YouTube runs experiment addressing users with ad blocker

[madires]

YouTube's 'Ad blockers not allowed' pop-up scares the bejesus out of netizens: https://www.theregister.com/2023/05/10/youtube_ad_blockers/

[coppercone2]

usually means the business is gonna go belly up if it entered the shake down the users phase. Probably not youtube but the advertiser they partner with. Its like a drowning man with lead in his pockets grasping people to stay afloat.. try reducing mass . Because if youtube is not cool, people will stop posting videos, and it will just turn into some avant garde corporate gallary, and no one is gonna go there or talk about it. If people are talking about it being good it means you have alot of power.

if you did not notice, there has been a MASSIVE attempt by corporations to shake people down (employees, customers) for profits in the last few months. But now the radio is saying we are not in a recession but closed to a recession rather then the recession we were certainly in, so go figure. I think the finance industry had a panic attack.

I read the way face book treat its employees with the recent policies is kind of like a old rich person getting stingy on a date. DO YOU WANT ME TO PAY FOR THE UBER OR THE FOOD??? you know what those subjects are gonna decide to do... (because everyone figured out its dating and its NOT family)

when you act like the king, and you got people used to the court (dinner court and castle services), and then you start pushing them... history shows only a few things tend to happen from that point

I kind of imagine it like a liner on a cylinder (say corporate culture) that slipped off the cylinder and got stuck on the piston and there is just this metal cylinder slamming in and out of the engine block that is some how maintaining compression while getting severe internal stress before it cracks. Then its like the culture is doing more damage the more present it is (if its totally ignored it turns into a 4th dimensional object that does not interact with the system, but it maintains compression). Usually in this state, where its being jack hammered by a useless but corporeal object, the engine experiences severe vibration and starts to lose perfectly good parts on he road, which are picked up by other drivers, and must be replaced. Some times they just slip off but sometimes they take a chunk of casting with them

[NiHaoMike]

Now might be the time for stealth adblocking.

[Ranayna]

Youtube will be a *very* high priority for the developers of adblockers, i'm sure.
So i don't think that this will work in the long run. Well of course for chromium based browsers they will mess even more with the adblockers. But there still is Firefox

Interestingly, i had YT inserting still ads, staying visible for maybe 10 seconds, when i ran AdGuard on my iPad.
That would actually be something i can live with.

I would even consider getting Premium, if the cheaper "no frills" subscription would be available in germany. I do not need YT Music, i don't want to see their series and movies, i don't even want 4K. I just want no ads.

[David Hess]

I have not seen that yet, but for most of my Youtube watching, I download the video to local storage and then play it from there.  I will stream it after latency, bandwidth, and packet loss are fixed, which will never happen.

[ataradov]

So i don't think that this will work in the long run.

They can't force you to watch the ads, but it is in their power to not serve the video until ads play time has elapsed. So, you will get a blank screen for a few seconds/minutes before the video

Long time ago I used to block Hulu ads by making my own local server that would serve 1 frame video. Hulu used different domains for ads and the video, so it was easy to redirect ads to a localhost. But then they got smarter and started delaying video stream. And then then stopped serving the video entirely if ad failed to load from their servers. And then I stopped caring about Hulu once they lost all the good content.

I have been using YT Premium for years. I started when I was a part of one of those experiments where adblockers stopped working, and it was so frustrating that it was easier to pay. So, annoying users works. Some would quit, of course.

[Ranayna]

So, you will get a blank screen for a few seconds/minutes before the video

Honestly? I could easily live with that. That would be far better than the current crap ads.

As i mentioned this is essentially what happens on my iPad, with AdGuard (free Version) installed.
YT shows a still ad, without sound, with a tiny little timer in the corner. These last for maybe 10 seconds, sometimes there is a second ad like that, and then the video plays.

[Black Phoenix]

Well as someone who uses a VPN for reasons that it is know (no other way to access anything not authorised by the CCP when in Mainland China) I come to realize one thing: Geolocation of the VPN servers.

For some reason (that I don't know) when I choose as VPN server one in Taiwan no Ads are provided before, during or on the end of the video, being on Windows, Fedora or any of the Apps (Android and iOS).

Same can't be said if the server selected is on Hong Kong, Japan, Singapore, Australia, US, etc where Ads are delivered, some 30sec without skip option.

I find strange that no AD company selects Taiwan as a country to run their Ads. So something must be also at play here. And yes I tried with the Adblockers off (uBlock on Firefox, none on the mobile devices) and I also don't use stuff as a PiHole on my network or special rules in my network equipments.

[thm_w]

Haven't seen anything with ublock or SmartTubenext yet.

There was also a recent story about youtube creators seeing huge drops due to their views being flagged as bot views. May be due to adblocking.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnkoetsier/2023/03/10/youtube-creators-say-video-revenue-down-up-to-90-something-is-definitely-off/?sh=518b90ef12a2

Of course, they'd get no revenue but youtube would still show you ads on the video.

[AndyBeez]

I just tap the mute and flick down the thumbnails until the ad times out. I'm from a generation that learnt to ignore adverts from an early age. Don't worry Dave, you still get the ad revenue even if I have no idea what they were selling.

[SiliconWizard]

Common ad blockers block the trafic for ads altogether and thus can be detected by the remote server.
If you're willing to sacrifice your network bandwidth, while not being bothered by ads, you can just implement an ad blocker that downloads anything ad-related (so the remote server can't tell the difference) and just doesn't display it to the end user.
Problem with video ads is that they are not served as fast as your connection is - they are streamed, so even if your ad blocker did act as above, the user would have to wait until the ad had been streamed entirely before seeing the actual video, if YT decides to block ad blockers altogether, this is an easy move to do. Whether they detect an ad blocker or not doesn't matter at this point, if you have to wait until the video ad is done streaming - whether you actually see it or not - this will be pretty annoying.
I don't really see a way around it at all if that's YT's decision.

[NiHaoMike]

Common ad blockers block the trafic for ads altogether and thus can be detected by the remote server.
If you're willing to sacrifice your network bandwidth, while not being bothered by ads, you can just implement an ad blocker that downloads anything ad-related (so the remote server can't tell the difference) and just doesn't display it to the end user.

Go a step further and fake "clicking" on the ad to really mess up their stats.
https://adnauseam.io/

Problem with video ads is that they are not served as fast as your connection is - they are streamed, so even if your ad blocker did act as above, the user would have to wait until the ad had been streamed entirely before seeing the actual video, if YT decides to block ad blockers altogether, this is an easy move to do. Whether they detect an ad blocker or not doesn't matter at this point, if you have to wait until the video ad is done streaming - whether you actually see it or not - this will be pretty annoying.
I don't really see a way around it at all if that's YT's decision.

Speculatively load the next video, downloading it to cache.

I wonder what would happen if you start "playing" the ad but then "reload" the page in the middle repeatedly. Maybe it would refuse to serve any more ads to your IP for a while? (If that blocks using Youtube altogether, it would be a lot of fun to do on a CGNAT or other shared IP!)

[.RC.]

I was searching swimming pools on youtube and these quasi c pron videos would popped up in the search results (think of the sort of thing like baywatch style attire, but with children) along with other pointless crap, years old, millions of views and I was wondering given the sensitivity of modern big corporations are these days to any social negativity, they support this sort of shit on youtube.

[YurkshireLad]

I don't know if it related but since they started their experiment, I can no longer load comments in YouTube using Firefox or brave on android. It's weird. Brave either spins forever but no comments load, or in a couple of cases, it showed the comments from a previous video I watched. Firefox seems to spin forever but loads nothing.

[YurkshireLad]

Brave has stopped even trying to load comments. It may be unrelated...

[MathWizard]

For me, Youtube is a million times better than having cable TV, there's no comparison. So I'm sure I'll keep watching utube if they enforce no adblock, but I'm not looking forward to it.

I'd understand 1 ad at the beginning, but if they have ads every few minutes or even 10's of minutes, I'll watch less and less stuff.

[artag]

Yes, it's a million times better. But it's no longer much good. I've blocked all the channels I didn't like and it struggles to find anything good - much of what it shows is clickbait or crap. There are a few good channels of course, but they don't provide many updates and youtube doesn't seem very good at finding high quality similar channels.

I think it's going to die. It wouldn't take much and compulsory ads would be the last nail.

[tszaboo]

Sure, you try to run two unskippable 20 seconds ad before a Youtube short, and get upset if I block it...

[coromonadalix]

oh on some occasion(s) even while listening videos, it cut  do an add  and continue

Firefox  w  facebook container, adblock origin and i dont care about cookies

[wilfred]

I watch Youtube amongst other things on a small Android media player box which worked fine with Youtube when I bought it. But as updates were applied it frequently would slow down and throw up a message "Youtube has stopped responding do you want to wait?". If you selected wait a few times it would eventually continue playing but it was clearly the transition to ads where the problem was.

I tried older YT app versions but it would repeatedly offer an upgrade with no option to refuse so I looked around the site where I downloaded tho old YT app .apk file and found smart_youtube_tv_v6.17.730. Which I still use. It can block ads and also the in video sponsor segments and standard lead-in credits. I'm pretty well unaware of ads and mostly unaware of in video sponsorship. I assume the YT creator has some incentive to mark such segments for the app to detect them.

Anyway I recommend it if you think it might suit. It's very flexible but I haven't found a way to read comments. Which I prefer to do on a computer.

It saved this weak little Android 6 box which cost me $20 at Officeworks from the scrap heap. That and a couple very angry letters to the ABC to tell them to pull their heads out of their arses when they tried to force their app upgrades to something incompatible with older (android 6) media boxes. And yes I am taking sole personal credit for that.

[hans]

Sure, you try to run two unskippable 20 seconds ad before a Youtube short, and get upset if I block it...

This.

I hate ads so much that I would probably switch to downloading videos from RSS feeds, and putting them on my media library so I can watch them in due time.
I did that back in '17/'18 as I was kicking off YT habits. It completely kills discoverability on the platform, but it made sure I only watched what I wanted to see. Half of the vids stayed unwatched and were automatically removed after a few weeks. It doesn't take much more than a few hundred lines of Python to make such a thing work.

It probably saves YT also a lot of money if I don't watch random crap. Is that a win-win?

[MrMobodies]

I think I prefer the webpage youtube and that goes for everything else when I am in more control of finding and killing wanted things such killing suggestions, animations and dimming overlays. I don't normally block adverts unless they start to interfere and cause distraction past their banner space and set to get in the way follow down the page and that goes with anything else. I have seen the ones where the video stops and it plays and so on.

I have seen "the app" advertised and some people using it last year on their phone and it has this a horrible dimming overlay with the controls large in size slapped in the middle of the video. I might being trying to see to find something and putting my hand where it can get in the way and obscuring the picture with the dimming overlay... I think is very stupid. Also going from light to dark to light excessively isn't very nice for my eyes.

I didn't know an adblocker or browser extension can operate outside of the browser in Android (unless I am mistaken and the "apps" are run from Chrome but in the background) but that I find that interesting that they are throttling by advert exposure.

[Infraviolet]

Haven't seen this yet for my browser configuration, I know it has only hit a random saple of users worldwide, but I'll make a few points:

Many of the channels on youtube don't make their money from google's inserted adverts any more, but from having product placement and internal adverts. Each video usually says at the start "sponsored by...", shoves links to ...'s website in the description, has a ... long piece at the video's end, and maybe inserts a ... advert in their own voice and visual style in to the video at a semi-convenient point in the middle.

Yes, these product placement ads can be annoying, but they aren't so bad. They are paying for the free videos, and they are inserted at timestamps where the channel's creator doesn't think they'll be too disruptive, they don't cut words in half.

With this in mind youtube's own inserted adverts are probably making money for youtube-google rather than for the person/organisation who actually made the video (who makes much more from product placement / internal adverts), and they get inserted at terrible times. If you have a video on in the background, a lecture or history documentary, whilst you're doing something you do not want to be having the volume suddenly jump in the middle of a sentence to bombard you with marketing for a product you know you'll never want (especially now you've seen how awful and disruptive an advert the seller is willing to create for it).

And that's before we get to the security aspect, yes I run Linux so am relatively safe from viruses, but the number of cases of malware exploits being packaged in to adverts, which get bought up by an ad network, which resells to another ad network, and so on until mal-adverts appear on the very most prominent of websites, are such that going online without an ad blocker is like running naked through a thorn hedge.

[langwadt]

So i don't think that this will work in the long run.

They can't force you to watch the ads, but it is in their power to not serve the video until ads play time has elapsed. So, you will get a blank screen for a few seconds/minutes before the video

Long time ago I used to block Hulu ads by making my own local server that would serve 1 frame video. Hulu used different domains for ads and the video, so it was easy to redirect ads to a localhost. But then they got smarter and started delaying video stream. And then then stopped serving the video entirely if ad failed to load from their servers. And then I stopped caring about Hulu once they lost all the good content.

I seem to remember an "adblocker" service that replaced the original ads with their own ads and the money from those ads going to charity, that was quickly killed off

I have been using YT Premium for years. I started when I was a part of one of those experiments where adblockers stopped working, and it was so frustrating that it was easier to pay. So, annoying users works. Some would quit, of course.

yeh, I also got Premium years ago, it's better and cheaper than cable TV anyway and someone has to pay

[nctnico]

I don't really see a way around it at all if that's YT's decision.

Well, if add-blockers are a problem for Youtube, viewers moving away will be a problem for content creators with paid product placement in their videos. The content creators might go to other platforms which don't scare away their viewers.