8mo ago

YouTube’s ad blocker crackdown now includes third-party apps

www.theverge.com YouTube’s ad blocker crackdown now includes third-party apps

YouTube’s ad blocking battle continues.

334 comments

YouTube's argument is the same as Linus' from LTT: if you watch a video without ads, you're failing to comply with your side of the transaction, thus essentially pirating that content and stealing the revenue source.
Regardless if we agree or not with that statement, I'll absolutely side with adblockers always for a deeper issue: it's my screen, so I get the ultimate say on what content gets rendered. Quite literally. It's my network, my cable, my screen, my graphics card, my web browser running JavaScript on my CPU - you do not, ever, get to overreach and decide what pixels show up or not. If I don't want your obnoxious ad for an AI girlfriend to show up, there's no moral argument to be had here.
EDIT: I think some of you are missing the point of this comment. There's no reason to reply to me countering the argument in the first paragraph, as it is not my comment, in fact, I specifically mentioned how it's YouTube (and Linus') argument.
- I was happy with an ad at the side of the video. Then they started popping up over my video, then they started appearing before my video, then they started appearing throughout my video. Companies shot themselves in the foot with online advertising, banner ads and such weren't much of a problem, but once ads start disrupting the content we visit a site for, then we look to block them ads. More people blocking ads is less revenue, so they make the ads more aggressive... and the cycle continues.
  And on a side note, Linus can fuck off.
  
  That and the large ad networks even on sites like YouTube and Facebook literally are advertising scams. Every time I browse shorts on either I get ads that are obvious scams of the "There's a new $6400 monthly health credit see if you qualify." variety. On one of Meta's apps I got an ad that was for male enhancement that was straight up clips of uncensored hardcore porn. Not just nudity but full on PIV sex. If they can't even do the work to properly screen their ads they can get fucked, I'm blocking all of it that I can.
  
  Non disruptive ads were meant to advertise.
  Slightly annoying ads were meant to be seen more, since people just ignored banners by default.
  Hidden ads (like an ad in an article which you really could tell it was an ad) were meant to increase the image of a company.
  Disruptive ads like in YouTube or Spotify aren't meant for advertising. They don't really care about the advertising money, they want to force you to buy premium. The more annoying the ad is the higher the chances you pay 20€ a month for them to go away.
  
  Yeah, the pre-ads (unstoppable) and the massively increased loading times of the basic Youtube page makes it impossible to successfully Rickroll people
- By that logic using a VCR to record television and fast-forwarding adverts is piracy.
  
  And you see digital tv providers trying to implement fast forward blockers without chasing away their customers too much
  
  That argument was in fact made when VCRs first came out. I don’t remember how exactly it played out but in the end the courts here in the US said that VCRs were fine.
  
  The agreement isn't that you watch the ad, but that you allow the ad to play on your device. That's it. Whether or not you see it or hear it doesn't matter; the "cost" for this type of content is a few moment of your device's time, not your attention.
- TBH I'm just so fucking tired of ads overstepping, back in the day there's be a little banner on the side of a page advertising a truck or whatever, I'm sick of seeing like, enormous length ads.
  One day I had a 3 hour minecraft let's play uploaded as an ad, you think I should have to watch all of that youtube?
  And the frequency is getting crazy.
  
  When YouTube Red first dropped they were putting hour-long pilot episodes of their shows as pre-roll ads. Now I notice ads on shorts are full of obvious scams related to "new monthly health credits". Still better than getting an ad on Facebook reels that was uncensored hardcore porn.
- You know what, I actually agree with YouTube's argument. Ad blocking is piracy. In fact, no, it's worse than piracy. If I pirate a movie, Disney makes no money, but it costs them nothing at all. If I watch YouTube without an ad blocker, I'm depriving YouTube of its revenue source and I'm costing them money. Morally, ad blocking sits somewhere between piracy and actual theft.
  The thing is? I don't care. I ad block YouTube all the time and feel not a lick of guilt. The reason: Google brought this on themselves. I used to happily pay for YouTube Red. But they have continuously, both before and after that point, been actively hostile to the people actually producing the content they make. Their willingness to bow down to copyright trolls and complete inability to properly apply fair use. They extremely harsh policies on acceptable content, stopping people talking about sex education or mediaeval weaponry being able to reliably makes money.
  And the straw that broke this camel's back was when they changed the requirements to be in the Partner Program, locking out all the smaller creators from ever being able to make money on YouTube. I never considered myself a "creator", but over the 5 years prior to that I occasionally uploaded stuff I was doing anyway. I had amassed almost $100 over those 5 years. Not an impressive amount, for sure, but having that taken away from me made me feel unwelcome. I don't think I've uploaded anything public since, and I've been blocking ads on the site since then.
  Even worse, not long after this change, they decided to start showing ads even on videos from non-partnered videos, so you can get ads on my videos even though I don't see a single cent.
  So fuck YouTube. Ad blocking is worse than piracy, and I say good.
  
  Google: You're pirating our content!
  Us: Yeah, so what?
  
  My god… are you… me? Same exact shit. Created my YT account 14 years ago. Made some vids… some got some views… eventually I got a few dollars deposited like for 3 years. Probably totaled the same $100 you mentioned then boom. Shut down.
- I’d agree with that logic if YouTube kept up their end of the bargain and actually vetted their ad buyers. Instead they show ads for fake stimulus scams, fake news, and blatant malware.
  I manage a large network and ads are blocked at the edge of the network. Not using an adblocker is a security risk that is not acceptable for my company. I pay for YouTube premium because it’s in my means and I get value from the subscription but I don’t blame anyone who takes the same approach
  
  I manage a large network and ads are blocked at the edge of the network.
  You must MITM all traffic and do some magic with stripping/injecting JavaScript then? Because every time I've tried with pihole, its just threads and threads of people saying its not possible with DNS blocking because the ads are served from the video servers.
- TL;DR: my property rights trump Youtube's business model.
- The problem is that there is that ad networks and ad placements are just bad actors in the consumer space. Not only has malware been passed time and time again with ads but also false ads to malware. When that happens suddenly the content creator/website/whatever 'isn't responsible' for it. Then there's the issue of ads being placed everywhere slowing down websites but even worse, getting in the way with auto play audio and video, videos autoscrolling over the content you're trying to read or whatever, etc.
  As a consumer, I should not and ethically do not need to worry about another's business model. If the business model fails simply because I don't allow something that model depends on to traverse my network then it is on them to figure it out. If the ads get in the way of the content, then I just want consume the content anyway.
  Some news websites use Ad Admiral or whatever it is called and I haven't bothered trying to bypass the adblock wall for them. I just simply consume the content elsewhere.
  If ads were ever responsibly used or perhaps could be argued that there is compromise where consumers wouldn't mind, then there'd probably be a lot less ad blocker usage. It's like anything else. When it takes less effort to install an adblocker to have an OK experience, then ad blockers will be popular.
  I was around before ad blockers were very popular and even before pop-up blockers were around. Ads kept getting worse which is why ad blockers became more popular and more sophisticated. The Internet had ads for years before ad blockers were the norm.
  
  Yeah I wasn’t using an Adblock on YouTube when this all started. Then the ads got so intrusive it was seriously hindering content. These days I don’t watch much YouTube, but it’s with Adblock
- I mean, the argument falls short when YT (or LTT) spew literal garbage. I might have a hint of sympathy if it wasn't a dumpster fire of decaying babies.
  The few people I sub do and do yt as a monitory source, I support elsewhere. Fuck YouTube acting as a sleezy middle-man and simultaneously playing the victim.
  
  I mean, the argument falls short when YT (or LTT) spew literal garbage.
  The fact that you don't like the product doesn't really change that their expected transaction is "watch an ad to receive it". Every argument against the idea of not watching the ads being piracy seems to be, essentially, either "the product isn't good" or "the price is too high", neither of which is relevant to the fact that they've put a "price" on it and you're skipping the part where you "pay".
  Quality of the videos is irrelevant. Intrusiveness of the ads is irrelevant. The ads are the price, the videos are the product. You're getting the videos without seeing the ads.
  I agree that the "price" is too high, the ads are awful, and the videos are frequently bad. I will continue to block those ads as long as I am able, but I'm not going to delude myself into thinking that I'm not skipping out on the cheque, as it were, when I do so.
  I might have a hint of sympathy if it wasn’t a dumpster fire of decaying babies.
  Literally no one is asking you to have any sympathy. Why get so defensive when it's pointed out that skipping ads is skipping on your side of the transaction when using an ad supported service?
  
  Fuck YouTube acting as a sleezy middle-man
  A sleezy middleman that happens to foot the YT infrastructure bill.
- if a content creator doesnt want people to be able to skip the ads/demonetize the content, then they should post on a platform that makes ads mandatory.
  problem is that no one will watch crap on that sort of platform
- Linus Short Sebastian is an asshole. I like his channel and even bought a water bottle, but he is an asshole nontheless. His opinions are always 5 years outdated. He used to hate reddit but now liked Reddit. Probably a contrarian too.
  
  Cool, let's body shame people.
- Another argument proving that Linus Media Group is a bunch of morons
- The same Linus who can't be arsed to spend $500 of various people's time to properly test a product is now telling us what to do?
- My guy, that's why there is DRM. Your screen are loading pixels, because they let you. Those third party apps and frontends work because they let the users have a little freedoms.
  If you steal something off the mall and bring it to your home, it doesn't make it yours. People thinking all that code, infrastructure and labour to run something on the internet should be free because they have an internet connection are entitled as the sovcit bunch. Just cringe.
  Advertisers, Malwares and Ad blockers are all to blame for the current state of the internet. We're heading for paywalled internet and entitled basement dwellers are going to complain you miss the "old internet"
  Seriously, I use adblockers but the rationale people make up for this like countless others are just plain stupid.
  
  Fuck that victim-blaming nonsense. The entire reason ad blockers were invented in the first place were because ads in the 90s and early 2000s were somehow even worse than they are now. You would click on a website, and pop-up ads would literally open new windows under your mouse cursor and immediately load an ad that opened another pop-up ad, and then another, and another, until you had 30 windows open and 29 of them were pop-up ads, all of them hoping to trick you into clicking on them to take you to a website laden with more and more pop-up ads. Banner ads would use bright, flashing, two-tone colors (that were likely seizure-inducing, so have fun epileptics!) to demand your attention while taking up most of your relatively tiny, low-resolution screen.
  The worst offenders were the Flash-based ads. On top of all the other dirty tricks that regular ads did, they would do things like disguising themselves as games to trick you into clicking them. ("Punch the monkey and win a prize!" The prize was malware.) They would play sound and video--which were the equivalent of a jump scare back then, because of how rare audio/video was on the Internet in that day. They would exploit the poor security of Flash to try and download malware to your PC without you even interacting with them. And all this while hogging your limited dialup connection (or DSL if you were lucky), and dragging your PC to a crawl with horrible optimization. When Apple refused to support Flash on iOS way back in the day, it was a backdoor ad blocker because of how ubiquitous Flash was for advertising content at the time.
  The point of all this is that advertisers have always abused the Internet, practically from day one. Firefox first became popular because it was the first browser to introduce a pop-up blocker, which was another backdoor ad blocker. Half the reason why Google became the company it did is because it started out as a deliberate break from the abuses of everyone else and gave a simple, clean interface with to-the-point, unobtrusive, text-based advertisements.
  If advertisers and Google in particular had stuck to that bargain--clean, unobstrusive, simple advertisements that had no risk of malware and no interruption to user workflow, ad blockers would largely be a thing of the past. Instead, they decided to chase the profit dragon, and modern Google is no better than the very companies it originally replaced.
  
  My guy, that’s why there is DRM. Your screen are loading pixels, because they let you.
  When I ping YouTube's server it provides me with a stream that contains an ad and a video. What I do with that stream is my problem, and if I want to chop it up it's something I can freely decide.
  Your server can send any data it wants, but it can't decide what I do with it, are you nuts?
  
  Advertisers, Malwares and Ad blockers are all to blame for the current state of the internet.
  So the thing that blocks the first two is equally to blame?
  I remember the day I started using an Ad blocker. I used to not care at all about ads on sites, "it's how they make money. I can live with it." And then I encountered a banner ad that screamed "HELOOOOOOO!" every time my mouse went over it. I couldn't download an ad blocker fast enough.
  Advertisers and Malware are to blame for Ad blockers. Advertisers will get more and more annoying and intrusive until people reach the point that they won't put up with them anymore. Seeing as the internet is one big bucket and I can't block some ads, then I will block all ads.
  
  MY hardware and infrastructure was not free either and I and ONLY I get to decide how it is used.
  
  If something allows it then it's morally justified. You can't be naked intentionally and ask me to not look at same time.

“because that prevents the creator from being rewarded for viewership”
not like Youtube rewards creators for viewership either (and then lying to the advertisers as well)
- I think YouTubers make fractional pennies from Ads, and mostly only if its fully watched and sometimes clicked to go to the website. So if you get a 15 second ad, and skip to the content, you didn't give the creators any money.
  Also, shout out to those ads being horrible. My first time ever installing an adblocker was during a rapid anti-smoking campaign, that had body horror. 15 year old me didn't want to smoke, nor wanted to after, but it was so disturbing that I learned how to avoid them.
  Not even going into the disturbing or weird ads. One time I got an ad for a "Ching Chong Fing Fong shirt company" as a way of mocking Chinese people because their government sucks. Another time, I got a full 12 hour video by a Vietnamese couple just grilling in their backyard. No subtitles, not even sure if they were aware they enabled their videos to do that, or didn't fully understand the process of uploading videos.
  Anytime I see actual ads on the internet, not just YouTube, it just makes me go "I am perfectly justified in not seeing these weird ads." I don't give them any money no matter what I do, so why not have my eyes saved from bright flashing colors and scam artists?
  
  If I recall correctly, ever since videos could be called up as ads you can just pay for any video to be an ad, as long as it's on YouTube, and it doesn't have to be yours. I don't know if this has changed, but an essays channel figured out that that's the fastests way someone could target a competitor's channel. Paying to have someone else's video as an ad tanks that video ad revenue and discoverability instantly. Ad views count as views to the video and skipping an ad counts as a skip on the video which signals the algorithm to think that nobody wants or likes to see that video. Do it to enough new videos and you can entirely kill a previously profitable channel in a couple of months.
  
  My first time ever installing an adblocker was during a rapid anti-smoking campaign
  Those ads made me want to take up smoking out of spite.
  
  If it hadn't been for ublock origin, I'd not be on YT this long
- They could probably retain users simply by running ads every 10 minutes, rather than every 3 minutes.
  
  Oh but they don’t care about anything but short form content. If they could ditch supporting long form content today they would.
  
  Money/s is the more used metric. Retention is secondary or even tertiary to money/s. Behold the algorithm, great and terrible, sheathed in robes of black and grasping sickle white.

At this point id rather see youtube die than watch ads
- I was watching a long video on chromecast today and I had ads every three minutes or so. That's a two hours video. The amount of ads is disgusting.
  YouTube is unwatchable without an ad blocker.
  
  My kid would watch his videos with ads and I offered to set him up with an alternative with no ads. He said no, I like the ads. I said ok then. That was two years ago. Last week he was losing his shit because of all the ads that made it unwatchable. I set him up with the ad free alternative and I get thanked every day for it.
  Youtube is tanking their own platform.
- This is why I pay for YT Premium. No way in hell am I watching ads, but I do want to be able to use the platform, and the money has to come from somewhere. So far it's been pretty good value, although SponsorBlock is of course still required.
  
  I would like to pay for YT Premium, but I think the service is bad. The product is good, and the service is bad.
  If I say I don't want to see this video, I don't want to see this fucking video again, youtube. I said don't recommend this channel, and you said I won't see it again, but I just refreshed, and there it is. I am not dutch, I don't speak dutch, I've never even been to the Netherlands. I shouldn't be seeing videos in dutch.
  Routinely, I have to go through my home page and try to train the algorithm but I've just given up. I got an extension now that just permanently removes channels and videos I don't want to see.
  The thing is... the product is the videos, and youtube doesn't do the videos. Youtube does the service, and the service is bad. I understand that the ads pay the youtubers but the truth is I don't care. That pay is trash, and if they want my premium money, youtubers should unionize and force youtube to improve the service.
  Edit: I watch the youtuber's sponsor spot and I buy merch.
  
  Yes - AND I like that being a premium subscriber compensates creators I watch EVEN WHEN they are otherwise "demonetized" - like, if they cover news and the news contains upsetting information, YouTube will reduce their ad exposure. But my views still award them as much credit as ever, and count for, like, dozens of ad-supported views under normal circumstances.
  
  Nope bankrupt youtube and rebuild from the ashes

I haven't seen an anti adblocker popup on youtube for a couple months now, I though they gave up. It looks like the uBlock developers and block list maintainers are just doing an excellent job staying ahead of whatever youtube is doing.
- Revanced update fixed it on their end about two weeks ago also.
  
  Bless the Revanced guys. They made my mobile youtube binge watches as smooth as my desktop firefox + ublock setup.

Personally, I don't think a service is in the wrong for trying to protect against ad block, especially when their revenue comes from ads. However I also don't think there's anything wrong with adblockers continuing to innovate to circumvent that. I'm rooting for Ublock Origin lol
- they also fucked themselves over with the ad skill issues they've had over the years. Advertisers now find it to be more worthwhile to advertise directly with creators, though that also means they make a lot more money, so.
  They kinda dug their own grave, to be honest.
  
  What made me and I imagine a large chunk of other people convert to revanced/similar apps is the super aggressive advertising, it's impossible to use youtube when you get a double ad before and after every 5 second video and get 30 second midrolls every like 3 minutes. You can't skip through a video to find the part you want to see because you'll just get an ad. It's extremely infuriating and time-consuming, it used to be where I was willing to deal with it but they fucked it up. Now I can never go back to ad-riddled YouTube, even if it has a "reasonable" amount of advertising (I am now in the belief that no amount of advertising is reasonable anymore though).
  
  Aaand now we have also sponsorblock to barely ever see ads in videos
  
  Not only monetization but also the whole sorting/ranking algorithms. Youtube is a bit better than Facebook reels and instagram due to the thumbs down button, but some people go out of their way to make nonsensical garbage because viewers will then comment, and there's no way to tell if a video is good or bad based solely on engagement. Those videos where people have some DIY hack to clean a toilet bowl and they just pour random condiments in the toilet for 3 minutes and cut the video before any conclusion, those types of videos
- This is what Louis Rossman said. Youtube is completely in their right to kick people off for blocking ads. At the same time, it's also not a pissing match that's worth getting heavily invested in, because ultimately Youtube is going to lose unless they can start coercing people into installing proprietary apps which they already have for mobile devices.
- This is what Louis Rossman said. Youtube is completely in their right to kick people off for blocking ads. At the same time, it's also not a pissing match that's worth getting heavily invested in, because ultimately Youtube is going to lose unless they can start coercing people into installing proprietary apps which they already have for mobile devices.

One 10-15 sec ad for an 5-10 mins video would be fair. Because if you calculate the ad shown in Cable TV it was similar I would watch them no problem. But NOOO these greedy fckrs want 3-5 ads of >15secs unskipable ads shoved down our throats. They have record profits. In a business if you are in profit then it's a good thing. But these fcks want to increase profit year by year, not stable profit for the number of users. That want infinite growth and profit from a finite source and they crazy or what? So if anyone says blocking ads on YouTube is piracy, then fck you and those greedy fckrs. They crossed the limit long time ago and they are reaping what they had sowed.
- No amount of ads are "fair"
  I'm done wasting my life for other people.
  Go ahead tho, you do you boo
  
  I'm done wasting my life for other people.
  I do enough of that at work as it is. I'll be fucked if I do it during my downtime, too.
  
  How do you propose YouTube should pay for infrastructure costs (servers, Internet etc), staff costs (engineers, designers, moderators) and the content creators?
- They’re publicly traded, they have to. Thats not an excuse mind you, but if you ever like a service and they go public, just understand the end users are no longer the focus.
  
  Being publicly traded does not force companies to become greedy, immoral scum... Stop spreading this piece of misinformation
  https://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2015/04/16/what-are-corporations-obligations-to-shareholders/corporations-dont-have-to-maximize-profits
  PS: this goes hand in hand with the "you got to be an asshole to succeed"... You don't, the problem is that most people can't find anything else to imitate
- Television shows are 22-24 minutes, because cable TV should show 6-8 minutes of ads every half hour. 30 second ads in blocks of 3 or 4, multiple times per show.
  15 seonds ads are almost too short for a trip to the kitchen. I'm not saying they're good, but if you want to compare to cable TV, you need to remember the dark times.
  
  Star Trek TOS episodes (1 hour show) were about 52 minutes long, with 8 minutes for commercials. By the time of TNG, episodes were down to 42 minutes. I regularly see ads every 5-6 minutes on YouTube.
  Businesses never understand that it's THEIR obnoxious, sh*tty advertising that kills something profitable, and when it finally dies, it's surprised Pikachu faces all around.

I refuse to use the official youtube app. Its so trash... I use newpipe and its amazing to just have all my favorite videos bookmarked locally in different lists.
If they take that away from me i will just stop using youtube.
- Better start preparing for the coming exodus. Try Odysee, Peertube and Nebula and see what works for you. Once the enshittification hits critical mass, you’ll be ready to let go of that sinking ship.
  
  Odysee
  ewwwwww.. 99% far right garbage, zero moderation there last time I took a look.
- Try Tubular, newpipe + sponsor block combo!
  
  I've never tried that one. Can you share a safe link please? Thanks!

Since the initial push, I have not even had to reset my ublock... stop using Chrome

The web should have had a Terms of Usage from start. Something like
"If you broadcast content on the internet, expect people to download it."
- This. I always say this exact thing.
  If you provide content for free, expect people to take it for free.
  
  Even if you don't intend to provide it for free, if it's possible to, expect it. No different from Walmart complaining about increased theft after replacing cashiers with self checkout - tiny violins.

everything still fine here on firefox + ublock origin
- Wish I could say the same.
  I'm also using firefox + ublock, but Ive noticed when I'm watching shorts, I'll occasionally get an ad that's disguised as a short. There's no like/dislike buttons or anything.
  
  Just block shorts alltogether, it's a win win.
  
  That's intended. Even to premium subs youtube pushes adds which try and promote engagement. Its fucking awful.
  Does get me out of the loop sometimes though, so I guess Im thankful for that.
- Sometimes I have to reload the page when using these 2. the page will load but just have a youtube icon in the centre of the player or the spinny circle until i hit f5
- Yup same here, on android

Somewhere out there a CEO thought this was a good idea. All it seems to be doing is pushing people to other platforms (the younger gen moving over to tiktok and the older gens moving 3rd party or just offline).
- While I agree, the amount of people who'd do this is negligibly small, compared to their total userbase. Obviously a bunch of people use ad blockers, but only a tiny amount of them have modified apps, followed by an even tinier amount of those people with fully custom frontends. For YT it might work out as a net positive, because the annoying blocks and reminders will just pressure people into paying for Premium.
  At the end of the day, I could just stop watching youtube entirely, if this trend continues. I have nothing to gain there
  
  I guess what there really winning is all those non tech-savvy people who currently have an adblocker installed because their friend helped.
  
  Yes, been thinking I've just been substituting YT for TV, and while the consumption can still be customized, it's still a habit that can be kicked. I bet I'll get more sleep and productivity.
  Lol autocorrect
- Good. Let their stranglehold die.

YouTube is bringing its ad blocker fight to mobile. In an update on Monday, YouTube writes that users accessing videos through a third-party ad blocking app may encounter buffering issues or see an error message that reads, “The following content is not available on this app.”
Yea, noticed that last week. Is already fixed again in latest revanced.
Delete microG, revanced manager, and YouTube revanced
Download and install the new gmscore, which replaces microG: https://github.com/ReVanced/GmsCore/releases/tag/v0.3.1.4.240913
Download and install latest version of Revanced Manager: https://github.com/ReVanced/revanced-manager/releases/tag/v1.20.1
Download and install YouTube 19.09.37 from APKmirror: https://www.apkmirror.com/apk/google-inc/youtube/youtube-19-09-37-release/youtube-19-09-37-android-apk-download/
- Revanced will never die. Stand against the Goliath.
  
  Vanced died. If revanced dies we'll just get rerevanced. Ad infitum.
- Didn't know about the update. Thanks, just did it.
- yup, noticed that revanced wasn't working a week ago.
  went into revanced manager, patched the recommended version, installed gmscore, done.
  suck it youtube, i'm not paying a subscription to watch low effort vtuber edits.

Oh, I definitely have experienced "The following content is not available on this app." Before, but I thought it was just a thing of my Revanced version outdated because I rarely update it... Which I'm gonna do just now 😁
I hope this doesn't bring too many issues to Smart Tube, which is where I do 99% of my YT usage (and I have yet to be bothered with any bug).
- Never had any outage in SmartTube either, unless they pushed a faulty release (I'm on the beta channel), but even then they have reacted super fast with fixes.
  So far I'm using NewPipe x Sponsorblock on my phone - apparently it has been discontinued & archived, but still works just fine as well. Only the comment view is broken since a couple weeks, but I really don't care about those to begin with.
  
  Nowadays I'm using tubular which is newpipe with sponsor block and youtube dislike incorporated.

Did they fuck up revanced again?
Nope, it still works...

In Germany, there is a law that regulates the amount and intervals of advertising for private television broadcasters: 20% or 1/5 per broadcast day may be used for advertising. Programs that are shorter than 30 minutes may have a break, otherwise there must be 20 minutes between commercial breaks - 30 minutes in the evening. Unfortunately, there are still some loopholes.
Children's programs are not allowed to have commercial breaks.
It's a shame that this law still doesn't apply to YouTube.
- It's a shame that this law still doesn't apply to YouTube
  If Germany is anything like Canada and other countries, applying public broadcast laws to YouTube would be a monkey's paw deal. Sure you might get tighter control over advertising, but youtube would also be forced to do things like show you x% of content made in your country/language, resulting in state mandated control of the content you see online and potentially limiting/warping international audiences for content creators, and potentially other ramifications I'm not considering.
  Now if they made a law specifically for youtube and other online video platforms that dealt with advertising in that context, that would be a different story.
  
  Sure you might get tighter control over advertising, but youtube would also be forced to do things like show you x% of content made in your country/language, resulting in state mandated control of the content you see online and potentially limiting/warping international audiences for content creators, and potentially other ramifications I'm not considering.
  This is false. You can create laws restricting advertising without creating other laws forcing companies to display domestic content. The point about the Canadian government wanting YouTube to promote domestic content is irrelevant.

Makes me miss a time where they couldn't tell if ads were actually watched or not.
Sooner or later, ad blockers should just simulate the ad being played (in the background) with the real content going in the foreground to act as if the ad was watched.
Kind of like going to the bathroom during commercials.
Then again I wish we had a real alternative to YouTube. (Don't point me to the fediverse video stuff ... that's not what I mean.) There is no real competition for a place to freely upload videos ... or on the other side find all that content. No one wants to scale enough to compete. (Very few probably could considering the amount of new content per minute).
If only there was real competition, then YouTube would have to fight over our attention/usage by lowering ad count.
No competition means worse for all.
- There's a tool that does this. It speeds up the ad so it takes only a couple of seconds. The ad is "watched" but muted the whole time so you don't actually have to deal with it.
  Edit: The article isn't great but the tool is sort of the same as what you mentioned. https://9to5google.com/2023/11/25/youtube-ads-speed-up-workaround/
- Well, YT is literally getting petabytes uploaded to it. Every single day. Thats 1000 terabytes, and thats 1000000 gigabytes.
  I bet you haven't even seen a petabyte of storage in one place (assuming you didn't go to a data center yourself). How is a small company, or even fediverse, gonna handle that? Thats absolutely insane amount of data and, without moderation or curation, it is not feasible.
  It's a giant waste of space and resources, to be honest. Most videos are seen once, and the rest is mostly spam or bad quality content.
  
  Actually the cost issues wouldn't be the storage it's self. Storage is pretty cheap, it's content delivery networks. YouTube is supported by being owned and run by one of the worlds larges content delivery networks. There's virtually no latency, videos play immediately.
  Having millions (potentially billions in YouTube's case) of people accessing data at once is an immense challenge and YouTube perfected it pretty early on, that's part of why there's no competition.
  
  Well break it up "lemmy wise" or more? I mean nobody can replace youtube but it would be possible having your own fishing channel for example. If it gets wildly watched you probably have to figure out some sponsorship for sure.
  BTW no I haven'tseen a PB storage, but I did write visualisation and computation software for treating and seing datastructures up to PB size with hdf5.
- Sooner or later, ad blockers should just simulate the ad being played (in the background) with the real content going in the foreground to act as if the ad was watched.
  I wish adblockers did this, open the ad in a little silenced sandbox window. I don't see the ad, creator gets their pay
  
  Even the advertisers don't lose out because you wouldn't have paid attention to the ad too. They might even win a little because now one doesn't have to get annoyed by the ad and deliberately not buy the thing.
  
  Adnaseum is a fork of unlock that fakes viewing ads. The thing is its banned from chromes app store because google is at its core an advertising company.
- No one wants to scale enough to compete.
  I don't consider scale important from the perspective of making and watching good videos. People get hung up on it when citing barriers to competition with Youtube, and while it's certainly there, it only matters to Google itself (so it can continue to plausibly lie to its customers about ad impression numbers). In fact YT's offering was at its creative peak when scale was lacking.
  It makes no difference to me whether a knowledgeable hobbyist has 20,000 subs or 250,000. I don't care about their "content" suitability for advertisers (that creepy term can get nuked). I certainly couldn't care less whether the algorithm promotes their work, deserving as it may be. This sort of creator operates on the assumption their viewers are intelligent, and is typically savvy enough to route around YT with alternate donation/support mechanisms. These people will continue on any platform. For them, quality is an end in itself rather than a feed-in to a metric. I would rather watch a badly filmed insightful critical appraisal of a new piece of hardware than Canadian/Black Technology Man's 8K press release rehash full of slick cuts and pointless b-roll.
  Scale is the concern of middlemen.
- I wonder about this. Youtube is made so that videos has to be long (10 minutes at least, or you won't get exposure, right?) so we get all those dragged out videos with long summaries.
  Also you are supposed to earn money with it, which combined makes videos, IMO, often not very interesting.
  Sure, I get it, everyone can't make videos all day long for free, but isn't that something that we shouldn't maybe want?
  I prefer a genuine hobbyist making one video a year, than a sponsored person pushing one a day.
  Which brings me to hosting and bandwidth needs, youtube needs a lot of that because of its business model, but say Lemmy communities could probably host quality videos without large hassle (especially if small servers wasn't defederated all the time).
  Thoughts?
  
  The problem is the term quality would be used to block out certain creators. The definition would wind up being vague and/or arbitrary.
  What one person thinks is quality may not be quality to someone else. In a way that's a niceness of YouTube. We can each upload what we think is good.. or bad.
  Even then if a video goes big viral (which is arguably something a creator may want), the bandwidth costs could skyrocket.
  Then it's like: maybe we need CDNs and more storage and boom now it's even more expensive. I just don't see fediverse video working great long term without big money to back it.
  
  I thought the 10 minute was a monetization requirement.

It's kinda cute how they are utterly loosing with adblocker crackdown and now they are saying they will even handle their party apps. No company will handle an open source project full of talented people pissed of by ads.
- Reddit managed pretty well, let’s be real. The 3rd party app protests were essentially a speed bump that lost a tiny subsection of users that advertisers didn’t want anyways. Everyone else just migrated to the official app or website.
  
  In their defense, advertisers weren't seeing those same people.
  
  You can still use third party apps, they are just not in the playstore. Just like with YouTube right now

What they don't realize is people are also using those third party apps because they are offering much more customization than the stock YouTube app ever offers. I had free premium and still used Revanced because it's such a godsend. There's so much useless crap in the youtube layout.
- I have premium now and use revanced. I can't stand the create button in the middle of the screen. I have no desire to make shitty videos for their platform. I would use the default app if I could just customize what buttons are on screen so I don't accidentally press one. That seems like a great accessibility feature, but I guess they don't care about some people.
- I have premium and use revanced, I agree.

I just use revanced
- stopped working for me yesterday :(
  
  Are you still using the microg version? There is a new version that uses another patch. You'll have to go to Reddit for the instructions on how to install that
  
  you have to get the new microG for the newer revanced to work
  
  Update it
  
  Working fine for me

I kind of already hoarded so many videos from youtubes last failed adblock crusade that I barely even use the real youtube anymore. Guess I'll show my disapproval by improving my offline video caching system even more.
My search system doesn't autosuggest results based on which videos have more boobs in the thumbnail but I'll get over it.

If they fully manage to block applications from viewing YouTube, then I will just stop viewing YouTube entirely. And I will figure out channels to watch on Odyssey and peertube. That will also be my last Google service since that is the only one I use frequently since I deleted my Google account two years ago.
- Making you leave is their point since you cost them money.
  
  True, but if enough people leave, then creators will start leaving as well, and that is something they do not want.
  
  At the scale youtube does things it doesn't really cost them much. They actually have the servers, the bandwidth, often the power. It's not like they get to sell a server if enough people leave. The savings probably do not even justify the effort (=cost) to unplug the server. And they still get many other benefits of having you as a user (getting to profile you, getting to push propaganda, getting to sell your information, maybe you send videos to friends who don't use adblock, maybe you buy merch from creators making creators happier on their platform).
  On the other hand this enshittification is ruining their monopoly, other areas of business (if you don't need youtube, maybe you don't need a chromecast? If you don't need a chromecast, would you buy pixel phone, that can only do chromecast if samsung can do hdmi? Maybe you're done with android? And if you're on iphone, are you still using google maps, photos, search, keep etc?) and curing people who are addicted to the platform.
  The eventual consequence of enshittification is always platform death. Which would be amazing, sadly the next platform is going to repeat the cycle.

Dickheads coming to shill for YT Premium in 3.. 2..
- ..1!
  (Read as if this was as an ad from Google) (if your familer with Rodger's Honest Ads, this was inspired by the way those are written) (if that last sentence wasn't clear...this whole post is a mockery or /s)
  Buy YouTube Premium with your hard earned money so you can feel good about a few extra pennies going towards your beloved creators. We'll keep the rest of your precious money for ourselves to bring you new and exciting features you never asked for -
  you'll get exclusive acess to the ever growing library of YouTube Originals, because we felt it necessary to take the "You" out of YouTube and sponsor our own content for you to enjoy.
  We'll bring more pixels to you with real time 4K video streaming. Now you can enjoy one of the 6 channels that actually record in 4k in beautiful life like quality on your tiny phone, the 13 year old computer screen you rescued from your work dumpster or your smart 4K TV that doesn't have a WiFi card fast enough to get all the pixels for a buttery smooth expirence.
  Next we'll bring you Live TV straight to your eyes from across the globe. Ditch those pesky cable bills and pay for our ever growing selection of unwilling particpents as the affordability of streaming destroys traditional cable for the low monthly cost of $57.99 for the first 3 months. As a bonus, our website doesn't bother to tell you if it includes any the other YouTube Premium features - you might just end up paying for premium twice and we have no real obligation to tell you.
  Finally, we've thought of the little ones with our special version of YouTube for Kids, called YouTube Kids. Here we use an advanced AI system of people who can find the report button to filter out any content we decide goes against our ever changing guidelines. We allow your children to only watch the most mind numbing, cheaply made, addicitive garbage to keep them ocupied while you do more important things than raising your child.
  We know the real reason you're here is YouTube Music. Access our huge library of every song that we haven't been forced to take down because some studio decided they wanted their cut. We'll entice you to spend a few more dollars than what you pay for just YouTube Music to get ad-free YouTube videos and the revolutionary ability to play music in the background on your mobile phone. That's right, we've developed a method in which you can listen to music at the same you binge read cringy fanfiction novels at 3 in the morning. It's revolutionary.
  Still not convinced, lastly we added in the amazing feature called offline viewing. This will download the videos you select to your device offline in an encrypted format so hackers can't steal them from you, allowing you to watch them anywhere, provided you have an internet connection so we can verify you downloaded the videos.
  Buy YouTube Premium today, and buy it again every month, for the low price of your daughter's medium latte macchiato coffe milkshake with extra caramel, whipped cream and a cute bright red40 cherry on top.
  
  That is just to true 😩. I never heard of Honest Ads before but these are hilarious!
  
  Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
  Honest Ads
  Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
  I'm open-source; check me out at GitHub.
- It’s actually a really great deal at the old price I’m grandfathered into and none of you can get any more.
  Also if you pirate YT, Google won’t pay creators. If you watch ads, Google still won’t pay creators.
  
  Who's pirating YouTube? I'm just blocking content I don't want to watch. :)
  And if you want to support creators, but something from their store or send them a donation or something. Doing that once is probably more money than they'd ever get from ads you watch.

Luckily Piped, Invidious and others are still doing its thing.
- my revanced still works
- Can anyone tell me what's up with LibreTube not playing videos recently?
  
  It's probably due to Invidious and Piped instances getting rate limited. LibreTube uses them as the source of the videos, i think.
  
  Invidious and piped had issues with youtube blocking them, but the instances I use work fine again now. They even blocked my self hosted invidious instance which I use maybe once a day lol.

If you are looking for a specific video, use DDG search, then click videos. No ad's!
Obviously not useful if you're just randomly browsing content.
- Ads* goddammit
  
  yes, but did you enable an adblocker? I'm just saying it will work browsing via DDG. (oh, and I'm on PC. Don't know if this would work on a phone).
- Even more importantly, no junk "fOr YoU" or "tReNdInG" in the search.

Speaking of, does anyone know how best to block YouTube ads on my Sony TV? It uses Android and I have the YT app on it.
- Install SmartTube and use that instead of the official YouTube app.
  It's even better than the real YouTube app because, unlike that, it's native.
  
  Ah yes! Thank you. Will try this today
- Install smarttube
- Pihole maybe. Even though I have heard its not as reliable lately
  
  You can't block YouTube ads with PiHole generally because the ads come from legitimate Google domains so you can't block them easily

GrayJay works great. And it's not even limited to YouTube, there are lots of other platforms you can fill your feed with. And also, you still can get your feed directly from YouTube, so recommendations are there and channel memberships also work. You can't use YouTube likes and comments, but you can create a Polycentric identity, and like the videos or comment on it in that "decentralized" identity platform.

Lmao, because they've been so successful with browsers...

I still use FreeTube for desktop and no ads here :)
- FreeTube, newpipe etc. simulate being a browser and extract the video that way..if YouTube would want to add ads for this thirdparty clients they would have to inject them directly into the video feed.
  
  With the WebM-Format they use it might be possible. It's based on Matroska and there is a feature to replace or add chunks within the stream in realtime.

Okay, then in exchange can I get a UI that doesn't suck?

Good luck Youtube, you fools.

I hear people talking about how Youtube is not paying out like it used to. So they are playing ads to us and not paying the creators. There is a growing group of people looking at open source platforms like Odysee and PeerTube.

Those that do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it.

I hope the YouTube Kodi plugin stays working, otherwise I'll have to write a script to download all latest videos in my subscription to my home server.

This is the best summary I could come up with:
YouTube is bringing its ad blocker fight to mobile.
In an update on Monday, YouTube writes that users accessing videos through a third-party ad blocking app may encounter buffering issues or see an error message that reads, “The following content is not available on this app.”
It also began disabling videos for users with an ad blocking extension enabled.
But now, YouTube says its policies don’t allow “third-party apps to turn off ads because that prevents the creator from being rewarded for viewership.” This appears to target mobile ad blockers like AdGuard, which lets you open YouTube within the ad blocking app, where you’ll get to view videos interruption-free.
“When we find an app that violates these terms, we will take appropriate action to protect our platform, creators, and viewers.”
This likely won’t come as pleasant news to all the users who watch YouTube through ad blocking apps, but it doesn’t look like YouTube is backing down in its battle against ad blockers anytime soon.
The original article contains 220 words, the summary contains 165 words. Saved 25%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!

This sound familiar to anyone?

Lmao, I keep hearing about this but my Ublock Origin & Firefox keeps chugging along fine on both desktop and mobile. Eat my ass, Neal Mohan.

I don't see how they'll stop these without majorly changing the functionality of the site. Most just load the none ad portions of the video. I don't understand how they'll prevent that.
- The simplest solution is to embed the ads in the video stream.
  
  That's why we have the sponsorblock add on lol
  
  But the ad blocking algorithm can notice the jump cut, (simple audio/video/meta data.) irregularities and then just jump forward to the regular video.
  
  The simplest solution is to embed the ads in the video stream.
  Then people could fast forward past them.
  I'd be fine with it, but advertisers won't be happy until you're forced to stand up, say "Mc Donald's", and then answer a short quiz about the ad that just played before you can continue.

microG, Newpipe and brave still working like a charm..

LibreTube hasn't worked in a couple of weeks
- Yeah that really sucks
- Yeah so I'm not the only one! Does anybody know what's the matter?
  
  YouTube is blocking it, the only way to fix it is to go into settings and disable the piped proxy

They need to distract the MBAs with a box of crayons to eat so the adults can make good decisions.

We will find a way. Never give up or give in. Screw your shareholders!

I literally just use the Dislike Re-Adder, also used uBlock Origin and never got an Anti-AdBlock message
- I still get block messages in Vivaldi, but not Firefox.

spoofing app signature makes revanced not work and clipious also not working so im down to just newpipe sponsorblock and yt on browser

Now? They've always been playing whack-a-mole against third party apps.

it would be amazing if they could just add a mobile ui to Smarttube (best android tv app imho) - it supports login, adblock, sponsorblock & dearrow, you can cast to it, etc. - and it's updated constantly, via a prompt in the app, no external download or play store necessary
- You can use Revanced which allows to log in, adblock and sponsorblock at least. I use it everyday and it works great!

And yet it still can't figure out how to get past two adblockers at once
It's stupid that it works, but it works
- If it's stupid and it works, it's not stupid.
- Why would you use two adblockers?
  
  Because so far, not a single YouTube update has let them get past it. Basically, I switched adblockers but forgot to uninstall the old one, then by the time I noticed, I had also noticed that the combination somehow, for some bizarre reason, ends up confusing anti adblockers to the point of not even getting "disable adblocker" messages. It's not something involving their blacklists either because they have the same blacklist (due to the aforementioned replacing one with another then forgetting to uninstall the older one)
  
  Twice the protection
  Double the security
  PS: Doesn't apply to condoms.

Okay so I will just keep using NewPipe

Ungoogled chromium + uBlock origin + pihole and I haven't had any issues so far (Germany)

They'll fail so hard, can't wait to watch this train wrack. If YouTube is gone tomorrow this is just a little inconvincing to me. Competition will pop up for every single element. Be it gaming, music or video trailer or fan made content. YouTube is stacking so high, they haven't noticed we're ready to replace them. Not one huge new YouTube, just small parts and people create 4-10 bookmarks to get the same content.
- This is the same comment that appears on every YT update for 15 years. No, it won't happen. YT is too big to fail and real competition is almost non-existent (due to various reasons). Some have tried, all have failed, unfortunately.
  Also, I'm sure people would rather pay a monthly subscription than go to other plattforms.
  
  While I agree YouTube won't die because of this, nothing is too big to fail.
  
  I didn't mean YouTube will die, it's obviously too big at the moment. But they will lose a lot of users, quite a few old sites still exists as zombie without much relevance.
  With "they'll fail" I mean the CEOs who plan this, will fail, because there are alternatives. I should've been more precise. YouTube knows that, that's why they added shorts, they are already bleeding users.

YouTube’s Youtube crackdown now includes third-party apps

This Hour Has 22 Minutes
- Phew
- Seeing this at 21 minutes past gave me a slight pause.

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