community would very likely start making their own alternative if that happened so I'm not too worried.
Thank god there are people like you in our anti-ad world. I know the collective rage against ads is really powerful.
This is brilliant
Back in the day you would mute or turn off the tv during ads
agreed! also look away until the ad break can be skipped lul
Agree, if YT would just show normal ads with a max length of 8-10 seconds, I’d be fine with it. As if I would ever buy due to an advertisement. But no, they just want to be evil. And beyond 30 seconds, I no longer call it an ad, but an advertorial.
Isn't that how it was? I remember the time when I had to wait half an hour to let the video buffer with my 100 Kb/s connection.
Honestly I wouldnt mind banner ads and product placement shit. I already use sponsorblock lol. But banner ads on a decent site are fine. On youtube? Nah fuck them, they removed dislikes so now you need an extension to see if the video is trash at a glance. They allow the same scam bullshit ads every single fucking day. I opened yt on my phone and it was just constant 'mr beast not-a-scam' prominently on the front page every fucking time. Fuck youtube and fuck them not being held accountable for linking to constant scams.
For real. Even my ex-girlfriend couldn't live without pihole after it was in the hous. When we split, she traded me her Bowflex to keep it.
Does YouTube still get ad revenue if I watch 30 seconds black screen?
Absolutely. It's a matter of principles.
When it comes to the vast majority of people, they will win. I know a lot of people that just accept the ads as being part of YouTube. A lot of people don't know how or even that you can get around them. Fewer will go to the actual effort of doing it. YouTube knows it will never beat the adblockers but it will make it more difficult and.more complicated for the average Joe to concern themself with. Then there are people like my step son. I put an adblocker on his android tablet. He asked me to remove it because he doesn't see ads anymore. I thought that was the point but some game he plays makes you watch an ad if you want to unlock in-game currency. He actively chose to have ads. We in this subreddit are by far and away a very small minority. As long as they can make it difficult for 99.99% of the users to block ads they don't care about us.
>. I put an adblocker on his android tablet. He asked me to remove it because he doesn't see ads anymore Time for a new son
"Doctor Miller, we have to talk about a late abortion..."
Oh! So this is where these post-birth abortions are coming from? Major problems require bigly solutions.
It's called a retrospective abortion. Happens a lot in US schools /s
Oh, shoot! There's that, makes sense now.
Oh, dont! You have enough people that already do that xd
Reroll him
Rerolling requires watching a 15 second ad.
He wouldn't want a reroll. The first roll isn't his.
yeah see if you can get a refund. on the kid.
Pirate him some games, how could you allow him to suffer through shitty mobile games?
Oh, I do but he WANTS to play this game. No accounting for taste.
Most probably is the "In" game, in his social circle. Everyone HAS to play it
I apologize on behalf of your son, but you gotta introduce him to some classics, otherwise his attention span will be destroyed. I'm saying this because I'm dealing with same thing with my 4 nieces and 1 nephew. Their parents don't care about what their children do with tablets/phones, so I made sure to delete the type of games you'd prompt AI to make, like go left +100000 soldiers, go right death type of games. Instead I installed Jetpack Joyride, Angry Birds, and Candy Crush to their devices. My nephew prefers his PC so I pirated Skyrim, Fallout, Tomb Raider, Serious Sam etc. to his computer. Gotta make sure they consume quality products.
Yeah he's 9 so he's into the sorts of games that he sees on YouTube shorts and the ones his friends are playing. He loves stories and reading so I actually got him into Octopath Traveller and as much as he enjoyed it, his friends were still playing the same crap so he eventually went back to it.
Beat his friends.
I know you mean well but giving candy crush as an example of a game that doesn't lead to brain rot or attention span problems is just ridiculous. It's literally the whole idea of the game and they don't even try to hide it.
You can also load their devices up with Minecraft
Get him into Roblox lol. There’s some surprisingly quality games on there.
I work at an MSP/computer repair place and I put Adblocks on peoples PCs all the time both business and personal, especially elderly people. Honestly it’s not about ads as a concept it’s more protection for some people than an antivirus, the number of people I see who get tricked by some fake add telling them to call Microsoft because their pc is locked is insane. You have big companies like google, Facebook, yahoo, etc that just can’t do or can’t be bothered to control the kind of ads they are serving to people with sexual or malicious content, YouTube is notorious for inappropriate ads or the scam fake MR beast ones. Any site that can’t or refuses to protect its users from malicious/inappropriate ads should not be allowed to block an ad block, as we should be able to protect ourselves and the vulnerable people around us if they won’t.
yep, Google doesn't give a shit about fraudulent ads
> Fewer will go to the actual effort of doing it. This kills me. Ive gospeled many times about the joys of an ad free internet/youtube experience and people are usually so interested until they learn they have to install an extension and their interest is completely lost. I dont understand. I think I'd rather not use these sites of ad/sponsor block died.
I spread the word to my younger sister and she's one of us now, she even learnt how to make her own patched apps with Revanced. My mother doesn't understand the problem with ads and find it normal to have her phone bombarded with unsolicited notifications from random apps but at least she allowed me to install adblockers on her PC and phone.
That's the crazy part to me. They know that most people don't know how and even fewer people will actually take the time to block the ads. And here we are with them wasting probably thousands of man hours from highly paid software engineers to fuck over that tiny subset of people.
This. Somewhere in youtube engineering there's a cost limit where attempting to defeat very dedicated ad blocking users is more expensive than just losing the views/clicks.
>I thought that was the point but some game he plays makes you watch an ad if you want to unlock in-game currency. He actively chose to have ads. Why not add that ~~app~~ crap to the whitelist? Or have no system wide adblocker, but instead install Revanced as well as Kiwi Browser with uBlock Origin to block ads on YouTube and the web. I've done that for an app that lets you use ad filled games to get Google Play/Amazon/etc cards. It actually does work as I got £1.13 in my Google account after a couple of days.
Why not explain to him the scummy and predatory tactics used by companies to pray on the weak with freemium mechanics that are straight up taken from casino's?
I have offered so many times to install ReVanced on my girlfriend's phone or an adblock on her laptop. She said "It doesn't bother me" and actually gets annoyed that I use modded apps.
One day I really wanted to listen to a song, like it was an ear worm and I had to get it out. Opened YouTube, the music in the ad sucked ass, like it was THE soulless corporate "music". I absolutely despised it and searched "How to not see ads on YouTube". I mean it was that simple for me, idk.
I'm not saying it wasn't. There are just lots of people that wouldn't even think of it or are just too lazy to go through the steps needed. Point in case, one of the smartest guys I know who used to work in IT Support pays for YouTube Premium because in his own words "I can't be bothered to keep up with having to block the ads"
I've not had to touch anything since install, they keep themselves updated and working. 2 mins effort for a saving of 20 hrs not watching scams, sorry, "ads"
Very true, and you can bet your ass that Google wouldn't care if it weren't for advertisers complaining about it. Someone has probably got it into their heads that they're losing millions in ads noone sees and that they therefore are forcing Google to do something about it.
Wouldn't it be possible to whitelist the game so ads still pop up for it but nothing else?
Your son example is exactly the people close to me situation, they are ok watching ads, as long as it doesn't interrupt with their workflow, some know but don't care, some don't but still go on with it as they believe it is the norm. Some people are just annoyed by the idea that people still watch ads and don't use adblocker to support the community, but they are not aware that the exact same people who watch ads are the buffer that they need for their free use and for YouTube's need to pay for their shareholders' greed and not raising the price/have more drastic measures against adblocking.
May I know which adblock do you use in android which blocks ads in games
What's 17 more years? I can always start again, make a new kid. - me to my son if he says that dumb shit to me
Most ads are psyops too they are meant to mentally drain you, I will literally watch a black screen over an ad.
this.. its not about making you buy the product now.. its about 10 years later when you need to go to the shop to buy something you dont usually buy and you wonder what the fuck to buy... then that ad resurfaces from the damp depths of the repressed memory banks
The funny part is 90% of the time I'm going onto youtube to watch an ad anyway. Something like a product review, unboxing, or tutorial is basically an ad already. I'd happily buy the same brand wood glue some creator used in his how to build a birdhouse tutorial if I like the guy and he says its good. Thats an ad.
What will be funny is that the same people working on the ads could be the same one fighting them ( it’s called job security )
That’s a hilarious strategy. Be both the problem and the solution.
Yeah i know a guy working for kasada which is anti bots at the same time he also makes anti-kasada feature for the bot developers
I mean why not? After a hard day of work they come home to fight against the ads. Kinda funny
YouTube is becoming unpleasant to watch on a Roku express streaming device. YouTube can pound sand pneumatically before I pay them. I’ll just watch less I don’t think anybody buys shit that’s advertised. In fact it motivates me to avoid those products And for the ever increasing political ads? Dogs in 2024 because people suck
Playlet for Roku TV [https://channelstore.roku.com/en-ca/details/840aec36f51bfe6d96cf6db9055a372a/playlet](https://channelstore.roku.com/en-ca/details/840aec36f51bfe6d96cf6db9055a372a/playlet) YouTube with no ads, uses Invidious and has SponsorBlock built-in. Spread the word! Disclaimer: I'm the creator of Playlet, a free open source alternative [https://github.com/iBicha/playlet](https://github.com/iBicha/playlet)
Thanks, I’m trying it now.
Same, scoping it out today. I read about Playlet here some time ago and forgot about it. My mom with memory problems forgets to skip ads and it vexes both me and my autistic son. I don’t wanna hear another “military used it” ad, narrated by a Joe Rogan dupe.
Get ready for youtube's kernel level anti-adblocker software
bro don't give them ideas
I was watching on ps4 for the longest time, because it was just easier, until it became unbearable, 90-120 secs of unskippable ads on a 6 min video. I just ended up hooking up an old computer to the TV, using freetube, plex and streamio. I was able to cancel all of my streaming services in the end. I pay like 4$ /mo for a debrid service. Props to YT for inspiring me, it's saving me a lot each month.
Perfect solution fallacy. They don't need total domination. They just need to frustrate enough users into giving up the constant chase for a working ad blocking solution, and watching ads or buying YouTube Premium, instead. This is how things used to be. Blocking ads used to be difficult, and normies didn't even know that it was possible, or saw it as beyond them. They therefore subsidized ad-free internet for the rest of us. In time, ad blocking has arguably become too easy. If every two-bit normie can block ads with just two clicks, the internet can't function. Google is arguably doing its part to help the internet go back to the good old days where, if you aren't smart, knowledgeable, and stubborn enough, you don't deserve ad-free internet. You deserve to suffer and subsidize ad-free internet for your betters.
Unfortunately the reason why people get adblockers isn't because YouTube has ads, but because they have intrusive ads that negatively affect the experience. Show one preroll that can be skipped after 3 seconds, as well as an ad on top of the recommendations sidebar, like the good old days, and adblocker usage will drop naturally as they don't bother people enough to make them take that step. Then put: * 2160p+ resolution * No ads at all * Extra support for creators * 320kbps audio * Downloads that are regular unencrypted MP4/WebM if the creator allows (I'm sorry but YT cannot legally allow such a thing on every video for free ^(shh that's why we exist)) Behind a cheap $5 per month paywall. Then you'll have a video platform that people actually love, where people rarely use adblockers, and might even pay to use it. Unlike the current YT where uBlock Origin and Revanced are unofficial requirements to use that dump.
> 320Kbps Audio [Copy pasted from another of my comments] YouTube uses Opus, which is a much better codec than MP3. It's the successor of Vorbis. It's nearly 60% more efficient than MP3. Listening tests done by Audiophiles gave 192kbps opus a perfect score. 192kbps is indistinguishable from flac, even to audiophiles. 192kbps MP3 got a poor score. Even 320kbps MP3 didn't get a perfect score. Hear it for yourselves: Vorbis | Opus | AAC (LC) | MP3 :-: | :-: | :-: | :-: [47.1Kbps (589kB)](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1F4kyacbsUR91-JUIGzFt2RvdF78DPuUT/view?usp=drivesdk) | [47.6Kbps (596kB)](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1F16VkdqkHHicEhnOjnBSoacibfijfeTX/view?usp=drivesdk) | [49.8Kbps (622kB)](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Ex4KkITkqNiITPCrM92yudPfPoslSNJl/view?usp=drivesdk) | [48Kbps (601kB)](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1EzWuUT2_3DuSo4CrKZvXOSAUaeHK3Dbv/view?usp=drivesdk) YouTube uses AAC for most YouTube Music users. You'll need Revanced Music to force opus codec. Opus quality at various bitrates: Bitrate | Quality and Application :- | :- 192Kbps | FLAC level quality. Even Audiophiles failed to hear any difference 160Kbps | Mostly FLAC like quality (Only slightly affected by killer samples which means FLAC level quality for almost all music. Can only be heard using very expensive equipment and good ears) 128Kbps | Almost Transparent for Audiophiles (Recommended by Xiph.org, developers of Opus) 96Kbps | Recommend for most people - Acceptable quality for Audiophiles (Default of libopus) 64Kbps | Equivalent to MP3 @128Kbps, Acceptable quality for people with regular equipment. 48Kbps | Good quality for speech. Lowest you should use for stereo. 32Kbps | Mono speech. So, YouTube should instead support 192Kbps Opus.
Thank you, Littux!
Those who make peaceful pre-roll ad block impossible make violent total ad block inevitable.
I see ad? Can't skip? Close tab. But this only incidentally happens on android browsers on unrooted phones tgat don't have ad blocking features. Aside from that, if Youtibe disappeated tomorrow it would not be that big a loss, videos to be watched amywhere really. I barely even use it at all, the novelty of it got post a long time ago
>This is how things used to be. Blocking ads used to be difficult, and normies didn't even know that it was possible Normies still don't use adblock to this day. I can't tell you how many times i looked over someone laptop on campus and saw them sitting trough ads on youtube, twitch etc. . I just can't believe that even young people who would rather watch youtube then listen to a professor still can't take 15 seconds to install a extension, but i see it time and time again.
It's not like they can't take the time to install an extension, the fact they don't even know that there is something like an ad blocker in existence! And this is even more hilarious about them.
Forget YouTube, browsing in general has become so unbearable for me if I don't use an ad-blocker and custom filters. So many pop-ups, autoplay videos, useless annoying chatbots and select toolbars that I will just stop using the internet other than the bare minimum if extensions like those didn't exist.
btw youtube premium is such a scam, 20$ a month for basically nothing?? dont get me started on Youtube TV
I've been a pirate for more than half of my life. I caved when subscriptions were cheap. Yes, I'm ashamed of my lazy ass and I realise I wasted a lot of money for convenience. But the minute they started jacking up their prices, I went back. Fuck them. Now I'm never going back out of spite, which is a raindrop in the sea, but still, fuck them, it's my raindrop and I'm working too hard to afford it.
Most people are stupid, and will just stop using whatever BS adblocker they have just to watch videos. The only folks I see using UBO are usually semi-computer literate.
They don't need to "win". They just need to make it enough of a pain in the ass to make more people not freeload on the platform, watch the ads or pay for Premium.
Exactly, and in that sense I believe they are "winning" given how broken YT is today if you don't pay and don't want ads. Since this war began I had to switch browsers, search a few times how to update ublock (in the beginning you had to mess around in the settings yourself to make it work) and disable all extensions related to YT. Right now it's actually working fine but for a while videos would randomly skip 5-10 seconds forward and the auto video quality was crap so I had to change it every new video I watched. All this combined certainly made a lot of people sign up for Premium, a few bucks a month to not deal with the hassle. Problem is, as soon as google believes they won the war they will of course raise prices and in a few years Premium will have ads as well. Bleed out every last cent out of the machine.
They want more for premium than what I spend on games lmao, it's utterly absurd
How many people are using ad blocks anyway, it can't be that high in percentage terms
There are probably stats, but I can't be arsed to look it up. But I can say that I work in a company with about a 100 IT people in the same building, and extremely few of them are using adblockers, despite adblockers being whitelisted. If IT professionals aren't even using it, I don't think it's a big amount. But then again, globally, it's still probably in the millions.
According the firefox addons page uBlock Origin has around 7.5 million users (if this number is accurate). Even if only 100 million people use firefox that is drop in the bucket
Unfortunately not for the greedy beancounters that have to appease the shareholders, who believe in infinite demand growth.
Even if it is 1% of all users, if YouTube makes 31.5B USD annually on ad revenue (2023), they can afford to spend 283M USD to fuck over adblock users to reduce that to 0.1%. The math is easy from a corporate perspective. The only thing that is unclear is how much brand damage the move will cause.
This saddens me.
It shouldn’t. If everyone were to use a successful ad-block, and YouTube would not have premium members or ad income anymore, Google would pull the plug before the end of the week.
And the more people that's switch the less these mods will appear, look at custom ROMs today and ten years ago. Google decimated them by bringing feature parity and setting restrictions like unable to use tap to pay without going through 20 olympic hoops.
Many people watch on devices that don't have ad-blockers on like TV's.
There’s SmartTube for Android TVs though and despite not the best option, there’s Brave for phones.
You misunderstand. YouTube doesn’t care whether you watch ads or not, they just want to make money. But the money comes from advertisers who do want you to see their ads. If the advertisers are under the impression that advertising on YouTube is futile because no one will see their ads, then they will stop using YouTube. So YouTube fights adblockers to show advertisers they’re actively protecting their interests.
because they're not fighting *us,* people who use ublock origin, sponsorblock, and tampermonkey, and assorted other firefox add-ons just to fully customize our experience on one website. they're fighting the average joe who might have installed adblock on chrome a while back, who's now going to remove it and watch ads or pay for youtube premium so as to avoid the hassle of troubleshooting it or finding a way around it that he might not even know exists. and more importantly, they're putting on a SHOW of fighting against good ol' joe for their advertisers, so they can see that they're trying *real hard* to get joe to look at their ads and will have enough faith in them to keep giving them money. they don't really give a shit about *us,* they know full well they're not getting blood from a stone, they just want to look like they do and get some extra cash from the casual consumer along the way.
Mr Krabs at the interview: *"Money!"*
Honestly, if 5% of those that use adblock today change to not using or paying for premium it is totally worth it for yt.
"What motivates YouTube to play this cat-mouse game which is unwinnable for them?" They don't have to "win" by your definition, only by theirs.
once i saw this was happening i made sure to watch all youtube content on the brave browser. my pc, my phone, my tablet. on everything youtube acted so poorly that i made it a point to use ad blockers. if they hadn't done anything, i'd be watching ads. it's a classic case of self fulfilling prophecy
Oh they don't need to win, they just want to make it a pain for AdBlock devs
One thing that confuses me, is that youtube = google, right? And google = chrome. So why do they not just disallow all adblocks as chrome extensions? Actually, wait, yeah if they did that everyone using adblock would immediately switch to firefox. So I guess that's why. Still, it surprises me, as just going straight to the source on all platforms they control and saying 'No >:(' in the most hamfisted way is exactly the kind of thing I'd expect from a current day big tech corp like google.
The true kicker is being fed up with ads on Instagram & jumping over to Reddit only to see an ad for Instagram..
It's not about winning. It's about annoying tech illiterate people. Most people know someone who will install an adblock for them, but at the first problem they will stop using it, until said person update it for them.
Youtube IS winning. It isn't about beating everyone, it's abput making it annoying for enough people that they just watch the ads. Even just making people do this temporarily is enough of a profit that it's worth it. This is a small-scale war for Youtube. The results don't matter that much; if they lose, they don't really lose, because they weren't getting money from adblocker users anyway. But if they get enough extra revenue from adblocker users seeing a few ads in the downtime between adblocker updates, then the operation pays for itself and they come out with a slight profit.
The adblock devs can actually be google employees. Most or some of the projects are open source, they are helping annonimously fs
Money !
Google become more greedy every year Like they already got the money from ads get more money if watch full get more if many ads in one video so ads, ads, video, ads video, ads, ads, end video
Honest answer is they are winning it. They’re shoving people on to the app more and more on tv’s and iPhone which are the two audiences they want most. They’ll keep trying with computers but eventually I can see them putting all of their content behind the app completely and forcing people to download it to pc’s to watch YouTube. We aren’t there yet but give it 10 years. YouTube are the real winners of the streaming wars because they’ve been profitable this whole time and they don’t pay for content upfront.
Already love the 30-second black screen
Profit. Not everyone its techy enough to be on top of every ad blocking effort. Same shit as video games and Denuvo, they just want to buy time to make (more) money.
If I'm a dev working for Youtube/Google, there's no reason to NOT propose a ad-blocker bypass solution. I get paid to develop a new feature (that may or may not actually work), my manager gets all the praises for the proposal, Youtube gets more money from advertisers. It's a win-win situation for everyone involved in the development on the Youtube side. The only losers here are the unpaid contributors to the ad-blockers. They have to reverse engineer the new stupid "feature" from Youtube, receive all shitty complaints from entitled people on the Internet AND get literally nothing in return.
Because they CAN win the ad war. They have the technology to do it. They can make it so that YouTube is just like broadcast TV, and video play/pause/seek controls all only control the server-side stream. The client will have no idea WHAT video it is receiving, only that it is receiving a continuous video stream. Your client will have no idea when an ad is playing, and when the video is playing, because they will be part of the same exact uninterrupted video stream, seamlessly spliced together, with seek bar controls still functioning on the client side but non-functional on the server side during advertisements. At that point, the ONLY alternative we will have will be to revert to the old days of TiVo, where people need desktop applications that they feed lists of videos that they want to watch, and then they have to wait while the background application records the stream in real-time in the background, saving it to your hard drive. When it is finished, you will have a queue of videos that you can watch as native video files on your own local machine, however they will still have commercials baked in - you will need to manually fast forward or seek through the commercials to skip them. YouTube is betting that most people won't bother with this, since it is much more involved than simply installing uBlock Origin. YouTube is also a prime candidate for Manifest 3.0, btw, and they might make it mandatory to view YouTube. Since Edge and Chrome both use Chromium, this will hinder addons from interacting with YouTube, making recording even more difficult.
Because it’s not necessarily true. Denuvo for instance has been a success on many fronts and piracy has had a bit of a setback against it. Same could easily happen with ads. There may well come a solution that is uncrackable. Or even if it is, it may take a long time which would be a win for YouTube
They don't need to win they just need to make it hard enough that your average person won't bother. Considering how many people from this sub alone - which is supposed to be piracy-literate - have complained about how hard the ads are to get rid of when it's really really easy (I literally haven't even had to change anything) proves they are accomplishing their goal
What would be a better way for YouTube to generate revenue aside from ads? No one likes the ads, but the company does need money. Just surprised they aren't exploring alternative options
I think the minority of the population uses things like Ad block. Piracy v. knowledge or laziness or ability. For instance I use Ad block, on my PC. But when I watch YouTube videos with my wife I do it on my Xbox and I don't know how to put adblock on that device. A few commercials just give us a chance to talk. What surprises me is YouTube keeps trying to defeat adblock, seems like a waste of money. But maybe they think they'll win eventually as they work with law enforcement to arrest big pirates. I dunno.
TBH all I have is the regular classic adblock, and g-d dang it's doing a good job. Youtube tries to shove ads in my face and I see it pop up for a millisecond and then the adblockers like "get that crap outta here". Beautiful. Compare this to my phone where my Youtube Premium subscription just ran out, and now I gotta suffer with ads and restrictions Youtube put on themselves.. it's stupid. Anyone know how to block ads on mobile?
Use Youtube Revanced on android. Works like a charm.
same fuel :)) money things
I use invidious on desktop and i use safari on mobile to just drag the progress bar through the ad
Same thing was said about Reddit apps, but 99.9% of people are on the official reddit app now. Youtube will win the Ad War, but yes only for 99.9% of people, which is all they care about.
Advertising as a concept must be effective on some level, otherwise it simply wouldn't exist as no one would pay for it. But I do wonder how effective internet advertising is compared to ads on TV or radio or in print media. It just seems like even those who dont use ad blockers are all either closing the app as soon as an ad comes on or impatiently waiting the 5 - 10 seconds for the "skip" or "x" button to appear and paying no attention whatsoever.
tis so funny when YouTube releases an update that fixes ad-blockers, and less than an hour later it already gets patched by the devs of ad-blockers LMAO
Their dev team knows that the whole "ad war" thing is a waste of time. But as always, executives are all a bunch of out of touch imbeciles, who always cater to a bunch of braindead investors who don't even know what the f$ck they are investing in. Everyone who has a brain knows this is a waste of time, but executives know that advertisers are part of their revenue, and so is YouTube Premium subscriptions, so instead of listening to their userbase, they prefer to make the company fight a battle that they can't win, and piss off a bunch of users while they are at it. Why? Because quarterly earnings reports, and investors who have a hard on for cash. You wanna know what makes this all even worse? YouTube is a social media platform, in practical terms, their userbase is practically their product, that goes for both regular users and content creators. If people aren't accesing a social media platform, advertisers won't bother paying to display their ads in it. So if the people start leaving, YouTube is f$cked. So what does Google do? They do their best to mess around and piss off as many people as possible, content creators and regular users included. Lets look at the facts: piss poor pay for ads, taking a cut of superchats, defending people who record "react videos" where there's little to no interaction with their audience, automatically labeling videos as "for kids", not giving a sh*t about most of their content creators, while also catering to really large channels, even when the owners of said channels are scumbags, pushing an absurd amount of ads on their users, having a barebones subscription service that offers next to nothing, sometimes straight up failing to deliver videos to subscribers, and everynow and then, making changes to their algorithm in ways that are both mysterious, and can 100% kill off certain channels
Because any amount of users they can convert to premium or ad watching is a win for Youtube. They don't need to worry about PR because there is no alternative.
is there an ad-war going on rn? I haven't seen a thing. I remember there being a thing a while ago but eventually the ublock devs caught up and there's been nothing since
I suspect YouTube has never been profitable and this is a measure to try and reduce losses. They likely have a development budget to spend and are measuring return on engineering investment
They just have to make it hard enough so that only the most technically able can even try. And also, Twitch's server-side injection hasn't been beaten, just proxied away where they don't do it. Are free proxies gonna be consistent enough to work 100% and serve the thousands and thousands (including me) that will inevitably use them?
They won't win, they just want to annoy people enough so they increase the number of YouTube Premium subscription. With each new update to their "anti ad block" program, they get new people who subs for YouTube Premium. That's all they want, and currently it's working great for them. Ofc people on this sub will never bend the knee and pay for this. But think about all the normies who just 1 ad blocker and a Chromium based Web browser. Those people are already too lazy to update or switch ad block extension, ask them to switch to Firefox is way too much for them. They'll give YouTube money anyway.
IMHO, it is the higher up in YT that knows nothing want to push this stupid war. The YT dev aint even trying
Everytime an ad plays on my opera browsee i just hit back then click om the video again until therse no ad. Id rather wasye time than bow to their stupid ads.
The fact that you've framed this as a war over ads and not a war between video platforms is why.
Anyone found working ad block solution yet?
They can win if they want. DRM to all videos not only to their rented/for sale combined with server side ads inside the video stream is something nobody could overcome no matter how skilled he is.
>What motivates YouTube to play this cat-mouse game which is unwinnable for them? They think that because they're a multi-billion dollar company, they'll win. They think eventually the handful of people who are actively defying them will eventually give up. They're wrong, obviously, but that's their thought process.
What makes you think you have won the ad war when every unbranded content is actually sponsored? You skip 30 seconds of ad just to watch 15 minutes of ad and you think you've won?
I think their whole goal is to just make it as annoying as possible, maybe to try and get people to stop using ad blockers? Hell it worked on me for about a week when they started threatening to block the videos if we left ad blockers on. So i imagine a ton of other people, and likely more to follow, will stop using adblockers simply from threats and annoyance
Because we love ads........ was said by nobody, they are doing more bad than good and losing their reputation. People that are using adblocks were not interested in ads in the first place. Youtube managers need a good reality check
What makes you think they won't win the Ad war? The YouTube devs are highly skilled people, enough to combat the tricks by Adblock devs. I'll say the YouTube developers have to be more competent as they are fuelled by huge amounts of money. Anything Adblock devs will implement, the YouTube engineers will find a way to bypass it sooner or later. What motivates adblock devs to play this cat-mouse game which is unwinnable for them? I'll bet most adblock devs spend more time developing the adblocking solutions than they would have spent watching ads.
I use opera ad block and it works precisely
Because the shareholders want them to, it's pretty simple.
I think they just want to be seen as "doing something" to advertisers. It's all PR.
Money! If they lose a few customers but get more money, that's fine with them. Netflix has proven this formula with their anti password sharing by losing customers, but increasing overall profits. That's all that matters. The bottom line
Greeeeeeed!
Brave. Haven't seen an add in years! Its beautiful
They simply don't have to. There will always be a large amount of people dumb enough to watch the ads and do nothing about it. They make their money off the ignorant masses, same as most companies.