UPDATE 2 It seems that starting today, uBlock Origin is working to combat this Youtube Block. Mine started working again! Lets all thank the devs of UBO for fighting this fight!
UPDATE So as new info comes out, I’ll be posting it here. It seems as if this Rollout Has Several Parts.
Part 1
You get a popup message over top of your video, blocking the screen:
- This is the first sign. If you see this popup AND are logged into a YouTube account, your account has been selected.
- At this stage you can likely close or block these messages with an adblocker.
Part 2
This message will change, indicating that you have 3 remaining videos to watch without ads.
Will insert photo once one has been found
- At this stage your adblocker will imminently stop working in 3 videos time.
- Personally using Firefox + uBlock Origin and tweaking filters and updates does not even fix it.
Part 3
None of the video loads now, everything looks blank.
- At this stage you must tred new ground to avoid ads. I have posted methods in the comments. If you want to bypass this end page, read down there.
End of Update
YouTube has started rolling out anti-adblock to users inside the United States, which means that they are preparing to roll this out to the entire country. Personally, I have been blocked already. I want to gauge how common this occurrence is.
I’ve got so many layers of adblock it’s hard to know which one(s) are responsible for blocking the ads.
Same here. Was just explaining to a coworker who was complaining about YT ads that I “just” use PiHole+Unbound for network blocking, AirVPN with DNS blocking, mullvad Private DNS on Android, and then Libretube to view my self-hosted Piped instance. As I said it I realized how ridiculous it’s gotten and how deranged I probably sound.
This all sounds like extremely reasonable to me. Fuck the haters.
Reasonable, yes. Feasible for everyone? Not necessarily. I would like to get at least a pihole going at some point but for now ublock origin and ReVanced have been enough for me.
Same. Keep up the good work.
Haha I appreciate y’all! Next stop: Tor City
I just use use uBlock Origin.
I didn’t think that could block Youtube ads alone? Like Hulu and Spotify
Before this new behavior uBlock Origin always blocked YouTube ads.
I mean, it did up until maybe now.
still does outside the US
PiHole+Unbound . . . AirVPN with DNS blocking, mullvad Private DNS . . . Libretube
This is what I pictured reading all that.
Hahaha yeah I may have went a little berserk there
Correct me if I’m wrong, but isn’t the point of using Piped having a proxy between you and YouTube? Or are you serving your instance to friends/family so that your queries get mixed together?
Yeah that’s the point. I do use my instance for links when sharing to people, but the main reason I selfhosted was for control and mostly just fun
Did your coworker know what you were talking about? Also, please explain how AirVPN with DNS blocking works.
Well they were already talking UBO and PiHoles, so I had faith lol AirVPN has the option to add blocklists to its DNS. Obviously with everything else I don’t really need it, but it can’t hurt.
Why do you need adblock, when using piped?
Because the internet includes more than just youtube…?
For everything other than Youtube!
The irony of the straw poll site throwing up an anti-adblock banner 🤣
I have a VPN and I can’t vote.
That’s self selection bias if I’ve ever seen it
I’m going to start a discussion in the comments here about methods to bypass the message. I will add suggestions here, so leave comments if you find a method!
Methods to bypass Youtube Anti-Adblock:
- The easiest method is simply to comply and turn off your adblock extension.
My Method
- My method, and the one that will likely work universally is as follows:
Install Extension Enhancer for YouTube™
Go to the extensions settings and ensure that under the Ads Management section, “Block Ads” is turned OFF
Now find the Custom Script box at the very bottom and enter the following script. I did not write this code, it comes from egaudette on GitHub
(function() { 'use strict'; var clickInterval = setInterval(skipAds, 5); var ytpAdModule; var miniAdd; var skipButton; var currentVideo; function skipAds() { ytpAdModule = document.querySelector('.ytp-ad-module'); skipButton = document.querySelector('button[class*="ad-skip"]'); miniAdd = document.querySelector('.ytp-ad-overlay-container'); if (ytpAdModule !== null && ytpAdModule.innerHTML !== '') { ytpAdModule.style.display = 'none'; } if (skipButton !== null) { skipButton.click(); return; } currentVideo = document.querySelector('video[class*="main-video"]') if (currentVideo !== null && currentVideo.duration <= 5) { currentVideo.muted = true; currentVideo.play(); currentVideo.currentTime = currentVideo.duration; } } })();Lastly, ensure the “Automatically execute the script when YouTube is loaded in a tab” box is checked, and press Save
I’ll add more methods as they are discovered!
Why would this work when others get blocked? Is it a novel way to block YT ads that’s not popular? Because I think YT isn’t looking for specific extensions but looking for certain kinds of behavior.
This method lets ads load for half a second but then get skipped instantly. i have not personally found a way to 100% block ads once ive gotten their block page.
I use greasemonkey to do a similar trick with the skip and dismiss buttons. But added random delays up to 2 seconds in an attempt to mimic a human clicking the button.
Also instead of an interval running, you can use MutationObserver and a callback to only run the code when the DOM changes and adds the button.
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Please note that posting the script has html-encoded && <> and similar characters so you’ll have to replace those with the correct ones (or just get the script from GitHub)
Thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you!!! ❤️
I genuinely think that advertising should be illegal at this point. It’s a ridiculous concept.
Based. Absolutely true, there is no good use for advertising.
How do you define “advertising”?
Is it advertising if a community government makes citizens aware that bus service will be changing?
Is it advertising to tell people that there’s a suicide hotline available if they need help?
Is it advertising to encourage people to volunteer for a local festival?
What about telling people that the festival exists using a poster? Is that an ad? Does it depend if the festival is free or non-profit?
Advertising is just fundamentally about bringing people’s attention to something. The spectrum can range from a municipal government “advertising” its monthly meeting so that local people can participate in their local democracy, to spam emails hyping a pump-and-dump cryptocurrency.
Different people will have different ideas where the cut-off should be. The extreme libertarians will say that nothing should be banned. Others will say that it’s ok to ban ads for alcohol and cigarettes but not for makeup or coffee. Even totalitarian states and supposedly communist states where one entity controls all companies have ads. Some of the most striking ads ever made were for Mussolini.
So, the question really isn’t about banning ads, it’s just where to draw the line.
An increasing number of states are banning billboards along highways. Travelers do need a low tech method for finding certain services though, such as food, lodging, fuel and restrooms. So you’ll see those blue signs that says “FOOD NEXT EXIT” with a Waffle House and Burger King logo. In order to put the logo on that sign, the business has to meet certain criteria (which vary from state to state like all highway laws), for example a restaurant must be within 3 miles of the highway, be open for at least 12 hours a day and feature public restrooms and telephones. The sign itself may include a distinctive logo and the name of the business in legible font but no slogans or ad copy. “This burger restaurant is nearby.”
This I see as an appropriate amount of advertising.
Paying to tell others that they should buy something they otherwise would not.
So, the government of Florida advising people to stock up on emergency supplies ahead of the oncoming hurricane – banned?
It is a great example of how an industry can survive with only self-reported effectiveness. I remember a freakonomics episode where it was shown that very infrequently do companies get a positive return on marketing spending. It will be very interesting if that industry ever collapses.
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Oh definitely. Its essentially a massive case of ‘it’s difficult to get someone to understand something when their salary depends on not understanding it.’
Same shit with Facebook claiming videos were the bestest content possible, using numbers sourced from the vicinity of their pelvis. Now every goddamn news site has autoplaying video for no damn reason.
Multinational scam artists
Advertising is about creating trends, and catching some impulse buyers. Effectiveness is likely overstated, but on the other hand it’s difficult to quantify the effectiveness of a trend. I don’t think it’s likely to ever collapse, people will always want to believe they can influence others more than they actually can.
For those who don’t know: VLC also takes a YouTube video address as input (in the menu: Media | Open Network Stream…).
VLC is so damn good
This has not worked for me in a very long time.
Your vlc is probably busted and could use a reinstall. Happened to me once. It still works.
i thought maybe this would work for me: nope. it was awesome when it worked but it’s completely broken afaict.
You can also pipe yt-dlp into vlc if that suits your fancy.
Mpv works just fine for me
Strange, that doesn’t work for me
Update your VLC player if you haven’t already.
There is also a way to individually update just the extractor LUA script that VLC uses to play YT videos, but I haven’t messed with that in so long I’ve forgotten how to do it
This is such a better use of their time and dollars versus improving their service to make it more attractive to customers.
If this is the change that really sets them financially straight, then I would say they have a failing business model.
This is such a better use of their time and dollars versus improving their service to make it more attractive to customers.
Making their service more attractive to customers is precicesly what they’re trying to do.
It’s just that an advertising agency’s customers are not the folk who watch, read or hear the ads, it’s the folk who pay for the ads.
I am not sure if it will work out like this though. The amount of ads they are forcing down peoples throat is isane. Eventually it will make people consume less videos and with that less ads overall.
And thus the enshittification cycle completes
I am not sure if it will work out like this though. The amount of ads they are forcing down peoples throat is isane. Eventually it will make people consume less videos and with that less ads overall.
Sure, could be - but keep in mind that they have all the relevant usage data at hand. Any decrease in service popularity among users (or indeed any kind of user behavior) is immediately visible to them. They have the means to know exactly what annoyances the market will bear.
And considering that YouTube still holds a de-facto monopoly on video discoverability within the entire anglophone internet I feel like it’s safe to say that the market will likely bear a lot more annoyances :P
You are not the customer. You are the product.
Yes, but if they destroy their products (aka drive users away) their real customers (ad companies) will pull out.
capitalism (or at least the weird version of it used in the tech world) is about short term profit. if they get good numbers from this, they can make future projections of an imaginary increase over the years and make the ad companies happy for a while. they do not care about breaking the product in the long term
I know. This was just the intelligent person view. In reality, as you said, they only care about short term profit, and can you blame them? Things can change overnight in the tech world. Google (as a product) was undisputed until ChatGPT was released and integrated into Bing, now Alphabet is falling vehind and losing its dominance on the market.
Just ask Twitter/X or what’s left ot it.
Why would the ad companies back out if Youtube got rid of the people who were blocking their ads anyway? If anything, it makes Youtube a safer investment.
Less viewer numbers to show to advertisers.
They’re already in hot water because of lying to their customers over this. They actually track ad blocker usage because lying about ads getting played when they weren’t would be fraud. In fact they’re getting sued by a whole bunch of advertisers because the “100% verified watched ads on Youtube.com” were actually playing in hidden frames on random websites.
I’m pretty sure the anti blocking, remote attestation direction Google is taking is an attempt to quickly fix this situation before it can get out of hand. They don’t know what ads plays are legitimate anymore and their customers are angry about it.
Worst case scenario, all Youtube advertisers over the last x years get their money back with some compensation, which would be devastating to Youtube as a product.
If premium cost $5per month I’d pay for it, u use YouTube all the time
No way in hell it’s worth $15 a month though, their pricing is completely brwindead
I agree. It’s around $22 NZD and that is just too steep. They have a slightly cheaper one but you can’t background play with it. I’m sick of being nickel and dimed at every possible opportunity and then hearing about how these companies are making record profits.
Just make a (digital) trip to India and get family of 5 accounts for about 1$ a month per account. This the way I did it.
I won’t give a penny to the evil google.
It’s $25/mo for family. I hate that I pay for it, but I use music, and I mostly watch YouTube on a streaming device, so I’ve never been able to use ad blockers. $15 for the fam felt worth it, but $25 has me rethinking. Maybe I can configure YT-DL to get the shows I care about on my Plex
Any android based streaming device can run SmartTube (formerly SmartTube next). On an Android phone you can patch the YouTube apk with revanced, which also gives you full access to yt music.
Do you guys not get Youtube Premium Lite? It’s €7 per month to get rid of ads and doesn’t include stuff most people aren’t interested in like Youtube music.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s): https://piped.video/premiumlite
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source, check me out at GitHub.
Nope, not available her ein the states.
So you know that the people watching YouTube aren’t really considered “customers” by google in the traditional sense, right?
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From what I read on their own report, less than 2% use adblocks.
That is depressing
Agreed. Sadly, agreed.
Remember when some people said we’re nuts thinking Google will try to ban ad blockers with manifest v3? Yeah.
Google will try everything in their power to stop us from blocking their ads. It’s their main source of revenue, you don’t have to be a genius to see why they don’t like ad blockers
Wouldn’t this show that they failed, if they have to recur to site-based adblocker blocking? Clearly v3 hasn’t stopped people from using Firefox, yt-dl, or whatever.
The Gecko Engine (Firefox), holds a user share of 4%. When compared to Chromium’s (Google Chrome and its clones) whooping 72% (roughly) user share, it’s clear that Firefox has limited relevance to their business strategy.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:StatCounter-browser-ww-monthly-202011-202011-bar.png
(according to latest statistics, Firefox would have an even lower share)
My point is: if v3 were effective at neutralizing ad blockers in 75% of the user base, or even 95% since Safari is supposed to get on board too, why are they developing additional countermeasures?
Or has Safari decided to do like Firefox, and still allow full ad blockers?
I reckon that blocking ad blockers isn’t some extra countermeasure here. It’s actually right in line with what Manifest V3 and that new environment attestation system are all about. They’re basically making sure that if you tinker with crucial bits of the JavaScript – stuff they see as essential (like anti-adblock) – you won’t make it through the attestation and you’ll get blocked.
They don’t want to block all modifications because that would be a hindrance to many users, for example the visually impaired. However, anything affecting their bottom line will probably be blocked.
How that will affect Firefox? I don’t know, maybe nothing will change for us, or perhaps Google will block Firefox altogether. We certainly know they’re capable.
@LoafyLemon @jarfil @Honse but they could just as well mark the ads as essential then
Yes, attestation is in line with V3 changes, just that it makes them irrelevant: YouTube’s website could some day ask for environment attestation of “no extension using the intercept hooks”, or “only the approved ones”, and still have the same effect. The fact that they’re implementing a server-side anti-adblock now, while postponing V2 deprecation over and over, makes me think the V3 changes are a flop.
Firefox… would likely require Mozilla to play ball and implement similar attestation in an official binary attestable by the OS. Edge too, just so MS doesn’t mess with Chrome’s binary attestation on Windows.
Safari already has attestation, without extra parameters, but it could be extended:
https://httptoolkit.com/blog/apple-private-access-tokens-attestation/
I’ll just stop using YouTube like I’ve stopped using Reddit.
I’m ready for that. When being a youtuber started looking like a job I think the site lost something.
That is something you just cannot avoid with a new medium. Eventually there will always be professionalization. It just sucks that youtube now just gives us the same shit over and over instead of making it easy to find new creators, like it used to be.
Hell I think you could make a massive improvement to the site if it could realize “Hey, I’ve been suggesting the same exact video to this user 500 times in a row, and he’s never clicked it. Maybe this user likes this creator/series, but not this specific video.”
Yeah, YouTube was better when it was a bunch of amateur cat videos.
There was a sweet spot when cat videos went pro. Then the spam killed it.
I’d say just smaller, less scripted content. Maybe that’s what tiktok is.
I remember one of the early Youtube sensations was this teen chick’s vlog that turned out to be a fictional soap opera basically. Because it hadn’t occurred to anyone to do that yet.
This was BACK IN THE DAY, around the same time Boxxy became a sensation, or that one chick who just sat still in front of the camera because the Japanese liked her huge eyes.
lonelygirl15? I remember a friend telling me about that series because she wanted to share a funny video reply (Remember those?) by somebody who managed to find the same animal plushies that the girl carries around; it was a parody episode where the plushies talk about the current situation in the story and suggest that maybe the girl should drop all the teen drama stuff so they can all focus on running for their lives instead.
That’s the one, lonelygirl15. What a wild story. My internet destroyed brain immediately jumped to “Wow that was before the Youtube partner program, and it was presented as an authentic teen’s vlog at least at first…I wonder what the monetization strategy was?” And it turns out there kinda wasn’t one. They went into $50,000 worth of credit card debt to fund the series, according to Wikipedia. Like remember that episode of South Park (remember that show?) where they had the waiting room full of viral video people waiting to get their non-existent internet fame money?
Youtube’s use of A/B testing is very smart in that it’s actually nothing about testing user response and all about limiting the number of people they piss off at once with their god awful changes.
The day I can’t block ads on the internet is the day I stop using the internet.
targeted ads have broken the Internet, saturated our subconsciouses, hijacked the attention economy, and continue to erode what’s left of our dwindling privacy
advertisers are the de facto gatekeepers of larger and larger swaths of online content.
it wasn’t always like this. it’s gotten so much worse in recent years.
I always knew that funding the internet using ads wasn’t sustainable in the long run.
There’s constant fixes for it btw from the ublockorigin team now! :D
Ads would have happened anyway like it’s happening on the streaming services. They’ve got people paying subscriptions *with *ads. Double the money, double the fun, right?
I wonder if there’s actually any benefit to ads. Like if you could magically ban advertising, would people spend any less money?
Banning advertising will cause people to rely on word of mouth.
Now, instead of some nameless entity telling you a product is the greatest thing, you’ll be able to hold people accountable for the things they recommend you.
I wonder how lemmy makes money…
Oh wait. It’s almost like ads only exist so people can make a living doing nothing.
It’s only going to get worse.
Shoving more ads in people’s faces just desensitizes them to it so you can keep adding even more ads into the mix.
“You were okay with 2 ads, why not 3?”
“You were okay with 3 ads, why not 5?”
Repeat until the end of time, or until the masses stop being dumbasses and work together to topple the ruling class.
P.S. I have no respect for anyone in the advertising industry. They are all scum worth less than the gum under my shoe.
Advertising is poison.
The entire concept is intolerable, and it breaks whole industries. We’ve ruined televisions - not the medium of television, the physical rectangle in your living room - for the sake of cramming ads into the menus. They can show ads over your home movies. Paying for content to avoid ads is impossible because they just add ads. The siren song of slightly more money must not be ignored!
yeah this, youtube inb particular is entirely unusable without an adblocker
Admiral is the worst kind of anti adblock there is.
They buy thousands of domains at a time, with individually corresponding Google Cloud IPs to evade adblock lists. Real pain in the ass to block them, they also DMCA community blocklists containing their domains
Sounds like DMCA abuse to me. You can’t copyright a fact. In this case, the fact that these IPs are used by a company is a fact.
When has that stopped anyone from abusing it anyway…
People should tell them to kick rocks.
Here’s a rule for uBlock Origin.
Credit: https://lemmy.one/comment/597479 && original link: https://lemmy.nz/comment/446556
! Anti-Youtube Anti-Adblocker https://lemmy.one/comment/597479youtube.com##+js(set, yt.config_.openPopupConfig.supportedPopups.adBlockMessageViewModel, false)youtube.com##+js(set, Object.prototype.adBlocksFound, 0)youtube.com##+js(set, ytplayer.config.args.raw_player_response.adPlacements, [])youtube.com##+js(set, Object.prototype.hasAllowedInstreamAd, true)This has not worked for me.
I feel dumb, do I need to do anything else besides pasting it to my rules > temporary rules > save?
Doing the lord’s work. Thank you!
Commenting so I can do this later. Thanks OP 😁🍻
You can save comments too.
They are on kbin which doesn’t support saving comments (yet).
Maybe on lemmy but not on kBin as far as I’m aware. If anyone knows how to this I’m game.
Just upvote or boost? Aren’t you having to go to your profile to find it either way?
If you looked at my vote history you would see why that doesn’t work for me 😅
Looks like you comment more than you boost though.
Okay.
I haven’t used youtube.com to watch YouTube in years. NewPipe x SponsorBlock (polymorphicshade) on mobile, SmartTubeNext on TV, Invidious, Piped, or FreeTube on desktop.
Hadn’t heard of FreeTube before, thanks for mentioning it!
Thanks! Freetube works great. Here are directions for importing YT subscriptions. https://docs.freetubeapp.io/usage/importing-subscriptions/
The irony of this poll blocking access from users with a VPN.
Yep, I can’t vote because I have a VPN.
No problems with Mozilla VPN
Huh… Worked for me
What happens to me now with Firefox and ublock origin is if i leave a video paused in the background for a long time and then it unloads it and then I click it to continue watching so it loads back up, then it plays an ad. I was legit like
because I haven’t seen an ad on the internet in years.Yep, same here. Today I’ve been abruptly reminded how intrusive and obnoxious ads on Youtube are!
Same! I was taken aback and offended all at once then refreshed to get rid of the ad which thankfully still works… But for how long more is the question 😭
There’s constant fixes for it btw from the ublockorigin team now! :D
