YouTube tests blocking videos unless you disable ad blockers

It seems like we've all lost the plot. We'd probably be willing to view ads if the experience wasn't literally jarring. Try browsing for a day on a plain-no-extension browser. If you use other web enhancement tools kill those too. Straight-up internet is cancer, especially on mobile.

It's impossible to read a 250-word article without being interrupted 5-7 times. Two of those interruptions are likely a full page overlay with give me your email, and are you sure you don't want to subscribe, just give me your credit card number.

Then there are auto-play videos on the side, some with audio on by default. I mean I came here to read something, so of course we have things flashing and moving and making noise, it's the most conducive environment for thought, right?

Ad blockers and script blocking are essentially a hazmat suit that allows us to withstand a hostile environment. Remember when we said myspace pages with audio and [marching-ants] borders was a bad UX? At least we didn't have overlays back then.

Go back to basics and consider what makes a good vs bad internet experience. The reality sounds like someone with a minor case of severe brain damage. I think we've just become unashamed of greed as a society. It's clearly all just about money.

Those annoying customers/users generate content and we have to put up with them so we can monetize it. *Sadly, It's unclear if I'm talking about youtube, reddit, or nearly any other site.

Le sigh.

oh look, another web service who wants to strangle its users for money and ad views :D when's a peertube instance going to get some big creators on it supported by viewers? that'll do it, i bet

Seems unlikely that a creator would jump ship from a platform that pays them to a platform that doesn’t. That being said, lots of creators also constantly complain about demonetization, so maybe they’ll start to get fed up and move to purely in-video sponsorship things. Seems most likely from a creator that’s already on a platform like nebula
- Most big youtubers have in-video ads now anyways. I'm not sure what the ratio of their revenue comes from youtube ads vs in-video ads, but youtube seems pretty trigger happy about demonetizing videos. Sometimes entire channels. If someone gets the majority of their revenue from other sources than youtube ads, I could see them migrating to something like peertube.
- you're definitely right on most points. but, to your point, if a creator was on a federated instance of peertube then they don't have to worry about the wishy-washy, everchanging rules of youtube :3
- I could see someone making some fork of peertube that helps creators get paid. May not be free but could get creators willing to join
- Sponsorships are even worse than ads.
- Sponsorships are even worse than ads.
Unfortunately most people post to YouTube. They might not know about Peertube. So Peertube just doesn't have the content.
- Here's to hoping as lemmy, mastodon, etc. get name recognition peertube gets their time of day too.
Hopefully once the issue of the ridiculous amount of resources needed for such a service is resolved. This is why we don't have any viable youtube alternative yet, especially one that isn't a corporate pile of junk. Once you get to a certain size if you don't rake in the cash you shut down. So hopefully peer to peer saves the day.
- yup, even youtube isn't profitable. Video remains one of the largest sinks of resources. A 4K movie is stored on a disc of about 66GB, so about 30GB per hour of 4k video. Even with peertube it'd take the best hobbyists to run even a modest server for a few streamers. We're talking people with PB level of storage capacities now with fiber lines to their house to truly host peertube alternatives, and if we're talking cloud we're talking thousands per month.
  It's not impossible, I don't want to get people down, but that's the major hurdle
- hopefully 💙 video codecs have gotten pretty good, and maybe they'll get even better to where, like you're saying, we don't have to shovel so many resources into hosting something like a peertube. crossing fingers 🤞
I subscribe to nebula for this reason, directly support creators and it's very reasonably priced.
- never heard of nebula, thank you for bringing it up :D
- Did they ever get around to implementing playlists and autoplay of some sort? I really wanted to get into that service, but the absence of those two things just killed it for me
How is peertube in terms of hosting costs? I would assume much higher than lemmy or mastodon considering it's all video content.
- hosting cost for peertube would probably be astronomical since you're likely hosting the videos yourself :/ unless there is some sort of federation that kind of works like bittorrent. that would be awesome
I've had good experiences with Odysee. Not as much content yet, and it's missing DIY videos, but I don't see problems yet.
- Odysee lacks of moderation. It's full of conspiration bullshit, racist videos and horrible stuff.
- this is very interesting, ty 💙
Peertube will unfortunately never be an answer because of the lack of way for creators to get paid for watchtime
- I disagree with this, I fully believe a donation-funded content economy can work.
- Full-time creators need to be paid, but it doesn't have to be for watchtime specifically. There are already services and creators on the web that make a living via patreon or other donation systems. And there are small-time creators or creators already backed up by funding that don't care about monetization.
I'm confused about this take. YouTube clearly has hosting costs and also pays creators. That money has to come from somewhere. They offer two options, ads or subscription. You could argue that the number of ads is too many or the cost of the subscription is too high, but demanding a service be free just because it's technologically possible to block ads seems weird.

I imagine folks wouldn't have a problem with this if the ads weren't already so aggressive. Numerous ads before and during the content break it up too much. And if the content is extremely short form, it completely ruins the experience.

The number of ads and their length should be proportional to the length of the video. And any creator doing built-in ads should also not be able to inject a bunch of other ads. Burying content is an easy way to get avoided.

Print media had limits for advertisements, heck, in magazines they were premium real estate for the finest graphic designers to put together incredible imagery to get your attention. This level of care (not necessarily images or what have you) has yet to translate to the web.

Unrelated, online ads seem to go out of their way to insist that there's nothing to be learned from print ad stacks. Which is a shame, because I've personally placed an irregular shape ad in the middle of a broadsheet page and place stories around it in the manner least like to confuse readers. Guess what the verdict was back then?
Are you saying your threshold for ads and empty foreshadowing hype is somehow under 99%? I sure do love me an ad-blocked, sponsor-blocked video that still somehow manages to waste 10 minutes to learn "no" or "I don't know, either."
- That's when the skip to highlight option comes in handy. And if a video doesn't have it I end up contributing so next person can save time.
It makes the servive inconvenient and annoying to use. I just want to watch the video, not watch a 60s ad that us totally irrelevant to me.

Wow the enshittification is at full throttle across silicon valley! Guess those investors gotta get those returns now that interest rates are spiking!

I have to imagine many of these investors also have money in areas whose prices have skyrocketed due to "inflation." They've seen the profits other industries are getting away with and now big tech feels the need to do the same. These companies are supposed to be the future, after all... How will it look if big oil is more profitable than mainstream digital platforms? To investors, it looks bad.
Sadly, when your ability to generate profit relies on using your users (or the developers and mods that run your platform cough Reddit) like cheap labor, rather than providing better product at reasonable prices, digital platforms suffer in usability or features. It's kind of a lose lose for anyone that actually cares, because so far the market hasn't self-corrected.

I have had this in my ublock origin filters for quite some time. Seems to do the trick:

        !www.youtube.com
    ##.ytp-ce-element

Doesn't work anymore. Youtube now replaces the whole video player with the following message:
Ad blockers violate YouTube's Terms of Service
It looks like you may be using an ad blocker. Video playback is blocked unless YouTube is allowlisted or the ad blocker is disabled.
Ads allow YouTube to be used by billions worldwide.
You can go ad-free with YouTube Premium, and creators can still get paid from your subscription.

That's funny, I'm testing YouTube alternatives.

Suggestions?
My issue is that the content creators i watch probably arnt going to leave... and im sure ad blocks will find a way around it after a month or so
- @PhatInferno There's Peertube here in the fediverse. But yea, every platform will need creators which will not easily switch. Some even have youtube membership enabled on their channels, which makes it kinda impossible (without being deprived of revenue).
  @koolnewt
- PeerTube seems to be the federated (decentralized) option (similar to this). Content obv is entirely different, but maybe that's actually a good thing. Think of it as a clean slate - a fresh canvas. tbh YouTube's content has really sucked the past few years, and mother of bog do you see the stuff that trends nowadays when you're signed out? It's basically become cable tv. I started using youtube bc I hated cable tv.
- Invidious is the most obvious. Its FOSS wrapper but it also lets you watch peertube and other federated content.
- I usually follow creators through RSS, so I mix and match platforms avoiding YouTube for any creator that cross posts. A lot cross post to Odyssey though so if you wanted to have like one app in addition to YT that'd probably be the way to go, or at least worth checking out.
- Nebula. Most of they content creators I watch are there.

I would rather not watch Youtube again then be exposed to terrible ads. I accidentally went on Youtube on Chrome and one of the ads was a straight up scam. $7.54 Switch! Like maybe if they had humans vet ads like you used to do maybe I would have less of a problem with it.

Lol I know exactly the company you’re talking about. I like their ads for $1 Lenovo headphones

Alternate headline: Users test using only YouTube ReVanced to bypass this new system

Newpipe for me!
- Newpipe x Sponsorblock fork is my go to.
- Is there anything like newpipe but for yt music? Ideally on fdroid, revanced is... confusing... to maintain.
- Hey, where do I find this? UBlock blocks the top links on DDG as "Badware risk"
Never heard of this, does it work on desktop? NewPipe is my go to on my phone, but some content I need a large screen to watch
- For Desktop, you can use FreeTube
  Private viewing by default
  Supports all platforms (Yey Linux)
  No ads
  Can create seperate profiles (Helps me with productivity)
  Download the video is required
  Only downside
  Can't comment on the videos
- You can't use ReVanced on desktop. I was mostly being sarcastic and saying everyone would just start watching on their phones. But I do most of my YouTube viewing on mobile anyway, so if I started getting hit with this, this is literally what I would do.
ReVanced in all its forms are a blessing.

Yep, got selected for this test and I thought my network went down.

Had to do nearly 30 mins of debugging until I realized it was youtube actively withholding JUST the video. Took some effort but managed to get them to send the videos again after resetting a bunch of things.

I refuse to view ads and will go to the ends of the earth to make that happen.

Paying is most certainly an option, but only when that becomes the ONLY option.

I've been using an adblocker since ads starting becoming more intrusive and the internet has progressed so much that it's become generally unusable without one. I remember when a mobile ad popped up on my phone and it straight up startled me.

I wouldn't mind ads if,

They didn't repeat the same 3 ads every few minutes on high ad videos (No It, I will not take it >:c)
Moderated and removed obvious scam ads
Remove ads that are disgusting or clearly inappropriate (I have seen some stuff that could be categorized as porn in YouTube ads and no I do not allow them to feed me ads based on my interests)
If ads were still not being actively used to spread malware/viruses (not sure if this happens on YouTube at all but I would rather be safe then sorry)

[EDIT] Removed a redundant word

The largest issue for me is that I've never watched an ad and thought "I need that". It's just a huge waste of time that I find disrespectful and distasteful.
That being said I haven't watched and ad in years. A bit less then a decade now, actually.
- Advertising clearly does work on the whole or who would companies spend so much gold on it? Advertising shits in your head. It subtly influences consumers and advertisers have become quite sophisticated about it. There is a glut of advertising space available now so we see awful and ineffective ads but be assured a lot of the bigger players know what they are doing. This is why I block all ads. Well for that reason plus they are annoying as hell.
- To be fair the aim of ads generally isn’t to make you go ‘oh now I’ll go and buy that’, it’s more about unconsciously planting the idea that $product exists so when you actually do want to buy something you buy that brand. It’s why ‘show me as many as you like, ads don’t work on me’ is complete rubbish and the only real solution is blocking them entirely on a personal level and on a social level laws that restrict where and when they may be shown.
  A particularly egregious example of psychologically manipulative advertising would be ‘Joe Camel’ who was nominally just a fun mascot but in reality existed to advertise cigarettes to children so they’d buy Camels when they were old enough. Given the prevalence of really awful advertising in the present day Big Tech really does deserve the increasing comparisons with Big Tobacco I think.
- To be fair, even though ads didn't make you want to buy anything, the tax write-off was the same.
@Mewio @talos This, and
do not show me ads for praegeru / hey you're queer, you should stop being queer
which was absolutely a thing that was happening to me before I was blocking ads on yt
And it would be nice if ads would not be played with an insane volume. Every time one sneaks by my uBlock it blasts my ears out.
I was late to the vanced game because I was very willing to put up with the ads for a long while. But yeah, the number of commercial breaks in a 10 minute video became insane.
- This, and this is why few years ago I didn't care about yt ads on my TV. I had like 3-4 ads, 15 sec each for an hour of content, ads only between videos, not in the middle.
  However, suddenly there was 3-4 ads before each video, and many times the ads started to be longer than videos.It feels like they are trying to push me into subscribing to paid YouTube by making the free version unusable without an adblock. And now they are even trying to make me disable my adblock?

Alternate Player for Twitch still doesn't let any ads through https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/twitch_5/
my ublock origin works ok for twitch, although i basically only watch replays. maybe its different live
I have an adbocker for twitch, it usually works, sometimes twitch can still shove an ad through, but when twitch does show an ad I just close the stream and do something else

We'll find a way around it, if not go to hell YT. Apart from posters in the real world, I am living a 100% ad-free life and I'm super happy about it.

Okay but I don't understand. Isn't paying to remove ads a fair deal? I don't know, I pay for YouTube Premium and I'm kinda happy about it. The price seems fair; you get no ads, you get to download stuff, enables picture-in-picture and background playback. YouTube has been my main source of entertainment for the last couple of years so it's the only subscription I have alongside Spotify.
- Yeah until they start showing ads for Premium as well. You know it's going to happen eventually
- The problem isn't so much that there are ads. The problem is also what kind of ads they're playing. YouTube has been known to play inappropriate ads without vetting them - think of those awful mobile game ads with a heavy sexual tone.
  This stuff also seems to explicitly target videos that kids might watch.
- Isn’t paying to remove ads a fair deal?
  If the price were reasonable, community practices especially regarding monetization and moderation were acceptable, telemetry-tracking javascript minimal, etc. then sure.
  But... we're not there.
- Absolutely, you are free to make every kind of contract if you like. Personally, I am not very invested in youTube, I don't watch any streamers or youTubers, it's just a video hosting platform for me. I am boycotting Google wherever I can, it is a privacy desaster and dystopia-like enterprise. NewPipe has all the 'features' as well, if it breaks I just let YouTube go..

I just stood up a selfhosted Invidious instance the other day, and I replaced YouTube ReVanced with Clipious (an Invidious client for Android) on my phone. No ads, SponsorBlock built-in, no need for a YouTube/Google account to create subscriptions, playlists, etc. And it's highly performant since I run it behind a reverse proxy with some custom caching configuration for things like thumbnail images, static assets, etc.

Clipious can also be installed on an Android TV (has an actual Android TV interface). I'm going to end up installing it on mine, but I'm also using SmartTubeNext at the moment, which does require a YouTube/Google account for subscriptions, playlists, etc, but does have no ads, built-in SponsorBlock, and a slew of other great features. I'll be keeping both around, since I do sometimes like to cast to my TV, and SmartTubeNext allows for that (Clipious does not, at least at this time).

Unless YouTube somehow starts dynamically splicing in ads as part of the actual video stream, there's always going to be a way to block ads, unless they do something pretty elaborate. But that's probably not worth the effort on their end to go that far, since the vast, vast majority of people won't know what to do to get around that, nor will they probably care enough to try. But I think it's clear that DNS blocking using services such as AdGuard Home, PiHole, etc, are going to become less effective over time.

I hadn't heard of Clipious before! What are some of its advantages over SmartTubeNext and ReVanced??
- The main advantage to me is that I can work with Invidious as a backend, and whatever I configure there will reflect in Clipious as a client. So as I subscribe to new channels in Invidious, add or update playlists, etc, Clipious will reflect these changes accordingly. Advantages of selfhosting Invidious that indirectly benefit Clipious are of course built-in adblocking by virtue of how Invidious works, SponsorBlock support, and the ability to cache static assets, such as video thumbnails for faster load times, using a reverse proxy (Nginx is what I use). There's a lot more we could dive into beyond this, such as no Google account requirement (for enhanced privacy).
  One area where the SmartTubeNext and YouTube ReVanced combo has the advantage is the convenience of being able to cast from your handheld device to your TV. Clipious/Invidious has no casting ability. But I can totally live without that.
- No google account
undefined> ehind a reverse proxy with some custom caching configuration for things like thumbnail images, static assets, etc.
Really curious what those nginx settings are, Clipious on my phone only shows broken thumbnails from my invidious instance
- I have all my Nginx files separated and using include statements for organization, so I can't quickly and easily post an example, but a good place to start looking is at the various proxy_cache directives.

The comments in here are interesting to me. Ads and Premium are a way for your favorite content creators to get paid for the content that they produce. I've listened to a number of creators talk about the YouTube revenue sharing model and most of them (LTT and Hank Green) says that YouTube is actually really fair with how they share ad revenue and how Premium is actually a good alternative that meets the needs of the platform, users, and creators. And YouTube, the platform, DOES need to get paid as well otherwise your videos can't get to you.

I also hate ads, like a lot, and I do whatever I can to get them off of my screen because I think they are intrusive and we have proof of how they enable tracking across the internet at large. However, for those platforms that I find extreme value in (YouTube being the example here) I see how and why ads/Premium pump value into their system. If your favorite content creator isn't getting paid for their content, they won't be able to sustain it long term.

One last thought about video streaming and the content we all love that is hosted by YouTube: if we were to say that we would rather our money go directly to our favorite content creators, we would end up with a very fragmented ecosystem akin to the Streaming Service MESS we are in with TV/Movies. I would LOVE to pay LTT directly through Floatplane, but then where would I be with being able to watch other content creators?

Remember when ads were short and easy to skip? They're just getting more annoying now.
I could bear them back then, but now I can tell immediately if I accidentally use the mobile app on my phone vs my phone's web browser.
- This is the thing about ads. It's never, ever enough. The web is unusable without an ad blocker and it doesn't matter. We still get more ads.
  Basically I think we are going to have to find more and more alternatives to the web. It's ruined and it's not coming back.
  I know many people who are back on piracy now. It's just impossible to take all the ads.
- I have heard that the ads are getting worse and longer/unskipable. I do wonder how YouTube determines what the 'balance' should be. You know they have the usage and engagement statistics to back up the increase. It did get to a point where I said there was no way I could continue to use YouTube as it was; but it was also around the time that I pretty much switched to YouTube for content over Netflix/Hulu/Disney+/TV so Preimum was a no brainer as I could drop 3 or 4 streaming services for YouTube.
- Once, I played the first YouTube of the day on the Roku, and instantly got 2 minutes of unskipable ads (4, 30 second segments) with (what I would categorize as) unnecessarily sexual content on a children's playdough video. That was when I installed and configured PiHole for the Roku. That was the last straw. My 2-yo niece should not have seen a dude's butt. A 5-second video-age-appropriate ad, ok. An age-appropriate banner on the bottom, ok. 2 minutes of unskipable adult ads on a kid's video, no. I started blocking, when they started intruding.
I understand your argument, but I think the issue is more complex. I would wish that it was just advertisers paying money to YouTube and YouTube taking its cut and giving the rest to the content creator. It used to be like that in the beginning, but it isn't anymore. I do not pay for a YouTube subscription, because I don't want YouTube to track my videos and create a profile of me. Especially when I often have to sift through multiple videos just to find an answer to very specific question and YouTube takes that as me being super interested in that whole topic. Watching ads on the other hand is also just a large tracking apparatus that tries to squeeze money out of my pockets. My preferences over the whole Internet is being tracked to serve me "the most relevant and personalised content". Basically, they try to figure out what I want, before I do and then try to sell me that. If there is a way to directly support content creators (donations, subscriptions, etc), I usually do that. But I don't want to support shady business with my data behind my back.
- Very much this. If I visit the grocery store, I am not walking through other businesses just to get to each isle.
  I am perfectly happy with going back to amateur YouTube somewhere else. If it was a real community of individuals I would probably post content again myself. The whole idea of YT as career content creators only is not very interesting to me any more.
  I do not use an ad blocker. I use a whitelist firewall. I only visit the websites I request. If anyone wants to show me content, it must be on the servers I wish to visit. As far as I am concerned, if I invite you into my home, you head to the bathroom, open the window and let a dozen people into my home, you're never going to get invited to visit again. This is how ads work.
  If YT can't trust these people to host their content directly, that is not my problem.
If they would let me just specifically pay for ad-free YouTube at a reasonable price, instead of lumping it in with a bunch of shit I don't use and am not interested in, I would happily pay.
And YouTube, the platform, DOES need to get paid as well otherwise your videos can’t get to you.
I disagree. YouTube is owned by Google as we all know very well. They don't need to show you ads technically. I get why they would want to, because obviously its a company and they want to make more and more money. But I (and many more like me), as users we feel that it gets to a point where I'm not watching a video with ads sprinkled in, but ads with a video sprinkled in. So I as a consumer will find ways to circumvent that, and avoid watching ads. There comes a point where they're getting far too greedy and I can no longer tolerate the extent to which their "more and more money" practices get to. As another commenter mentioned, the ads arms race will simply continue turning. As for creators, there are other ways for them to make money, as was the case when YouTube was still a younger thing. Now there's even more options such as Patreon. Also, bigger brands such as LTT inevitably branch out and create separate revenue streams (think LTT store). Obviously, not every creator might want to do that simply to get paid, but when did we shift to this idea that its a job. Even though I'm young(er), I still remember the beginning of YouTube, though barely. It seems like it was more people back then that wanted to do this as a passion, not that they felt "I need to release a video every week at a set day and time or I get less money" as it seems to be now.
I wouldn't even mind that much if the ads didn't interfere with the primary function of the site, which one would think is to serve content (the product) to me (the consumer). Such as ads which are not part of the video but are loaded on the side for example. However, this is not the case. Primarily I think because we have reached a point in the internet's timeline where people using it are not the customers anymore, but the product. And we're being sold to ad companies.
Thanks for coming to my Ted Talk xD
YSK that Premium pays considerably less to creators than any other form of monetization.
So, if you want to support your favorite creator, literally send them a dollar.
One dollar is more than what that creator will ever make from a single viewer on YouTube.

I do understand that if companies running ad-supported models, they need to make sure users are actually watching those ads. Seems logically to me - no ads mean no money, and no money means no sustainable business model.

On the other side, as a user, I just can't browse the internet without an ad-blocker any more. They just got so annoying and sometimes even break the actual website.

But to be honest, I don't see an alternative to ad-supported models except paying money directly via subscriptions plans etc. But this also will not work in the long term. I just can't pay afford to pay a subscription for each website I visit during the day.

The biggest issue, I guess, is the amount and obnoxiousness of the ads. I could live quite well with seeing one ad banner per page-worth of scrolling, if it's for example off to the side in a specific "your ad here" place.
Or if the ads would be thematically related to the topic at hand. I don't want to be reminded of how much our devices listen in on us by seeing ads for diapers on a website for posting news about the Ukraine War, just because I happened to talk with my gf about how my step mom has another child now. But seeing ads for a website to buy camping tools, on a website for hiking backpacks, is fine by me.
Unfortunately those types of non-intrusive ads probably aren't what's raking in the most money.
I think many large corporations like Alphabet/Google are making their money as brokers of peoples personal data more so than ads directly on their sites.
Not that I don't believe ads are a big source of revenue, but YT has been chugging along just fine (and squashing its competitors) for decades without much trouble despite everyone and their grandmother having an ad blocker by now, so I find it hard to buy that they're suddenly struggling to make ends meet.
If it were a smaller site without much reach I might be more predisposed to believe it.
- I'm pretty sure YouTube has always operated at a net loss (strictly in terms of revenue and expenses). But of course, the value of the data Google owns makes up for it.

I'll say something unexpected: I pay for YouTube. With money! Why?

I use it every day and I'm a human who likes boosting the things that I enjoy
I think YouTube's content recommendations are a genuine value-add and not easily replaced
A cut of my subscription fee goes directly back to the video creators that I watch
The "premium" encoding levels are actually a substantial improvement to video bitrates
- Important: the premium bitrate is higher than anything previously offered and probably would not have been otherwise practical to serve for free

So yeah. I personally like YouTube enough to pay for it and I have the financial means to do so. Am I a clown for expressing personal appreciation towards a faceless megacorp? Yes. Yes I am. Constantly trying to win at every transaction in life is a drag though, so I think I'll continue to enjoy getting swindled.

If you serve me Ads that lead to scams and malicious websites, you don't reserve my ad revenue.

This should go quite well for YouTube. popcorn gif

Although not nice for people that can't afford or don't want YouTube premium, this makes a lot of sense. Hosting videos costs a lot of money, and I doubt the YouTube Premium subscribers pay even nearly enough to pay for the hosting of all these videos. Personally I just have YouTube Premium as this also gives more money to the creators that make these videos.

I think an Open Source alternative would also have a lot of trouble with receiving enough funding to stay up. It would require a lot more donation compared to hosting mostly text based sites like Lemmy.

Peertube I think helps offload that by having every video be a torrent so each additional viewer increases the max bandwidth. But still not free to start
Premium more than covers costs, with a reasonable profit margin included. That's what it really costs to host and serve that much data.
- I think GP is saying the the total income from Premium doesn't cover the cost of running all of Youtube, not that a single premium subscription doesn't cover that one user's costs, which it obviously does (or the people running YouTube are truly idiots).

If they really block adblockers, I will subscribe. To Nebula. It's got everything I want, adfree (including sponsored segments), extra content and is cheaper. And the content creators get a bigger share of the money.

There is nothing stopping you from subscribing to nebula right now. Since I haven't gotten any ads on YouTube in many years and even use sponsorblock to skip those annoying video segments I started thinking about how I am basically leeching off of most content creators. Subscribing to nebula was a no-brainer. It's about $4.16 per month on the yearly plan and lets me support all content creators I watch on there at once rather than subscribing to each and every one of them on patreon and I still don't see any ads
- I'm not familiar with Nebula. Are known Youtubers on that platform?
- I've been considering nebula for a while, but I also use Patreon to support creators that I appreciate.

Honestly, others do have point when they say we are basically leeching off of the platform. I honestly don't think I'd mind paying for youtube, I currently don't because it kind of just got ingrained in me that youtube was "free". I think the ad supported model is fundamentally flawed though.

Platforms will always want to make it worth it for advertisers to work for them. With the huge trove of user data that sites like Youtube, Twitter, Facebook etc. have they will use that to leverage personalized ads that will feed your brain with garbage all day and coax you into buying shit you don't need or sometimes even falling for scams.

I'd honestly like it better if these sites just straight up charged you right out of the gate. Maybe on top of that we could have sites be interoperable, like the fediverse, so it's not necessarily what the site offers but how they offer it to you. Making you want to pay for an experience that you truly can't get anywhere else.

Ironically I wouldn't mind paying for it if yt didn't have these stupid monetization rules. Every time i hear a word being bleeped out my hate for youtube grows.
I actually do give them some money as there is a band I really like and due to shipping costs/import tax yt channel membership is the most viable way I have to support them, so while it's less than yt premium, I'm still not completely leeching off the platform.
For folks considering paying for YT, note that you get YT Music Premium bundled in with it. The music premium alone is only $2/mo cheaper than the bundle.
I got it when I bailed on Spotify, and gotta say, the app is a little less polished, but I don’t miss Spotify a bit. Just putting it out there if you were looking for a push to get yourself off Spotify or a push to get YT ad-free, there ya go. It works out to $10/mo if you get the annual plan, so same as Spotify Premium, plus yanno, the YouTube benefits. It’s a pretty decent deal tbh.
- Yep. I've had Google play music since it came out so I've never seen YouTube ads except when at a friend's house. Each time I do, I'm reminded how worth it YT premium/YT music is. I wish more platforms would allow me to simply pay a small fee to enjoy an ad-free experience.
  Personally, I think YouTube will be the hardest thing to replicate in a federated way.
I started paying for YT Premium years ago after I got fed up with the ads. I value the content and I think the service is actually really good so why not pay for using it? Premium users also generate more income for creators so that's also a huge upside since I want the creators to thrive as well and keep on making good content on the platform. I think the basic ad-free subscription is only 4,99€ and Premium including YT Music is 9,99€ here in Finland so not bad at all compared to for example Netflix.
It's one thing to replace Reddit since it's basically just serving text content but replacing YouTube is not easy at all. Videos take huge amounts of space, bandwidth costs arms and legs after you gain any user base and then you also would have to be attractive to the content creators somehow. I think YT at it's current state is worth the subscription cost and given how the platform works it's also IMO completely reasonable to either force users to watch the ads or pay for ad-free subscription.
- Yeah, the replicated youtube we'd need to either have a lot of money for hosting or use a decentralized model. The second option isnt even that feasible though.

YouTube is going to have a lot of trouble enforcing this. Lots and lots of people out there are going to be immediately at work finding ways around this limitation.

We'll make some plugin that downloads the ad and tells Google it was "totally watched and stuff".
- "Say the product name into the mic to continue viewing the video"
There will be some cat-and-mouse games with blockers and anti-blockers, but the "Nash equilibrium" end result of online ads is that they will be spliced with the content into a single video stream before being sent to you. It's not done now because it's less work for youtube servers not to re-encode, but it can and will be done if youtube clients/browsers with addons keep ignoring downloading the ad video files, or download them but lie about playing them. We'll come full circle back to television yet!
You'll need a DVR for your YouTube. Ironically, when DVRs were a thing for TV, the most reliable method for automatically skipping commercial breaks was cutting out segments with increased sound volume profile XD
The other alternative is total DRM and a war against general computing. We already have HDMI with HDCP encryption in place, next YouTube will demand that only trusted code (that guarantees ads are played) authenticated via a TPM on authorized devices can access their video streams. Netflix and Amazon are already doing it. I can't play either because my devices are too "free" for them.

The ad blocking arms race churns ever onward

At least with my subscriptions I've been noticing an increase in sponsored segments. And you know what? I don't mind. It's much less jarring when the "host" is also doing the ad and pretty much just works it into the video. People have to make money, and this old-school approach works for me. Reminds me of ads in old TV/radio shows. And it doesn't suddenly change the scene and quadruple the volume along with seizure-inducing backgrounds.

God the ads are awful. If they start blocking apps like Vanced and Browsers like brave, i will make a PiHole. And they can never block it.

I think a pi hole dosen't work for youtube ads.
Piholes rely on blocking DNS requests to ad servers, but on youtube the servers that host the videos and the servers that host the ads are the same thing.
Unfortunately this is a question that comes up very often in the Pi-Hole community where the answer is always: no, a Pi-Hole cannot block YouTube ads.
This is because a pihole blocks at the DNS level and YouTube serves their ads from the YouTube.com domain. Block that and you lose full access to the site.
They recommend running either uBlock Origin alongside it and/or use apps such as newpipe for android and freetube for desktop.
That said, I will always recommend setting up a Pi-Hole if you're able to as the benefits of blocking trackers and ads from the entire network (which includes your cellphones, smart TVs, printers, IP cameras, etcetera) is definitely a good thing. Once set up it is 99% a "set it and forget it" kind of setup.
While a Pi-hole would work in theory, Ads are just wrapped youtube videos as they come from the same servers. It would be a need of pinpointing each video individually.
My take is that we need uBlock to have a functionality to send data to people's Pi-Hole on a page by page basis.
- "UBlock PiHole" is a great name for a team-up too.
I tried watching an hour long video yesterday on YouTube. So many ads. So today I shall sort out a rip of the video I think so I can watch stuff uninterrupted.
- I download a lot of videos when I watch on desktop. This gets rid of ads. It also preserves them, since videos can get taken down for very esoteric reasons.

and I'm testing Youtube Revanced on my phone for unlimited ad-free background play for nothing!

I use YouTube a lot, both on my phone via ReVanced and my smart TV via SmartTubeNext, completely ad free. If Youtube manage to block videos unless the users deactivate their adblockers, even if I enjoy Youtube a lot, I'll just stop watching videos. The quantity of ad per video is just insane. No way I can stand watching all those ads.

While I don’t disagree, YouTube won’t care. Currently folk like you and I who evade their ads are freeloading. We get all the content and YouTube gets nothing in return. Having those who block ads abandon watching doesn’t lose YouTube anything, and maybe saves them a little bandwidth bill I guess?
- Yup I know they does not care about me or anyone of us, but I'm not willing to stay on that platform if the experience is terrible due to ads
Unpopular opinion around these parts, I imagine, but I bought a family sub.
Me and 5? 6? other people get ad-free viewing, the creators get a little more for our views, and no worries about finding ad-blocking youtube viewers for my in law's smart-tvs or my idevices.
Especially given just how intrusive they are; they completely interfere with technical explanations or comedic timing.
- It's like everyone saw what Twitter did, and thought they could get away with doing the same
Say hello to Odysee.com
- I tried to use Odyssee in the past moths but the lack of content is a no go for me. I've had hard times to find something that I enjoyed watching on Odyssee, but I'll give it a second shot, maybe I'll find something interesting this time.

Just get an adblocker-blocker-blocket. Easy

There's always the Revanced Project on Android. Honestly though, I've cut way back on YouTube after their algorithm started shoveling crap at me. Now it's hard to find genuinely informative videos. It's all "This guy got PERMANENT ORGASM FACE DISORDER Tears of the Kingdom" type videos, instead of ones on science, technology, and news.

Ever tried looking at youtube while in incognito mode? What's popular is a hellscape of lowbrow garbage that makes reality tv look downright erudite. I still like the site when it shows me all the channels I've curated, but otherwise, goddamn...
- I've been thinking of switching to Invidious or something and using youtube primarily via subscriptions. I'm kind of getting sick of the whole 'recommended' frontpage thing.
- My god, it’s 50% movie/TV ads. The rest is clickbait with thumbnails for idiots.
  Wow. I thought the frontpage was bad back when I made a choice to consciously curate years ago, but I had no idea this is what it turned into.

Unpopular opinion: I like paying for YouTube Premium to get rid of ads and still make it possible for creators and YouTube to get paid and survive an keep offering me entertainment.

In addition you also get YouTube Music so no need to pay for Spotify. It might not have as good features but I listen to music specifically so I only search for what I want to listen to and don't want any algorithms anyway.

This is very much their propaganda tactic, that by not watching ads you're stealing from the poor content creators, when in reality they're just chucking a few pennies to the people who actually made the videos. If you want to actually support the creators then donate to their patreon or whatever, but don't pretend that watching ads or paying for premium is doing anything more than lining the pockets of investors.
- I don't have premium but I have stumbled on a number of content creators (I'm sure one of them was TheSpiffingBrit among others) explaining the audience how they get significantly more money from people watching them in a youtube premium...
I pay for nebula, which is significantly cheaper and has a lot of creators that I am interested in supporting, plus extra content from them.
- Small question about Nebula, am I right in thinking that it's mostly music-centered? Context, I barely use YouTube for music, but rather for documentaries and game stream edits.
My counterpoint to yours: YouTube Premium is not available in all countries.
Beyond that, I personally used YouTube Red for years until they killed Google Play Music. I was an avid user of GPM, had several playlists and radios tuned there, and when they announced the move to YT Music, I was hesitant but gave them until literally the last minute to add the features from GPM that didn't exist on YTM, but they never did.
I cancelled my YouTube Red subscription the day that the GPM app on my phone said it wouldn't work again, and on that day I swore I'd never pay YT another penny directly.
- Yes that's really bad that they don't offer it in all countries. I'm in luck that I lived in those countries they do offer it. But even that, once I moved to Korea, they don't allow YT Premium Family here. I guess it's some Korean Law thing, they have very extreme laws when it comes to IT here, Google Maps doesn't work, etc. Anyway until now they didn't mind that I used My dad's computer in Germany to circumvent it. But yeah, one day they will come after me, I'm sure.
- Same with me. I loved Google Play Music and was sad when they killed it. YouTube Music still isn't as good. I ended up ripping a bunch of old CDs, setting up my own Plex server, and using Plexamp for music streaming instead.
Yeah I think it's a good option for a lot of people.
As a counterpoint, I recommend watching Louis Rossman's take on why he recommends people pirate instead of paying for YouTube Premium. His general philosophy on things is that you should pay for things unless you're getting an inferior service to the pirates. In this case of YouTube Premium, he considers it restrictive enough (won't let him watch videos offline) that he cancelled his subscription and now recommends piracy.
- But YouTube Premium lets you download and watch offline...
Perhaps I should add that I hate ads with a passion and that I'm really thankful to YouTube that they offer opt out of ads.
I like YT Music better than Spotify because user uploads cover the gaps in Spotify's catalog. Bootlegs, concert recordings, obscure game soundtracks, it has everything.
- Agree on the gaps but I hate that YouTube music puts music videos in my mixes or only the videos are available in rare instances. Sometimes I'd be listening to a mix (bc I like discovering new stuff) and then I get a minute of random noises and dialogue from the beginning of a video. Granted, I haven't looked heavily into disabling videos or anything

I pay for Prenium. But that's only because I also use YouTube Music. Otherwise, I wouldn't pay for it and I would do everything that I can to get rid of the ads. YouTube with ads is just hell now. There are so many of them now, it's ridiculous.

Don't get me wrong, I recognise the value that YouTube provides. Most things I watch and listen to are on YouTube. It's the website I use the most and I'll be glad to pay for it. I understand that it costs money to run and I want to support the creators that I watch.

HOWEVER.

I refuse to be strong armed into paying for it. Music brings me the value that I want and comparing with other prices, such as Spotify and so on, the actual "YouTube" part of the package just cost me 1€ per month which is one hell of a deal if you ask me.

But if you don't care for YouTube Music, 11€ a month (worst in the US apparently), just to get rid of ads is... ridiculous. I'd happily pay 5€ a month. It's not much and for the thing that I use the most? Yeah, I'm willing to! And I know that there is YouTube Prenium Lite. However, it's not available everywhere and it comes with a giant "fuck you" to the costumer.

You see, YouTube Prenium Lite is YouTube without ads. And that's it. So, no Background Play (which I use ALL THE TIME), no downloading of videos, none of that. You want that, well, you have to pay full price. Even though these are basic features.

Paying for getting rid of ads is one thing, and maybe accessing special features is one thing. But paying for artificial limitations that are put into place? Absolutely not. And I know the line between what's a prenium feature and what's an artifical limit is blurry. But for me it's basically this: If I can do something for free on desktop, but can't on mobile without paying. Such as background play.

I am convinced YouTube Prenium would be way more appealing if YouTube weren't being such dicks about it.

It's simple:

Get your prices back to normal (I hear that in the US, prices have been going up for... no reason).
Roll out YouTube Prenium Lite to everyone and rename it YouTube Prenium. So it has all the features of current Prenium except YouTube Music (put ads and disable background play only on music videos?).
Make it at like 5 bucks a month.
Make a variety of plans based around that. So a Prenium Family and also, a Prenium Duo, just like Spotify, for just two people. Reasonably priced.
And you make a YouTube Prenium Music plan, which includes YouTube Music as well. So on top of all of that, for 11 bucks a month, you now have a really compelling offer because you can go, Hey, for just 5 more bucks a month, you get all of the features of YouTube Prenium AND you get a complete music streaming services.
Oh and also: STOP DOING THIS SHIT.

Bam. All of the sudden you have compelling options. Some people will say: "Uuuh, jUsT uSe an AdbLocKeR!" and whatever. Those people are not the majority, so many people watch YouTube from their phones and their TVs now, they will be much more inclined to buy it...

...I think.

That last part is important. I recognise I'm just playing armchair business developper here and that I don't know shit, but still. I'm convinced this could work. The real issue comes down to YouTube being a monopoly and thinking that they can do whatever the hell they want, which... they likely can, due to the position they're in. It's an issue but this comment is already long enough and that is another discussion entirely, but basically: Monopolies sucks.

I'm using NewPipe, which gives me music in background and no Ads
that's enough for me
out of interest, what other advantages does a premium account have?
- Lack of ads. Background play. Offline viewing. Prenium members are also much more valuable for creators in terms of revenue.
  I'm aware of NewPipe. But I don't like it's design and I use my YouTube account on multiple devices. I depends on my playlist, like videos, history and recommendations far too much to use NewPipe.
  Also, YouTube Music is a proper streaming service with proper algorithm and so on, it's not just the music videos of YouTube. :)
I'm sorry, I know this isn't a constructive comment, but I had a real good chuckle seeing your autocorrect (?) writing Prenium every single time 😂
I never saw that Rossman video before, but it sums up my thoughts on the 'popular' media landscapes so well. I'm so proud to be a pirate.

I've got most of the channels I sub to tracked by yt-dl so it all gets pulled to my nas. If Youtube starts forcing ads I'll just put some effort into getting things categorized properly into Plex and ditch their site.

I know it isn't the best thing a rando on lemmy should be asking but can you zerotier me access?
- Haha, that’s bold
- https://github.com/meeb/tubesync

This will lead to an increase of ad-blocker-blocker-blocker development.

The adblocking arms race escalates further!
yo dawg I heard you like blockers
Came here to say this as well. It's a game of cat and mouse.
They already exist and are quite effective, I wonder whether YouTube is able to detect those too
- So you're saying we need an ad-blocker-blocker-blocker-blocker-blocker.
- Wait really? Is there a recommended extension for this?
It's just natural evolution.
It'll happen. I just hope that it will just become semi-diffucult to do it, so that non-technical people give in so Google is happy, then the 0.1% of us can enjoy our adblocked youtube.

Fuck youtube anyway. Absolute sesspit of influencers, ads and stolen content.

to be honest YouTube has great content because of the video length allowed. You can find all sorts of tutorials on pretty much anything. Instagram and TikTok, on the other hand, fit your description much better.
While YouTube, or any service, has bad users/channels, there are also many great users/channels for people with varying interests to enjoy. You can ignore the channels you don’t like, and get to watch some of the best content from regular people you’ve never heard of, who aren’t major television studios or corporations with an agenda. All they want to do is make videos of things they are passionate about.
That entirely depends on who your subscribed to. Personally all my stuff channels like Numberphile/computerphile, or SmarterEveryDay, and plenty of Blender3d tutorial channels, animators, and a whole bunch of other informative channels.
This. Can't really understand YouTube addiction. I'm not exaggerating if I say that I watch, maybe, 2 entire videos per year.

While we are saying "fuck reddit", let's say "fuck you too YT". Fucking malware machine.

Fuck youtube and fuck their ads, this shit is getting out of hand

Translation: YT tests randomly pissing off users until they get fed up and leave for another site. if a site tells me I can't partake of their content with my adblocker engaged, I simply find my fix elsewhere.

The big issue for me is the content to ad ratio is completely out of whack.

Call me lumberjack cause I wish a nigga wood pay for YouTube premium. With how many times YT tells me I’m not connected to the internet while my phone has a 3 bars of 5G (for whatever that’s worth) connection, hell naw I’m not paying for youtube premium. They move the goalpost way too often for what counts as “monetizable content” to the point that it’s neutering my favorite content creators to keep the lights on. TBH I’d rather pay Nebula

Yet another platform to boycott? Excellent!

Right! I'm enjoying all these FOSS alternatives lately. I really hope they're here to stay.
- Is there a YouTube alternative that isn't an alt-right cesspit?

So soon we will need an adblocker blocker blocker to use YouTube?

Oh, cool; more reason to use Piped and Invidious lmao

Invidious received a lawyer letter from youtube...
- Which they promptly ignored...

Honestly if I worked at YouTube and they asked me to implement this I'd quit.

For folks considering paying for YT, note that you get YT Music Premium bundled in with it. The music premium alone is only $2/mo cheaper than the bundle.

I got it when I bailed on Spotify, and gotta say, the app is a little less polished, but I don't miss Spotify a bit. Just putting it out there if you were looking for a push to get yourself off Spotify or a push to get YT ad-free, there ya go. It works out to $10/mo if you get the annual plan, so same as Spotify Premium, plus yanno, the YouTube benefits. It's a pretty decent deal tbh.

Knowing what I know about the costs of streaming video, I really want to know what the alternative is for a platform that can't just throw money down the drain. To my mind, there are only two options here - people watch ads (within reason, but 2 hour ads aren't resonable), or people pay YouTube (a la Premium).

If you want things for free, the only way to make that happen sustainably is ads right now. Donations simply will not work, especially for something with the costs that video incurs - to say nothing about being able to compensate creators for their time and effort.

I understand why they're doing this, but if you make a service that was once free, paid (whether with your time, or money), it's not a good look.

I'm in the camp that says you should really pay for premium. It's so worth the money. For every premium user that watches a video the creator gets a pretty good cut. Something like 55%. Blocking ads doesn't really hurt the creator too much. Your mainly just sticking it to Google. But if your someone who watches alot of YouTube consider premium, to help your favorite creators more. Especially you get Music included.

Man, everything is a premium subscription these days. I'm just so done with modern monetization schemes thst nickel and dime. Everything from heated seats in cars to content in games that we've already paid for.
I would consider it if YouTube had built in sponsorblock since I find YouTube videos unwatchable without it that I don't bother casting videos to the TV, and go through other methods to retain sponsorblock functionality.
55% of what? The 0.001p of ad revenue from a single view?
- 55% of your subscription based on viewing hours each month of the creators you watch. So for argument sake, lets say a single sub is $12. Of that $6.60 is split up and allocated to the creators you watch, thats a generalization, there are other factors involved, but it still turns out as a win for creators, the more premium users that watch the creator the better. That $6.6 is worth more split up than normal ad revenue.
  Versus ad revenue which I believe is something like 1000 views generate $18 on average of ad revenue which a creator doesn't even see all of it . Keep in mind there are other factors in play with ad revenue based on the advertisers and watch time.

If I wanted to watch 15 minutes of ads in a 45 minute video, I'd just get cable. I'm happy to watch 1 or 2 ads before a video. That's it. So I use an app that can even remove promotions.

Honestly, I pay for YouTube Premium because I find value in it. The price is reasonable for where I live, and it's my main source of entertainment. I don't like watching movies/TV shows that much so YouTube is my jam. So the convenience of being able to download videos, ad-free viewing, picture-in-picture, background playback etc. is totally worth it for me. I know if I dig hard enough and use an Android phone/tablet I can get those features without having to pay, but I don't like Android and again, the features are worth the small price.

For me, YouTube Premium and Spotify broke piracy because they're more convenient than pirating.

Also a premium subscriber, and I it's definitely worth it to me (especially since it comes with music and I've got the grandfathered price)
The biggest problem I have with it isn't even a problem with premium. It's that it doesn't deal with sponsor spots in videos.
- Try Sponsorblock. Also available through ReVanced on Android.
My issue with premium is that they took features away from the old youtube app and then resold them as a part of premium.
It's hard to see the value in premium when half of the features are things they took away from us. It feels like a betrayal, and so i use revanced.
Same for me. Premium is worth it for the ease of use (especially because I watch a lot of YT on my AppleTV). I don’t want to have to worry about making sure all these ad blockers are set up right, and I also am ok with paying since I believe creators get something from that, right?
When I visit a friend and they pull up YT only for it to have three ads or whatever, I die inside. How do those people live?
Same here but YT Music instead of Spotify since Spotify ruined their app. It's a nice package and I like their recommendation engine better.

I use ytdl-sub to downloadt the newest videos from the channels I like and import into Jellyfin. No ads, nothing, just videos. Even thumbnails.

I took the L and started paying for YT Premium since you can't really get rid of ads on LG TV otherwise

Did it with a bit of malicious compliance and opted for Family plan using argentinian VPN, totaling at less than $3 a month (and constantly dropping) for 5 people.

If you can sideload Android apps SmartTubeNext is a great option https://github.com/yuliskov/SmartTubeNext
- LG TVs are neither Android TV nor Google TV OS, so it's a no-go here
Same here, been using YT Premium via Argentina for 2 years or so by now. It's nice, cause the few bucks you pay for that are fine, considering you get all videos ad-free and even YT music which isn't great but a nice bonus! just a shame you by now need a Mastercard for it cause Visas have to be from Argentina, as I've heard.
PiHole, Adguard Home and the like can't block ads on smart TVs? Or is it something like the TV refusing to start if it contacts the ad server and doesn't get a response?
- YouTube fixed that ages ago. Ads and videos are from the same endpoints now. So as far as pihole is concerned it's all videos
- PiHole blocks by preventing certain domains from loading (the ones you specify on your blocklist). It's not examining any content. It simply sees a request for say examplespamdomain.com and blocks it when something on your network requests it. Youtube serves ads and videos from the same domain, so this approach doesn't work.
- They can block other ads, but they can't block YouTube ads since YouTube ads come from the same domains as the videos.
- AFAIK due to how YouTube apps on Smart TVs work if you try blocking the ads it'll stop loading the videos altogether. Similarly how on phones people are using modified apps like Vanced instead of adblocking ad servers

laughs in SmartTube

I'd be happy to pay for video content/video hosting, but I'm not happy with any of my money going to youtube or google. Peertube is the future. 😎

I like the idea of peertube and hopefully it'll be the future with more and more bandwith being available but the risk of ending in jail right now is too high in my country.
If you get fined for downloading a movie it would be a relatively small amount of money I'd say not more than 200 € but if you torrented a movie you are now fined as a distributor and the 200 € will get multiplied by the amount of people you potentially shared the movie with and that's a shitload of money.
I could be wrong in some details because torrenting died about a decade ago in my country but in the end the risk of getting sued for xx,xxx € is not worth it. And if I understood the peertube system right, I would be torrenting every video I watched and couldn't know if I am violation the law
- Could a subscription to a decent VPN solve that for you?
Peertube? Is that a thing or just an idea you just had? Sounds amazing!
- Oh, it's a thing!

Honestly, I've always been surprised as to why YouTube even tolerates adblockers. It's basically a no-brainer for them to bake ads into the stream and disable skipping

Because it's impossible to block adblocking. The server can't know whether the client plays the video. The best they could do is have you wait the ad-time even if the ad is blocked but that would just mess with their analytics - they want to be sure the ad is being watched.
The only reason adblock blocking works for smaller websites is because adblockers need to catch up with each implementation. People will easily catch up with Youtube as there are thousands of people working on Youtube programming.
- I think the commenters intention was that YouTube could stream you the video with embedded ads. They would have to stream the content though and skipping ahead would have to be guarded serverside by some clever checks on if you received (and therefore likely seen) the section of the video with the ads.
  What probably speaks against this is that it would significantly increase their costs, since they couldn't cache as easily anymore and always need "clever" services/servers along the way. A dumb CDN wouldn't cut it anymore.
  I fear it's still just a question of when it's either cheap enough for Google to do it or when the expected returns are high enough to offset the increased costs.
Sponsorblock: allow us to introduce ourselves
- If YouTube wanted to, they could disable that.

Youtube ads are such garbage. Everyone talks about how google is 'the most advanced advertiser' - well google, you really can't figure out that playing the same ad for me 4 times in a 30 minute period is just going to make me hate both you and the advertiser?

Well, this certainly explains my difficulty with YouTube over the last few days. Ironically, the piped instances still seem to be fine...

This might just be enough to push me primarily over to Rumble. There are fewer and fewer reasons to use YouTube and more and more reasons not to.

Hadn‘t heard of Rumble. At first glance, it looks like it‘s run by Elon Musk. Andrew Tate on the frontpage, far-right political channels and crypto bros. I think I‘ll pass.
- Same, a lot of YT alternatives seem ripe with alt-right garbage. I'm a leftist myself, but I can stand liberal content, however platforms like Rumble and Odysee's feeds look awful right now
I have zero interest in any youtube alternative that isn't decentralised. Every centralised attempt, even if it somehow suceeded, will simply become enshittified anyway.

Try YT subscription from Argentina...😎

I'd be much happier to pay if I could ensure I don't get personalized recommendations and I could use it with yt-dlp. I can probably opt out of personalized recommendations, but I haven't checked yet because I don't use youtube through its main interface much.

What really irritates me is that I pay for YouTube TV because it's the cheapest option out of all "cable-like" plans, and yet I am not allowed any benefits on actual YouTube. It's ridiculous that I am already paying well over the premium amount so why do I have to watch more ads?
What's so bad about personalized recommendations? I think they're amazing.
- A lot of people have reported that they get recommendations drilling down the alt-right / Nazi pipeline after watching leftist content.

Yeah please do, I will just stop using YouTube and that would be a good thing.

I never thought YouTube's business model was very sustainable. As the world economy goes down, so does the value of ads. Creators or consumers need to pay up for all the bandwidth and storage. The question is about what is a reasonable price. Are low tiers for $3/mo. possible along with premium 4k options or does everything need to be at more than that?

Tough choice. I feel like if you’re a creator who uses YouTube as your sole source of income, a few bucks a month, even like $100 could be worth while. Tragically would lock out people just starting, but maybe they can get some kind of free trial? On the consumer side tho I imagine people would be much less likely to pay, but maybe some people could be convinced if it was real cheap.
YouTube premium is pretty reasonably priced if you consume a lot of content on there. I probably consume a minimum of 12 hours every week not including music, so I feel I'm paying a fair price.

I pay for Premium (bc I watch mostly from the TV using a console or AppleTV) but this sucks. Especially because how annoying and long a bunch of these ads are now.

For AppleTV, have a look at Yattee. It’s a YouTube front-end with no tracking and no ads. Downside is obviously no algorithm, so you need to make some effort to find your own stuff. Maybe that’s an upside anyway.

I wonder if this would affect things like Newpipe (android YouTube client replacement with no ads) or even just playing streams via MPV. I assume that stuff is relatively safe since it's grabbing the actual video streams, but I'm sure there is still a way they could block them.

Just set up a pi hole. Fuck ‘em

Pihole explicitly doesn't block Youtube ads as they can't differentiate them from content at that level, it needs to be done at browser/app level
- This.
  The ads and content are delivered via the same way, so blocking one blocks the others.
You mean piehole?
- You mean holepie?
- No. PiHole is effectively ad-blocking via DNS; the name is a play on black hole and Raspberry Pi.

Whats the percentage of YT users who use Adblock tools? i think it's a tiny number, mainly the power users.

There are people out there using YT without an ad-blocker?
- well, The majority of YT users doesn't even know what is an adblocker.
  edit: typo
- I prefer watching on my tablet, and still got no luck with any ad blocker. Somehow I like the default YT app, so switching to something else would be hard for me…
I thought it was most people who use an adblock for yt atleast on pc. I only know q single person not using it

I'm certainly not an expert in this, but surely there are ways to get around this right? Pihole? Could ad blockers fake ads being played?

Yes. I give it like a week before the FOSS community figures out how to bypass again. LOL.
At least for me, and as far as I know, Pihole doesn't block YouTube ads. Someone please correct me if I'm wrong because I'd love a network-level solution. Currently just have uBlock Origin for blocking YT ads.
- Pihole will not block YouTube ads. I think it’s incapable of doing so without blocking YouTube.
- uBlock Origin does a good job for me. On occasion, I will try watching YouTube on a platform where I don't have it and I'm amazed how unwatchable it is. This reminds me to try to find alternate platforms for watching the creators I care about. Nebula is a good option for a lot of them, although it probably will never have the variety YouTube has. I haven't tried PeerTube yet...I suspect I will run into the same issue.

I have a private piped instance running in oracle cloud free, works nicely for me.

didn't know about piped, thanks for the recommendation!
anything to know about before setting it up?
like some pitfalls or hiccups?

Oh gosh, that's unfortunate.

Good thing I've been using NewPipe! I'm reading the post for other alternatives, but feel free to suggest some to me directly, if you'd like.

Revanced too, if you are on Android. IOS has one, but I don't know the project name.
- Thanks!
  I had no idea there was a new fork(?) of Vanced. I was actually using Vanced previously, and really enjoyed that. Does it still require you to have a Google / YouTube account to login, or can it pull a NewPipe / FreeTube with profiles?
I have used freetube on windows. I assume adblock is in browser context here, so freetube should skip the browser completely.
- Thanks for the recommendation.
  I'm using Linux right now, and glad to see they have it on Flathub. I think I'll give that a try now!

I test not using YouTube.

Couple years ago a Youtube-Googler told me that adblockers are their big worry. Suckers.

I watch youtube, I mean, who doesn't? But there is nothing on there, no creater, no content, that would stop me from going cold turkey with the site if they are actually able to pull it off.

Seems fair enough, I've personally been freeloading for a while. Youtube is irreplacable, so there's not much we can do.

"Youtube considering incentivizing piracy"

Now we need a new video platform.

I've been poking around with Invidious lately, does anyone know if this'd be a counter to these blocks?

Invidious got hit by a cease and desist so they might be shutting down their operations. But yes, I believe it would be immune to those blocks unless they change their API.
- Invidious doesn't use the API

FreeTube, Invidious, or Rumble.

So.. using a ad blocker that we compile ourselves?

They can choke

YouTube feels unusable without an ad-blocker. I've gotten like 30min crazy conspiracy videos as an ad that shit is bonkers.

I guess this is the kick in the pants to go over to odysee or somewhere else, huh

Let's do the Peertube migration.

Does this also apply to revanced?

Youtube tried blocking revanced a few months ago and the team just pushed an update to fix it. Youtube is gonna try to block it but its gonna be a sepparete thing from blocking alblockers in a browser.

If I have to start paying to watch videos, I’ll probably just jump over to Nebula or something.

I wonder if this will affect Invidious

- But if Invidious is just scraping the youtube site then it may get caught in this?

huh. Maybe that’s why watching this on mobile safari with vinegar installed has been really flaky lately.

This is old news from a month ago.

And here's my hot take on YT ads: They need to make money somehow, but unfortunately they are subject to "ad creep," where they slowly increase the intensity of the ads. I've gotten 15+20s unskippable ads before.

But what really grinds my gears are how the ads almost seem designed to annoy you. If you commonly skip ads, that's when you get unskippable ads all the time. And if you try to listen to YT in the shower expect the ads to come and go like radio, you come out listening to some skippable 30 minute long ad.

And I hate how the ads on mobile decide to cover the comment section. That's ridiculous, like imagine if you're reading a newspaper and when you get to an ad the ad suddenly expands to fill the entire page.

And the forced ads on unmonetized channels is plain cruel.

So, as much as I want to support creators (and I do leave AdBlock off on YT most of the time), I'll come out against YT over this decision. My usage of it will drop, but only minorly.

Does this include Firefox or only chromium based browsers? Hoping my switch to ff is gonna work like I hoped.

An adblocker is an adblocker, no matter the platform.

I wonder how? Unless ad-blocker extensions are currently leaking some piece of info indicating to the website that we're using them?

There are numerous ways to detect ad-blockers. The most robust way is to default to assuming the user has an ad blocker (fail-safe design), loads an ad script, and the ad script continues loading the page (video, article content, etc). If the ad script is blocked, the page will stop loading, and the default adblock state will be rendered.
A more brittle option is to load the ad script with an error handler (or detect if it is blocked via a timing attack) and then the error handler changes the page to reflect the ad script was blocked. The reason this is more brittle is that the user can simply intercept and remove the error handler. (In contrast to the above approach, this is fail-deadly design.)
- Some websites load the ads before the page itself, which seems to get around many adblockers. Or at least I've heard some folks say that. Can't say for certain, though my adblocker doesn't seem to work at all on some sites, and that could be why.