YouTube isn't happy you're using ad blockers — and it's doing something about it

I actually pay for Premium at the moment, but still would need to sit through baked in sponsored messages, and YouTube Shorts or other internal YouTube big banner service advertisements. So i still have uBlock (and sponsor block) anyway to remove that stuff. At which point... Why am i paying for Premium again? They made their site awful to use regardless of if you pay, unless you use adblocking and other extensions.

I left YouTube when they took away my grandfathered family plan, but Spotify has the same crap. Sponsored home screen recommendations, concert recommendations for bands I've never listened to, etc...
I am VERY close to giving up Premium. In-content sponsorship is becoming so bad I can’t watch it without SponsorBlock. Since I need third party apps to achieve a reasonable experience anyway, I’m not really sure what I’m paying for. Once the EU forces Apple to allow installing apps outside the App Store, I might cancel.
I used to be grandfathered in to premium for years and I happily payed it because it was at a price point I thought the service was worth. Then they email me saying they will raise the price from $17 to $22. Now I use revanced and get it free on my phone. I would have happily been paying the original price but they decided to be greedy.
- Thank you for the heads up on revanced. I've been using NewPipe, and while it works very well, I like that revanced provides a more genuine YT experience.
Incoming, Youtube Premium+ with SponsorBlock.

Youtubers will mark their sponsored segments and get a higher payout for that.
- Spoiler: ads money is so low people need to do sponsor blocks and patreons.
Then we're back to cable, with constant ads in a paid service.
I think the creators are free to bake in sponsored segments, but I totally agree with the rest of it. YT is treating us like lab rats and pushing tons of unwanted unnecessary stuff on us. I don't really want to reward that behavior with a monthly subscription.

This is a problem with so many monthly subscriptions: Instead of treating the continuously paying customers well to keep them in, they treat them as fat wallets that they can potentially milk more out of.
Part of the reason YouTubers have 3rd party sponsor spots is because viewer an blocking makes their Adsense revenue unreliable.

YouTube premium helps address that for creators.

It wouldn't surprise me if some sponsors already demand viewership data to know how many people are skipping baked-in sponsor spots and uses that to pay creators less.

Finding more ways to avoid compensating creators isn't going to make the situation better.
- Part of the reason YouTubers have 3rd party sponsor spots is because viewer an blocking makes their Adsense revenue unreliable.
  
  I think the primary reason for that is so they still have revenue when YouTube randomly demonetized their videos. Whether for a false detection of something that's not "advertiser-friendly", false copyright claims because someone remixed music you've licensed and uploaded it to a library to be scanned using Content ID, or if YouTube just decided to say "fuck you" and say your videos are getting Invalid Traffic for no reason. It's a diversification of revenue streams.

They also got rid of my premium lite subscription... I was paying them and now I have to get back to adblock.

They try it out every once in a while in every country to probably gauge how far they can go until users either swap to Lite or quit alltogether by watching with ads or nothing at all.

Banger is, that with Lite you still get limted^tm ads. The fuck?
Still paying the YouTube red price before they changed it, $10 isn't bad for music and no ads, now a days

While YT is playing its games, I've found a half-dozen other ways to get at the videos. Very educational. I'm thinking they are learning a whole bunch about what people think of their way-too-aggressive approach ... and how people usually respond to that behavior.

They think the rest of the world will accept the horror that was USA cable TV. Ads interrupt your movie every few minutes 🤮
- I haven't seen a valuation on Youtube ... but recently saw that Twitter sold for $44B and X is now at $12B.
  
  I've enjoyed viewing YT videos for many years ... learned A LOT ... and thought quite highly of them. I can see charging to see long films (bandwidth and licenses isn't cheap) ... but piling ads on top of thousands of private people trying to help others out (for little profit)? Ads on educational programming? Yeah... it's WORSE than what Cable did to films.
  
  Reminds me of that old song lyric ...
  
  Meet the new boss, Same as the old boss
Any of those way for iOS?
- AltStore with uYouPlus
- I'm not on IOS, but I've heard Brave browser on IOS has adblock so that might be a way to avoid ads. Sites like various Invidious instances run in any browser would also be a way to dodge ads.
  
  Any browser that accepts plugins would also work, but I'm not sure if they exsist or not.
- Sure, throw it away and get something with access to 3rd party apps. Alternatively, wait a couple of years for the EU regulations regarding 3rd party apps to take effect on apple products.

The AdBlock arms race is still going on - would have been more precise

When they finally roll out full fledged DRM we will have to torrent channels.
- If there won't be any app to do it for me while looking like browsing YouTube I will rather simple stop using it. Their bandwidth at that point needs to be decrease as much as possible. But people are stupid and it won't happened..

Ok, every day at least 3 post like this.. It's boring already and fck youtube.

Same with "Oh no, Microsoft made Windows worse." Or "Oh no, Elon continues to be stupid."
- Maybe one day I'll see something that says the opposite happened, which will truly be news to me

I'm not going back to using Premium until in-video sponsorships are gone! I'm not gonna pay money and then still get ball shavers advertised to me.

I don't advise you get Premium, but I do recommend you download the free extension Sponsorblock (works on android too). It auto skips in-video sponsored segments.
- I do. But its wild that the free experience is better then the payed one!
In-video sponsorships are almost certainly never going to be gone for every channel, and definitely not as a part of premium since those sponsorships are done voluntarily by creators. As another said, the sponsorblock extension works great, find creators that dont do sponsors, or just skip manually.
The egregious amount and length of in-video sponsorships are why I cancelled YouTube premium.

Ad-free should mean ad-free.
- Yes exact same for me.
get premium with Indian vpn for 1€/month, get browser extension to skip all BS segments like intros, outros, sponsorships or whatever -> enjoyable experience

Old news. Posted several times already

This is a bot

The big issue is this: Premium is too damn expensive so we all use adblockers.

If Google were clever, they would charge just €1 per month per user for premium and virtually everyone would pay that not to see ads.

So instead of having 10 000 people paying €10 a month they could have 500 000 000 paying €1 a month and make WAY more money

narrator: it wasnt really about the money
I just went into Google payments and changed my address to a made-up Philippines address and I pay 239 pesos or around €4 for premium family. I think the individual plan is 159pp/€2.66.
- I’ve had that setup for a little over a year now. They just emailed me last week that they’re changing my region over to US.

Eh, the folks here are not the real targets of this.

There will always be a way around ads, but it will take more effort for a while. It becomes a question of cash vs effort and the majority of the tech savvy are going to opt for effort.

However, most people with a 9-5 are more likely to just pay up, especially as the messages will get more threatening ("accept adblock or lose your Gmail" seems like a natural escalation).

The net goes through these periods of monetisation drive, it has happened before (the pre DMCA net was an amazing place). You get half a year of bad service, then someone finds a way around it. Best option to fight back is to support the folks fighting against it, if you want a faster transition.

This just goes to show you that Google will do anything for money.

Insert surprised pickachu face here

Well that's out of character for Google

Yeah, what they are doing is similar to throwing a temper tantrum because you won't allow them to stab you with a sharp knife, at least in my opinion.

Ok but what exactly are they doing about it other than show that pop up? I've been getting it for the past couple days and I simply press the X and my video continues playing. It's annoying and I'm sure they're gonna make it more and more annoying and more difficult to block but other than that. What are they doing?

At this point, think of the old "boiling the frog" fable.

For now it's warnings with an easy skip button. Next they remove the skip button and probably add in more mid-video checks, but if you find a way to work around that the video still plays. Finally if they think you are using ad-blocking, no video at all. Then it's a cat-and-mouse game between the anti-adblock tech and the anti-anti-adblock tech.

The end result of this, and the ads, and the premium options, is money and data (that they can use to make more money).
- Then it’s a cat-and-mouse game between the anti-adblock tech and the anti-anti-adblock tech.
  
  My money (not literally though :) is on the anti-anti-adblock tech. That can be crowdsourced and generally adapts much faster than big companies.
It’s already been reported that one of the “final” steps is to just completely block you from paying videos. I believe it’s only happening for some, and only in certain countries, but it’s clear they mean to end as locking on the site completely.
Mine started like this. Then they said I had three more chances to stop. Then they blocked me from watching videos.

I updated my ad blocker and now I can watch them again without interruption.

Sail high on the sea mate

So I only watch YouTube on my PS4 since I watch it on my gaming TV. Are these ads the two they want to show while watching a video, usually around 6 mins between ads, though that seems to change depending how popular the uploader is, maybe settings from the uploaders too, I dunno the specifics but have been curious. Many times can skip in the second one after 5 seconds, first one is usually 15, but they seem to play around with it, sometimes skip the first ad after 5 or sometimes have to watch 2 x 15 second ones, or is there another ad rotation on PC I'm not aware of? I'm just curious since I rarely do a PC one but they are annoying. Annoying to the point I mute and consciously don't watch anything on the screen except for the ad skip being available. Usually hit it but sometimes stuffing the vaporizer I miss the first one then have to wait for the second to become available.

Personally it's not horrible but it'd be nice if I knew ahead of time which format they wanted. I'm also older,I assume if something was done like this in the 90s we'd be seeing full ad breaks like that time in broadcasting so I've been beaten down by ad acceptance as much as I try and ignore them. Trying to say even if it bothers me I sort of got used to ads all the time anyways.

At least they are not running YouTube for charity. Their move is completely normal, in a sense.