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.
Same. Keep up the good work.
Haha I appreciate y’all! Next stop: Tor City
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.
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
Why do you need adblock, when using piped?
Because the internet includes more than just youtube…?
For everything other than Youtube!
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.
The irony of the straw poll site throwing up an anti-adblock banner 🤣
I have a VPN and I can’t vote.
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.
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!!! ❤️
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
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.
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
And thus the enshittification cycle completes
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.
Just ask Twitter/X or what’s left ot it.
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Less viewer numbers to show to advertisers.
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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.
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From what I read on their own report, less than 2% use adblocks.
That is depressing
Agreed. Sadly, agreed.
So you know that the people watching YouTube aren’t really considered “customers” by google in the traditional sense, right?
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.
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.
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.
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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.
I genuinely think that advertising should be illegal at this point. It’s a ridiculous concept.
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.
They know. The fact that targeted ads leveraging so-called “big data” are not more effective than standard advertising is now known to the public. We can bet Google knew this years in advance. But they can’t abandon their whole business model since that would freak the stock market and investors out. So, they need to squeeze as much as they can before the entire model becomes unworkable and they’ll be forced to switch to something else or disappear.
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.’
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.
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/597479
youtube.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.
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
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/
I’ve started to just download videos with
yt-dlp
after grabbing links via Invidious. Using Invidious itself has become somewhat unreliable lately, and this way I don’t have to put up with buffering and can watch in good quality. Cut out the middle menI have to wonder if once the ad blocking gets fully rolled out if yt-dlp will also cease to work?
Good question. I’d hope not
MPV can directly play yt videos (it uses a built-in copy of yt-dlp afaik), and it’s very configurable. I always watch yt videos with it.
Sometimes it would be useful if it could use a proxy like piped or invidious, but those links don’t work
Ooh, I should try that! I already use mpv, so that’d streamline things a bit
Consider upping the cache for youtube. By default it is 2 minutes, which is mostly fine, except that if you are speeding through a part with 2x or faster, you may quickly run out of that small cache, because it only loads with the speed of something between 1x and 2x.
And then you may also set up saving the cache to disk instead of RAM, because it may be quite larger. Single config option.
You can make these only apply for youtube videos only with conditional auto profiles. The doc has an example for an automatic youtube profile, it’s perfect.I don’t use the main YouTube website at all anymore. A big reason for this is that I spend a lot of time using a really weak laptop that tends to struggle with the JavaScript-laden abomination that is modern corporate web design. Firefox itself struggles as well, so I primarily use Luakit with Invidious, which runs peachy. I also put together a local html page for my bookmarks that is generated from Yaml using a small C application (which is not optimal, I know, but I’ve been learning C and this was a good opportunity). Whenever something doesn’t work in Luakit, I evade to Palemoon. I also tried watching YouTube via mpv earlier, and it’s great! It runs infinitely better than any web player at max resolution and buffers the whole video. Never going back.
Do you self host Invidious? I have zero issues with it self hosted.
Same. If I really need the website, I now use https://yewtu.be
Or https:/piped.video
piped has been giving me more issues recently, I think Google’s fighting them?
yeah same, only like half of the videos load or play.
Had the same issues, but decided to host my own instance. Not had a single issue since, plus the latency is great 😏
Just a tip for those of you that do cave to pressure and go with the paid premium option. or already have one but dont want to pay for more accounts or a family account.
You can set up channels or brand accounts as sub-accounts on a premium subscription and they will act like separate accounts with the advantages of premium, so if you have a large family and don’t want to pay for the full family subscription (which only has 5 slots anyway) you can set up a few sub-accounts that each get their own subscriptions, recommendations, settings and all have the premium features.
So if you want to make a premium account for a parent or child, you can do that with one single subscription if you can take the caveat of them being brand accounts rather than fully their own thing.
This works on things like Android TV or Google TV, but you need to log into the main account then switch to a sub account in the app, however, there is no authentication to switch between channel accounts this way, so it’s really only useable for families only. I use this at home to run 4 separate nvidia shield youtube apps with their own subscriptions and recommendations on one single premium payment.
I expect they will change how that works in the future to remove the loophole, probably by charging for channel accounts or having it locked behind some kind of overpriced professional usage tier, but for now, it might be a good option for some.
Many people have also said if you set your location to for example India when signing up for premium you’ll get it basically for free compared to what it’ll cost in europe and it’ll keep working even if your location is elsewhere from there on.
I use Turkey, it’s around $2.50 per month for the 6-person plan.
Yes indeed, and google get less money. however there are some signs that companies are starting to crack down on that.