Youtube Anti-AntiAdblocker uBlock Origin Filter

MUST APPEASE THE GOD OF CAPITALISM AND THE ALMIGHTY SHAREHOLDERS!

There isn't a reason to run a section of your company if it costs you money.

It's funny that you say this, because Google intentionally ran YouTube without making any profit from it for many years. The goal (which they succeeded in) was to starve out any competition and establish YouTube as the online video monopoly. Ever since establishing that monopoly, they've been squeezing more and more money out of the platform knowing that social inertia will work against any would-be competitors (everything is on YouTube, all of the content creators are on YouTube, all of the viewers are on YouTube, so how does someone convince enough people to move to another platform?).

True but data collection is still done and generates $$$

Think about gmail & Google docs

Yes there is a reason to run a part of your business at a loss. It is well known market strategy and it is called a Loss Leader.

You offer a product or services at a loss because it helps you generate more revenue in another part of your business.

And plenty of companies keep products that don't make money, because they are Loss Leaders into products that do make money.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loss_leader

There are lots of reasons that one area of your company may make less money. It’s like how the NYC subway or post office technically don’t “make money” but the value they bring to the whole system is a net positive by enabling all the other companies to make way more.

Fairly sure that Alphabet is google parent company

It’s Google’s parent company. Like meta to fb.

Ok, I'm curious. Gonna do some math.

• YouTube makes $30B/yr in revenue.
• YouTube has 2.7B active users.
• This means that YouTube is making about $11.11/person/year.
• uBlockO has 10m active users.
• This means that uBlockO is costing YouTube $111m annually, or about 4% of their overall revenue.

I'll admit, that number is bigger than I expected. But almost any other line item on their budget sheet would be bigger.

ETA: it's worth noting that YouTube has estimated operating costs of $5B, so this isn't coming anywhere near making them unprofitable.

But... But... What If I want a large cat and a tiny car?

I want my leopard riding shotgun in my smart car.

Don't forget the gold confetti

I really care about your opinion. It's very important to me.

I have no idea.

So basically you let them bully you into giving them money lol

They bundle YT Music in your subscription because they wanted a share in music streaming, invested in an infrastructure on their platform and then realized that their service doesn't offer enough to make people want to use it over their competitors' music streaming services. Instead of taking that loss or making their service worth using, they bundle the shit nobody wants with what everyone needs and use that to justify a price hike.

If there was a basic subscription that just removes ads on the videos I click on without any other useless crap attached to it, I would pay for that. But no, it's predatory, anti-consumer bullshit, so I just block their ads.

Everything you just said, all of it, makes no fucking sense whatsoever.

Honestly I'm starting to wonder if the reason why we got ourselves into a ad filled hell hole is because we expect soo much to be free and those things have to make money somehow and server space and the electricity they run on aren't free and the only people willing to spend money are whales and advertisers and from what I've been told YouTube was never profitable on it's own for Google and the only reason they've been keeping the site on is because it brings attention to other Google services while also preventing competition so I greatly think we'd all benefit from being open to paying for sites that are like YouTube so YouTube and advertisers have some real competitors I don't know how a my theoreticall site would profit without ads but it's still sad that sites like YouTube are expensive and unprofitable making it so Google is the only option solely because they can afford the loses making yt premium even more greedy

Paying to remove ads is part of the ad business model. Upset your customer enough until they give you money to make it stop. Once you pay to remove the ads you have rewarded them for implementing ads which lets them know that implementing ads was a great way at making money.

So YouTube premium is not another model. It is the same model. Another model is paying for a service that never had ads at all such as NebulaTV or CuriosityStream.

You're right, but premium is too expensive. They make a pittance per ad view, but expect a user to pay $14/m to get rid of them? The math doesn't math.

They simultaneously introduced this ad blocker change and took away the $5 no-ads package.

This is a shakedown and it's been happening across many streaming platforms for a while now.

I don't mind ads as a concept. The issue is how invasive and numerous they've become. Get back to the days when ads were just banners around the actual content or an easily skippable video that plays before what I'm trying to watch and I'll happily disable my ad blocker for you. Unfortunately hardly anyone does that anymore because they view it as a missed opportunity to make even more money.

I'm not against using ads to support websites but it's the same basic concept as piracy. If you make the experience of playing by the rules so unbearable that it seems easier to go out of my way to break them then I probably will.

What everyone else said but also they still collect and do whatever they want with your data even if you pay them. They purposely made everything more shitty and then charged to put it back to how it was originally. Also, they stayed free as long as they did to kill off the competition and it clearly worked. I just can't ever justify giving them money. Especially with the double dip on my data.

But no, not like that. Clearly they need to find a way of materializing money from thin air.

Make it possible to get Premium without YT music bolted on it.
Believe it or not Google: Some users don't want it or already have a platform.

"I'm sure YouTube could even merge the ads into the content stream so they are unavoidable."

Who is going to tell him?

Last part is already done. Ads are delivered by the same DNS as the video, which is why DNS-based blocking methods like Pihole don't work for YouTube video ads.

If you meant that Google will re-encode every video on their platform and insert ads like the sponsor segments, that's not feasible. Ads ads served on a bidding basis and the advertiser who pays most, gets their ad delivered. That would be Impossible unless you keep multiple copies of the video with different ad segments.

DDNS

Before social media back in the 2000's i know quite a few personal site using home servers using them. And (google google) apparently these days cloudflare offers the service.

Then purchase a hosting service. Off-shore VPSes are pretty cheap, and they take Bitcoin. Even fucking Paypal uses Bitcoin nowadays. Only hurdle in your way is you.

Thanks, it's working great so far! 🫶

From my experience, LibreTube simply doesn't work without a kbm. I couldn't even select an instance using the TV controller.

I just spun up my own invidious instance on docker today. I'm so mad that I haven't done this sooner!

I followed those instructions to the letter aswell as cleared all the cookies and I'm still getting the popup. I first came up with this code more than 3 months ago so it's probably outdated by now.

i never use normal youtube otherwise and i shouldnt have to play detective for this to work

Somehow I still haven't seen that message despite also using uBlock and Firefox. Perhaps I'm just further down the line and Google will eventually come for me too, but I wonder if my DuckDuckGo and Privacy Badger extensions may also have something to do with it.

Are adblockers even illegal? I didn't think it was.

Well, that's pretty dumb and ruins my good times. Glad people are cracking down on it

I keep getting that pop-up, I have had ublock installed for years. I haven't done anything special to unlock and just refresh the page and it goes away.