Recently, YouTube has been ramping up its anti-adblock effort, and I’ve been watching this closely due to personal interest. This blog post is where I write down what I know.
Some Background
Here’s...
Youtube’s Anti-adblock and uBlock Origin::Recently, YouTube has been ramping up its anti-adblock effort, and I’ve been watching this closely due to personal interest. This blog post is where I write down what I know.
Some Background
Here’s...
The uBO team members are all volunteers. They’ve gone above and beyond to meet every little request from their users. But there’s a limit to how much they can take. At some point, the constant demands become too much, and they will leave uBO for good. It’s one thing to play cat and mouse with YouTube. It’s quite another to deal with a wave of angry users.
It's important to note that this extension is open source, and anyone can contribute. End users can contribute by writing more meaningful reports and exhibiting patience, and those who are handy can certainly contribute to uBlock Origin. Just about anyone can help in some way.
Of course, every project needs passionate leaders, which is where the maintainers play a role. They coordinate work and ensure quality. While lots of people can act as a leader, the passion of driving a project to success with unique expertise is a lot more rare. So treat your maintainers kindly!
YouTube staff underestimate the amount of effort tech savvy people will devote to remove minor annoyances. Ultimately, the core capability of YouTube is to deliver a video from its servers to your browser. Adblock tech will continue to win the cat-and-mouse game in the long run.
they also overestimate their importance to the same crowd. I mean, I use youtube a lot but as soon as I'm unable to without my adblocker in place, I'm done with the site. Already cut out several other sites that have done similar things; YouTube is big, but it's not the only time waster in town.
Sadly this is what they want. Anyone not giving them money directly through subscription fees or indirectly through advertisers they view as dead weight and want to buck to reduce operating costs. Rather than fix their service model, they prefer to squeeze what ever money they can out of people and dump them for not being profitable enough.
Plot twist, it is YouTube sending those moronic support requests.
Edit: I checked out the reddit thread and people really are moronic.
A:
I can't access YT at all now. I just get a big, blank empty page. I've tried following every single step in the guide and nothing works. Before, I was able to watch videos if I opened the link in a private browser, but now even that doesn't work. Using Firefox btw. What am I supposed to do now?
B:
I just started having this problem this morning.
I realized I forgot to disable Ghostery, one I took care of that the page would load again.
You don't need Ghostery if you have uBlock Origin, it only increases the chance of the two adblockers interfering with each other. It's like those boomers who have 5 different anti viruses on their Windows PC... Just stop it!
Good article. Rather than relying on uBo people should just stop using services they dislike (YouTube) and move to something else. Of course many people don't want to change what they're used to.
well, since the debacle I was thinking: do I really need YT? What if I don't access it at all, will my life become miserable? Nope, because YT is not something I NEED, just something I WANT.
Once we realize that, it's easy to look elsewhere, or even find something more productive to do.
Agreed, we need more creators uploading their content both to YT as well as to other hosting sites that are less explicitly against the viewership. Google only cares about maximizing their profits, and it's sad to have witnessed how YT has degraded over the years. It used to be a place that cared so much about the user experience and now... It's an ad serving tool, and not much more.
Once enough big creators decide to support alternative platforms we may see a growing number of people who check out of YT for good.
The creators are making money from the ads, they probably won’t abandon ship at yt unless they stop making revenue. A lot of the creators on yt rely on the ads to be worthwhile in creating the content.
I agree, yt is getting stupid with their ads, from what I understand they are now including ads in the yt premium subscription aervice, which is supposed to be ad free mind you.
As long as greed dictates content, creators won’t abandon ship, unless they can have ads on the alternatives to make money on.
I feel like I'm living in a utopia since more of my YT usage comes from a Nvidia Shield TV with Smart Tube Next and YouTube Revanced on a phone, in a nutshell I have been unaffected by all this mess... For now.
Best way to punish Youtube: Use a functioning ad blocker and then open dozens of tabs on auto play and mute them. Let them play perpetually.
Another way that would cause advertisers to potentially drop them or pay considerably less would be to do this without an ad blocker and then post evidence of it. With enough people doing this, advertisers won't want to pay.
If the advertisers start paying less, then Google will just increase the number of ads shown to the user. And playing content on more tabs won't even matter to them.
The issue is that they are a monopoly so they control and they can do whatever they want. The alternative is federated video services but those aren't matured yet.
Yesterday was the first time videos actually stopped working for me. I updated uBlock Origin and it's been working again. YouTube can't win this race. (Unless they completely cripple their website and make it only available to logged in verified users or something.)