YouTube’s Ad Blocker Crackdown Is Getting Harder to Dodge::The video platform now requires users to disable their ad blockers with an immovable pop-up.
I give it a year, tops, before they start serving ads in premium too.
They’ll introduce premium platinum for 2x the price, and then normal premium will be changed to YouTube supporter class, with select advertisements
But they’ll do this very quietly, and everyone will get grandfathered into YouTube supporter if they don’t do anything. So in public they’ll still say YouTube premium has no advertisements, even though they’ve moved the goal posts
This is scarily believable.
But on the good side, they offer 3 months of “reduced” cost ( but still more than old premium cost) for those that upgrade now
More realistically they’ll bump up the price of premium a bit more and then have a reduced ads tier for like $6-7. But, I also have my doubts about that. The business model is significantly different than other “streaming services”.
But that’s the only benefit of premium (on YouTube itself). I guess there are still YouTube originals but that kind of died as far as I can tell.
Update, they did it.
Kind of. If anybody signs up for that premium lite they’re fools.
Yes. And? You think they care? Premium isn’t there to benefit you, it’s there to benefit Google. As soon as the money stops coming in, they’ll look for other ways to squeeze it. We’re already seeing it with streaming providers shoehorning ads into their paid services. It’s not that much of a stretch.
The only benefit now, but what if they start to serve 30 non-skippable ads without premium and ONLY 5 with premium, what a deal! Right? If you hate ads you can just buy higher tier for ONLY $5 more.
Let’s just keep fingers crossed for ublock…
So they are cracking down on Adblockers and increasing the price of Premium as well.
I wish there was an alt platform that we could use, because even the FBI recommends using an Adblockers (and TBH what sane person would roll without one?)
I recommend Invidious.
Peertube, odysee
YouTube do not care if you buy the products or not, they care that they can tell the customer that you have seen it.
This made me think!
Would someone who was enjoying Internet services all the way from infancy (with no ad-blocking devices/apps), think that the amount of ads we have nowadays was the norm and that there was nothing weird or absurd about it?
I think they would be disgusted with it. I personally remember the Internet from the Dual Up days, and the amount of ads now is absolutely egregious.
The FBI does not recommend using adblockers so that you can avoid ads on YouTube. That’s just 🤦♂️ worthy.
Every adblocker I know of can be disabled on specific sites.
I know this is an unpopular opinion here, but Google is within their rights to show ads or make you pay. It costs more than it probably should, and they serve more ads than they should, but their platform is unique and expensive to run; most uploads do not make them money.
More like just get off my lawn. Constant bitching and moaning about completely optional services and spending a few dollars to use them is getting to me.
Yes, Lemmy is free, yes the Internet is historically free (because of ad driven content), but Christ things actually do cost money folks and services have a right to charge what people are willing to pay.
If you don’t like it… Don’t use YouTube, seek out an alternative, build an alternative, tell your creators you’ll only watch them on PeerTube (which probably won’t work because they want to make money) or floatplane or whatever.
This isn’t some crusade for Google. I’m just sick of this crap being in my feed and all these comments. This isn’t “technology”, it’s one service charging money 🙄
Removed by mod
I don’t have anything nice to say to you, so I’m just going to leave it at that.
For everybody else, consider how venture capitalism allowed for an otherwise completely non-viable product to come into existence. This isn’t a monopoly, it’s a product that could not exist any other way because of the expense of running it the way that it’s run.
You’re totally welcome to take your business elsewhere and it’s totally possible to live without YouTube. The fact is for most people (perhaps up until this point) there hasn’t been a significant motivation to create an actual alternative and get funding for it (or enough wrong with YouTube that people will actually pay what it costs to run a “YouTube without ads”). Rumble exists because the right wing wanted a similar service where they could talk without Google’s moderation policies.
I’m not endorsing Rumble, but alternatives can be started if the funds are put in place to do so and there’s a market for it. Like Lemmy, people just have to use the alternative over the existing dominant option (in this case Reddit).
PeerTube is an option as well of course, but I don’t see it taking off due to the expense and the inability for big creators to monetize on it. Floatplane has a better chance in that respect.
Fine but enforce some monopoly undercut pricing on YouTube.
I’m not sure what you’re advocating for here. Government regulation to cap the price?
That’s not how I intended the phrasing here.
No one doubts Google is not entitled to money. The level of ads is excessive, and to be fair, we are served too many ads in our daily lives as-is, constantly, billboards, radio, Cable TV (to which you pay for the priviledge of watching ads), Gas Pumps, ect. It’s everywhere and nauseating, and I’m starting to personally doubt the efficacy of them. People have become numb to them.
But they go on a crusade against Adblockers since the amount / type of ads is excessive, and then raise premium pricing : “The Solution”.
It’s almost like they have a monopoly and the moves as of recent are anti-consumer.
The FBI recommends an ad-blocker actually because of malicious… Google Search, yes that same pesky Google, not filtering out dangerous websites in their search results under the “Suggested” part of the search (these sites spoof their web addresses and hope you click on them to deliver a malware payload on your system.)
Gas Pumps
That one drives me especially crazy. I just want to pump my gas in peace.
It’s almost like they have a monopoly and the moves as of recent are anti-consumer.
I mean they do in a sense… But also complaining as a non-paying customer that you should have to pay is going to get you nowhere.
(Edit: I’m going to leave this part in, you were just asking for an alternative. My memory has blended other comments and a general “ugh” feeling in all these threads. So, this really isn’t aimed at you)
If you really want to make a change, stop using YouTube, create content elsewhere, try and convince the creators you watch to upload elsewhere. The thing is, most creators that are big enough for the average person to be watching are doing it because it makes them money, and Google is the best place to get that check. You could try floatplane, but my guess is it’s going to be more (not less) expensive than Google and/or might not have people you want to watch on it.
Google considered making 4k premium only because it’s so expensive. Linus tech tips did a nice video showing how 4k disrupts YouTube’s business model and imposes much higher costs. Instead of doing that, they’re raising prices and blocking ads. A more altruistic Google could reduce the ads once the adblockers are working, I kinda doubt they will, but it’s still a possibility.
The days of “free YouTube” (like so many other free Internet things) are over, it was a great deal. It’s not as great of a deal now. Maybe someone can actually afford to put up a fight now that it’s actually got to make money, maybe not. It’s still (IMO) a pretty dang good deal for all the content you get, and premium helps support the creators you’re watching (at least according to Linus) by a “significant” amount vs ad supported views.
The FBI recommends an ad-blocker actually because of malicious… Google Search, yes that same pesky Google, not filtering out dangerous websites in their search results under the “Suggested” part of the search (these sites spoof their web addresses and hope you click on them to deliver a malware payload on your system.)
Yeah you’re right on this one. I actually misremembered the reason, so I’ll take the facepalm for myself. Still, I haven’t used YouTube with ads in a while, but I remember YouTube ads being more like TV ads/a bit more reliable (and a bit too repetitive).
Some solutions:
- Android
- iOS
- Yattee with this guide
- (Adding Piped/Invidious website to Homescreen)
- Web
- Desktop
- FreeTube
- (Using any of the web solutions as PWAs)
- TV
- Android TV
- Apple TV
- Yattee with this guide
Vinegar on iOS is also still working perfectly
It really isnt getting harder to dodge past the initial recent push. “Go to settings, purge cache, refresh list, refresh youtube” is just as many steps today as it was when this recent push started
Big thing that helps is switching off of Chrome. I’ve been seeing a lot of people say that we should stop using Chrome and I just hadn’t gotten around to it. Once the YouTube adblocker started picking up Ublock Origin even after clearing the cache I hard switched to Fire Fox and installed Ublock Origin.
I have not cleared my cache once and I haven’t seen a single ad.
Firefox + uBlock Origin + PiHole = I’m wondering what all the fuss is about. I haven’t seen a single adblocker warning on YouTube yet.
Stop using browsers based on Chromium people, it’s not that hard.
I’ve still yet to see it… not even had to do any of those things. Something about my setup I guess neutralises it.
Me neither.
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Windows
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PiHole (AWS Lightsail instance)
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Edge
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TubeBlock extension
Waiting for the hammer to drop. OTOH, I don’t watch much Tube.
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I was, but they stopped appearing once I completely cleared browsing history and cookies. I also did another purge and update for good measure.
The only pain in the ass was that I ended up changing the username of some of my accounts but forgot to update them in my account manager, so it took a bit to find and log into them. But that was completely on me and won’t happen if you’re not being an idiot like I was.
This. I’ve gotten this popup about four times since this happened, telling me the video player was blocked because I had an adblocker still. Each time, I purged cache and updated and it went away.
Probably jinxing myself here, but I have yet to have a single problem. Linux, Firefox, ublock origin.
I’m using Invidious on desktop and Revanced on my android. No ads so far…
Are ads really that useful when the users subjected to them hate ads from the start?
Not to the advertiser, but to the one getting money for the ad.
How do they get money for an ad about a product I will never give a chance to?
Product pays Google to show you the ad
Ah gotcha. Ty
Cost Per Impression
Stop using butt adblockers. There’s a reason why UBO has the highest amount of downloads, is a recommended extension, and is the highest rated extension on both chromium and firefox.
It wouldn’t shock me if they removed ublock origin from the chrome store
Fuck YouTube
Freetube for the win. Built in sponsor block.
I use a whitelist firewall. It is like a lock on my front door. I don’t use an adblocker. I manually add only websites I wish to visit. Extorting me for only visiting websites I trust and wish to visit is criminal. I am the reason Ad Blocks are a thing. They are the lazy person’s mostly effective whitelist firewall.
All ads are are serving you another website you didn’t ask to visit and with unknown bad actors that are not effectively vetted. Ads are like a house party in your home where one of your guests opens a window in your bathroom and let’s a dozen random people into your home without your knowledge. The person that let them in sneaks around the hidden guests while trying to prevent you from noticing. It is criminal behavior. This is privateering, aka pirates that have a legal charter from a criminal government.
Well, if you visit Youtube to watch a video, it will serve both the video and the ads from the same website. Ads are not necessarily being loaded from another website. If they were, we could just DNS-block YouTube ads, and they would be gone in your entire home network, for instance.
I don’t understand why YouTube doesn’t just put the video ads in-stream, just seems stupid for stupid’s sake at this point.
Maybe this is some weird way of testing the waters. If they just solved the problem outright, users who wouldn’t put up with ads would just leave. This way they can see how many users will just tolerate the change without really committing.
That certainly seems like a possibility >_>
Gotta bleed them pennies dry.
Just stop using YouTube?
If content providers notice their viewership going down they’ll surely raise a stink to YouTube once it starts to affect their income.
Switched to Freetube and convinced my dad too as well. No ads, no algorithms, no shit yt search that never works. We’re chilling.
Using AdGuard on macOS and iOS. Works fine
