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YouTube is Losing The War Against Adblockers (www.howtogeek.com)
submitted 2 years ago by to c/technology@lemmy.world
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  • YouTube is intensifying efforts to combat adblockers, including blocking video playback and warning users of potential account suspension.
  • Increased ads on YouTube have driven many users to adblockers, hurting both YouTube’s ad revenue and content creators reliant on ad-based income.
  • Despite these measures, many users are leaving YouTube or finding workarounds, leading creators to seek alternative revenue streams off-platform.
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[–] 256 points 2 years ago (25 children)

The other day I visited youtube without any add-ons and concluded I'd rather do anything else than use youtube under those conditions.

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  • [–] 157 points 2 years ago (3 children)

    legit, if youtube ever beats ublock origin, i'll just stop watching youtube

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  • [–] 79 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (1 child)

    Its an all out assault on half your senses without an adblocker. Literal torture.

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  • [–] 54 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    The entire web is like that without an ad blocker these days.

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  • [–] 17 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    I miss those cheeky gif banners from the 2000s

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  • [–] 17 points 2 years ago (2 children)

    [With hindsight] The commercial use of the internet should never have been allowed.

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  • [–] 6 points 2 years ago* (2 children)

    I want the internet to be a network of digital libraries...communication, public events and sharing space...personal pages...services...the commercial motive starts from there and eventually consumes the rest :/

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  • [–] 7 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    I reckon without the rule changes in 1993-94 allowing commercial use that the internet would have turned into a significantly more useful utility with higher quality innovation than the advert laden train wreck that we have now.

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  • [–] 2 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    For this to happen, everyone using the internet should know HTML or there has to be a easy to use, MS Word-like web designer. And there should also be easy to use, free web hosting providers (neocities exists).

    Owning a website as a non-techie should be normalized and be portrayed as "cool"

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  • [–] 19 points 2 years ago (2 children)

    Yt-dlp download script + text file with fav channel urls + jellyfin.

    No bullshit, saves bandwidth.

    Also look into invidious.

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  • [–] 6 points 2 years ago (2 children)

    They were serving videos with ads spliced in, basically DAI in podcasting industry. I’m not sure how that experiment went, but if that’s how they’d serve the videos, downloaders will have ads embedded as well.

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  • [–] 6 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    Yt-dlp supports sponsorblock, i am not worried.

    I also dont even need tools for this as my usual style of watching is with my fingers on the arrow keys to skip back and forth

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  • [–] 4 points 2 years ago

    I actually don’t know if/how the ad block people worked around it or if YouTube pulled back. The problem with DAI on podcast and in stream ads is that the ads aren’t always 1:05~1:35, the ad could be longer or shorter, then the next ad won’t necessarily start at the same time, and most definitely won’t end at the same time. So sponsor block won’t know precisely where the ads are, thereby making it much harder for a crowd sourced solution to accurately skip embedded ads. Hopefully they figured out a way, but as mentioned earlier, I don’t know what happened to that experiment.

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  • [–] 34 points 2 years ago (2 children)

    I've had YouTube Premium since the days when it was called YouTube Red, so like a decade. I've grown used to not seeing any ads from Google and anytime I watch a video not using my account it's torture.

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  • [–] 4 points 2 years ago (2 children)

    Same here. FreeTube for desktop and NewPipe are all you need though if you don't want to pay and/or have access to music.

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  • [–] 6 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    Tubular is newpipe + sponsorblock BTW

    I use pipepipe but it's less stable

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  • [–] 3 points 2 years ago* (1 child)

    As a recent YT premium-tryer, it's amazing how many ads they put in that aren't obviously adverts - comparing between non-premium and premium browsing.
    Not sure I'll keep YT premium beyond the free trial, until I find more decent content producers. Even then, it's skipping those video's paid promotion segments.
    So it's like paying for a streaming platform to not get ads... But still getting ads

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  • [–] 0 points 2 years ago

    I agree... however, that is an issue with the content creators relying on using content promotions. I have noticed when skipping ahead in videos that it usually indicates in the progress bar where the promotion ends. If the content producers utilized other ways to contribute and I liked them enough, then I'd do that. YouTube now has a subscriber only feature that should help with this. There are also extensions that are supposed to block sponsors too. I don't think YouTube has implemented any functions to make blocking sponsored ads more difficult, especially for paying users... who knows though.

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  • [–] 9 points 2 years ago

    That‘s where Youtube Premium comes into play for many fools who don‘t really know about adblockers. Google‘s goal isn‘t to destroy the website, but to turn it into a much more profitable Netflix subscription based on user generated content. Sadly the enshittification of the biggest video platform will continue because enough people are willing to pay a lot for it. The site will not improve until there are mainstream alternatives that actually take revenue off Youtube.

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  • [–] 7 points 2 years ago

    It’s so bad that I 1) refuse to pay for premium so I don’t enable the behavior and 2) ended up sideloading an alt YouTube app on iOS that just doesn’t display the ads. YouTube hasn’t been able to block that one yet as it spoofs as the original YouTube app. Totally unsanctioned and a pain in the ass to keep the certificate alive but worth it. YouTube is actually enjoyable again. All that because the ads interruptions were constant. If it was every 15 min or so I wouldn’t care, but every 5!? Get the hell out of here!

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  • [–] 0 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    Pro tip, LLMs do an excellent job summarizing YouTube videos now. I've never liked YouTube content, the incentives for creators are perverse and discourage conveying accurate information simply in favor of drawing out every video to maximize ad opportunities. About 95% of the content I might have been interested in could have been better conveyed in a 1-2 page blog post and read in 2 minutes instead of stretched out into a 15 minute video. Having a robot summarize that content is so much less irritating.

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