As plenty of other people have already said, if YouTube Premium went up by a pittance every month (boiling frog price increases) I would probably keep subscribing.
The fact that they
A) clamped down on AdBlockers
and
B) increased Premium rates
is a major disappointment.
Add to this that Patreon are introducing invasive User Agreements and it is getting more difficult to support Independent content creators.
Platforms like Curiosity Stream are looking more and more appealing to those of us who want interesting content and don’t mind parting with a reasonable amount of cash to support creators.
I tried to watch the Thursday night football recap yesterday and accidentally opened YouTube instead of smarttube. I was shocked. I watched a minute of ads to start and one minute in I had another minute of ads. YouTube was basically unwatchable.
Some people use Google Chrome or other Chromium-based browsers that don't support proper ad-blockers because Google deprecated MV2. Firefox and its forks like LibreWolf are the only usable browsers nowadays, they are the only ones that support MV2 and proper ad-blockers like uBlock Origin.
I updated ublock but it didn't stop the ads, so I can see others doing the same. I'm guessing it didn't actually pull the very latest version or the very latest block lists for whatever reason, but others might be less patient than me.
Make sure you have no other adblockers, disable enhanced tracking protection for youtube (shield icon at address bar) and make sure you have no other custom rules set for youtube.
Also you don't need to update all the filters. Just the quick fixes section -> click the clock icon and then update.
Also this all assumes you mean uBlock Origin, not just uBlock.
didn't work for me at first too, but other YouTube specific ad blockers had side effects (videos opened in new tabs would play automatically instead of waiting for you to switch to that tab, etc)
here's what I did:
reset uBlock to default settings, then purge caches and update
clear all caches in your browser (in Firefox/Chrome you can just search for cache in the settings search bar and it'll come up)
I think it's meant for people who currently use ABP, uBlock, or one of the other countless bad ones as opposed to the far superior uBlock Origin, or Adnauseam.
YouTube does it for revenue and has to spend money to enhance their anti-adblock system, while there is an army of volunteers online who will gladly defeat these enhancements for free with an impact on a massive scale.
Can you Chromecast embedded videos? Invidious has a link on every video that just embeds the YouTube vid full-size in a blank page. The ad bullshit doesn't work with embeds.
It is a gradual rollout. as many have said. I hadn't seen the Youtube's first warning until today, although people have be talking about it for a few weeks now.
The rollout already hit me and passed. I use Chrome at work with uBlock mostly because it's mandated and I burnt through all the warnings and videos were starting to not play. I thought that was that, I was too lazy to fix it on my work PC but a day later uBlock updated and it hasn't been an issue since.
Procrastinating wins again, I never took direct action. I don't want to get too hopeful, but I think even Google is going to have more trouble with this than they anticipate
Production, sure. Operational costs, not so much zero. I don't understand how people think video streaming on any scale can be supported without any income. I don't think they're recent pricehike is reasonable, but to think anyone deserves to be able to stream 4k video (albeit low bit rate) without any sort of compensation is beyond me.
I pay for Youtube Premium, because I get a legit way to bypass ads and the creators I watch gets payed more than if I watched ads, but I also use an adblocker pretty much everywhere because they are intrusive and annoying. However I'm not under any illusion that doing so does directly hurt the income of the sites I visit.
I'm completely aware of the financial issues YouTube is facing, but they got themselves into this mess (and most other companies as well, who provide a service for "free"). They make users accustomed to a level of service, build a userbase and ride on investments with the expectation that they'll figure out how to make money when they reach mass adoption.
The fact that youtube premium took years to even conceptualize is a massive failure on their part. Or how 1080p+ video wasn't a paid feature to begin with. Making your users get used to a level of service, then making their experience more miserable and selling a solution to the problem they made does not bode well with people who have been on the platform before "things turned to shit".
It also doesn't help that the first course of action was to increase the amount of ads, increase retainment, "enshifficate" the platform in order to increase the time people spend on the site (=more ad revenue). Now I'm at a point that I can't use YouTube without uBlock, sponsorblock, return youtube dislikes and Revanced (includes the latter two extensions for mobile), turning useless features off (or with the case of dislikes, back on) and stopping the bombardment of ads.
Youtube premium would still provide me with a worse experience, so why would I switch? They should figure out how to provide people additional value for their money, and shouldn't have accustomed people to a level of service that they 100% knew wouldn't be sustainable.
The big issue I see with YouTube premium (though I'm a paid subscriber) is that the bitrate is still far too low. Vimeo provided much better quality a decade ago for paid users and so do Nebula, Floatplane and all the other competing sites nowadays
What's often left out is people are uninstalling terrible ad blockers and installing better ones. The terrible ones allow certain ads (from advertisers who pay to get through) or even inject their own ads.
Some disinformative articles are trying to use that to claim that because people are uninstalling [insert bad scammy adblocker name] that people are uninstalling adblockers altogether.
I had uBlock Origin and I didn't mind paying for YouTube Premium. When I will mind paying for YouTube Premium will be when all of my feed is full of reactionary populist channels, not to avoid paying part of the income that pays some of the people making a career out of streaming on the platform I've been avoiding even watching ads on.
It will be a losing battle for the people not trying to look for alternatives - in the end, Google has control of the backend, they can eventually decide to incorporate ads directly into the streams that are served to people protocol wise and they can decide to forego giving users any warning of when an ad will play and when they will try to force the video into forced reproduction.
That the streams are served in a way where the browser can discern when it should play the ads is more of a courtesy from a legacy architecture that came from a Google that wasn't intent on cracking down on people adblocking, and people may have to revert back to using more specific and resource intensive YouTube adblockers that try to guess when a commercial break is starting and ending directly from the video stream like old school VCRs did: https://www.theguardian.com/notesandqueries/query/0,,-2869,00.html
These days I imagine a database of ads can be built up. Every time a new ad appears, it could well be in the database within a day. Then within 5 or 10 frames, the ad could be detected and the database would know exactly how long to skip forward.
"Sorry, we noticed that you are using a browser that isn't Google Approved™. Therefore YouTube won't play any video and also, we deleted your YouTube account."
The worst-case endgame is, you can send the videos, but they'll never reach my eyeballs. Send those frames to /dev/null and store the video stream where I can watch it as often as I like.