YouTube is slowing down for users with ad blockers in new wave

A new wave of slowdowns is hitting users, with the only resolutions being disabling the ad blocker or upgrading to premium.

Or just switching to ublock origin.

Or just switching to newpipe.

Or just switching to freetube.

etc

I have ublock origin on firefox and it's really bad for me currently. This has traditionally been the good combo I believe.
Not just slowing down, but stopping, then restarting after skipping a few seconds that you cannot access no matter what.
For now the best solution I've found is to copy the video url, open potplayer and just hit the paste command and the video runs flawlessly.
So they'll have to close that loophole eventually, which means enshittifying the video streaming protocol for everything that isn't the native web viewer, which will inconvenience more people who were used to something working, leading to another workaround, leading to...
Youtube is gradually accelerating their enshittification. I'm looking forward to when it comes to a real head. Too many serious interested parties rely on it. I don't know if peertube will be the first fallback, but I'm sure it'll get a big bump.
- Change your useragent to Chrome.
  It breaks the detection of your adblocker… for now.
how do those youtube clients work? i thought YouTube was very closed source
- AFAIK NewPipe parses the regular YouTube website and only extracts the useful bits.
- No expert but I believe they access the API directly.
- Some probably use an API of some sort, because SmartTube for Android TV even synchronises your watch history, subscriptions, you login with your google account etc...
Or downloading videos to watch later? Does Plex recognize YouTube videos?
- Plex does not recognize them in terms of pulling down metadata but you can still organize them in folders and browse that way. I find the Plex route is a healthier way to engage with video content than platforms that just keep serving you whatever the algorithm thinks will keep you peeled to the screen. It's more intentional and less of a passive consumption kinda thing.
- tl;dr: Yes, but probably takes some effort for most content.
  Plex will play the files, but metadata is hit or miss. If it's something that's on thetvdb or themoviedb, it can be matched as a series or movie, respectively. With some effort, you could also probably include all the relevant metadata when downloading the videos, then have plex use local metadata, which could cover anything not big enough for the big metadata providers.
  I think it's also possible to find plug-ins/scripts that will pull metadata directly from youtube, but I've had bad luck relying on that stuff and then development stopping, so I avoid it these days.
- but won't it be hassle to follow that?
YouTube revanced has also been working for me

And still, I’m more likely to stop using YouTube than to stop using an ad blocker.

That's what they want. Get all the users they aren't able to monetize off the platform to lower their costs.
- I mean, I like a good Google hate train as much as the next guy, but that's kind of a legitimate thing to want.
- Then I'mma leech HARDER
- That's a double edged sword though, lose viewers and you lose appeal to advertisers. Lose users and they're going to go somewhere else. That somewhere else will eventually grow and be competition. The bigger it gets, the faster it will grow.
- They used the "You" as in the people, during their growth years to build their platform. Now they are going against the people since they no longer need us.
Good news: you can have the best of both by watching everything for free through piped video!
Way ahead of you. Recently got Nebula, which has dramatically reduced the amount of time I spend on YT. Besides, this way I can help also the people who make the videos. They don’t need to be so dependent on the whimsical and unpredictable nature of the algorithm and the ever changing landscape of what is or isn’t advertiser friendly on the platform.
If YT feels like further cranking up the enshittification dial, I say, bring it on. I’m ready to drop my watch time even lower than it currently is.

Too be honest I was fine with seeing an ad every few videos. But at some point it became unskippable ads before , during and after a video.
- Ads got too aggressive, people made adblockers, ads got more aggressive because of lost revenue, almost everyone starts using adblockers.
  They did it to themselves, people were content with simple ads on a page, it's once they started interfering with the content and access of it that they became a problem.
I never had an issue with YT's 1-2 skipable ads at the beginning, or even the banner ad. But they got greedy.
The midrolls and the unskipable ads was the trigger point for me.
- I was fine with even having a couple very short unskippable ads every other video. Now it is all of them with one in the middle of videos longer than 5 minutes. And then of course the content creator has to put in an ad because YouTube does not pay shit for views.
- I mean, they didn’t get greedy, as far as everyone knows they are losing a ton of money (at least if you can extrapolate anytbing from the fact that twitch is massively unprofitable)
- Yeah and I wouldn’t even mind like 5 minutes of ads at the beginning compared to randomly dispersed in the middle
- Plus nearly all advertising is insultingly stupid as to appeal to idiots.
- I find it extremely funny that YouTube serving ads also strains the same video infrastructure they're trying to increase revenue on.
There is potentially a world in which you want to see ads because ads themselves do technically provide a service. You do want to know about things you care about and would want to buy… you just don’t want it obnoxiously shoved into your face all of the time in psychologically manipulative ways.
- Look at the way ads used to look "back in the day", with details about the product, its features, and reasons you would actually want to buy it. New tractor model, this many HP, pulls 4 bottom plow, burns this much diesel per hour, buy now and grow more corn.
  However it turned out that it worked better just to try to trick people into buying a product that they didn't need, and that's how we got the ads we have today.
- It would also help if I were served ads that even attempt to approach the vicinity of my own interests. That is vanishingly rare.
Like for real, you have all the money in the world and you know what I like and don't, so why don't tailor the ads to not annoy the fuck out of me?
- "MORE!" - already wealthy people.
- I'd much much much rather watch ads for products that are not the least relevant to me. I'm not going to be an active participant in my own manipulation. I'd rather be annoyed.
Youtube doesnt make money with the youtuber reviewing the product.
- They sure are.
  Those creators drive the traffic to the page.
A very large chunk of what people consume these days is effectively already ads. Every Youtuber holding a product into the camera is an ad. And people want to watch that. They want to know what new products are out there. It just has to presented appropriately.
I doubt so - Sponsorblock exists. I guess some don't mind it because it supports the creators they like directly.
Because that has been tried so many times over the decades.
The good sites put effort in to curate their ads and make sure they are things their audiences would enjoy. Lots of webcomics STILL have blog posts about doing this. Same with one of the more popular "steam deck" websites.
The problem is that this doesn't work. Because people don't permitlist those sites. They just block everything for the exact same reasons "I pirate it and if I like it I'll buy it" was always a blatant lie for the vast majority of people (and no, I don't care who consider themselves exceptions to that).
So when curated and "good" ads have almost zero benefit over shitty and obnoxious ones? The focus stops being "let's serve good ads and trust our users to have our backs" and more "What can we do to actually get ANY ad revenue out of this so that we can keep the lights on?"
I'll never understand why they spend so much effort pushing ads into people's faces
money
Also, disappointingly, most people don't care about the ad all that much.
A 15min video from a Youtuber reviewing a product in detail is way more effective than any regular ad I have ever seen, yet there are almost no ads in that style.
True. But probably that money does not go to Google but to the Youtuber directly, so for Google this is still a cost.

I really wish government would just come in already and shatter google into a million pieces with the anti-monopoly hammer already.

Google is far worse than AT&T ever was when it was shattered into the baby bells.

Just gotta learn from AT&T to not let them re-congeal back together like somekind of fucked up liquid metal terminator 20+ years down the line.

50% of congress wants to know how the computer mouse stays alive without food.
- They pretend to be ignorant but they're really looking the other way because they're lobbied for meager sums like $10,000

Frankly, I'd stop using YouTube entirely before I'd start using it without an adblocker. At least there are no signs of it slowing down for me, yet.

I'd consider paying a few bucks a month, but not $10 or more
Get rid of shitty YouTube music and give me a tier that's no ads only
- That is precisely why Premium Lite was killed off, it did exactly what you are looking for.
- That’s just leaving money on the table

Watching YouTube load slowly is better than watching ads.

Exactly! I started surfin' da information highway in the 90's. I remember watching an image unveil itself slowly as a morning sunrise.

I will download videos then. I refuse to not use an adblocker on the modern internet.

Pirate everything, it's the only way to show greedy corporations the content should be free.
It would be really cool to be able to download YouTube videos withour the sponsorship segments, I wonder if there is a way to do his already?
- yt-dlp has a command-line option to download videos while using sponsor block.
  
  yt-dlp https://youtube... --sponsorblock-remove all
- On android, I use Seal. Its basically a frontend for yt-dlp and has a sponsor block feature.
- If I see one more PCBWay ad...
- I swore I've seen a FOSS project that did that. An ad segment detector basically
My worry with all this is that they might say fuck it and put DRM for all YouTube videos which would block attempts to download the videos. Not make it impossible as seen with streaming services but not as trivial as now....
- Time to quit YouTube then
- The day they go 100% paywalled, is the day their dominance ends. They will never do this because, contrary to the corporate dickriders in this thread they rely on bait and switch tactics to draw the crowd in the first place.
- Google's plan is to DRM the web
- Well the good news is Widevine is very expensive, and doesn't work. It's not as simple as right click / save target as, but Widevine decryption is why you can torrent any of the shows/movies on those streaming services.
  Everytime someone requests a video on those services, the service pays a fee to Widevine. $0.50 USD per request for the first 30k requests/month. How much you think Google is willing to pay someone for you to watch cat videos for free?

"We'll make our service worse, that'll show them!"

Ok google, good luck with that.

At this point I'm convinced they're trying to drive people away to shrink the overhead on bandwidth and servers, but it doesn't work like that. Not after you got them hooked on videos of cats after years of a steady drip of memes.

I wish we can fast forward to the part where Youtube completely destroys itself and a new platform takes its place so we can enjoy it for 10 years before the enshittification cycle restarts again.

The problem is that only conglomerates can eat the cost of running such a platform. Ads will be the end of free interne, that's for sure.
I'm not so sure – YouTube is much larger than you might think. It's not the video platform you grew up with anymore. No one in this world can match the backlog and content density/diversity of YouTube, not even all streaming services combined. People complaining that YouTube is dying because a few YouTubers "retire" from their main gig or that it's not the same anymore don't understand how YouTube works. They might not comprehend that the time of their "bubble" has come to an end. When this happens, there are already five new bubbles/niches that are even bigger, and you might not have heard of them, but they are more successful than their "predecessor." The old bubble is still there to consume in the backlog. Someday in the future, AI will have a field day with the data accumulated via YouTube.
It is transforming, for sure, but I don't think it will destroy itself completely. In a sense, you can say it will destroy whatever view you had of YouTube as a platform because it is not what it once was.
To my knowledge, YouTube will hit the billion-user milestone this year (Netflix currently at ~250 million paid users). If we look at other data trends from streaming services, it suggests that YouTube will grow more over the coming years. I don't know how anyone can match YouTube as a whole. In certain niches, sure, but as a whole, it would be like fighting windmills. There's a reason no one tries to tackle YouTube as a platform and only goes for certain niches.
And if it would be federated, there would be no cycle.

So I have YouTube premium but also have ad-blocker, for the first time yesterday I was noticing absolutely abysmal speeds on YouTube and I suspect this is why. I thought my computer was starting to shit the bed initially it was so brutal.

I have YouTube premium
Wow, so you pay them and they still screw you? Glad that’s a product I’ll never buy then!
- I have YouTube premium and an adblocker and I don’t have this problem. I’m skeptical that it’s related.
- I know, right? But I suppose their reasoning is that my ads are also blocked across the rest of their ecosystem, my subscription isn't covering those losses.
  Still though, a model that requires that customers look at something they don't want to nor will engage with smells like failure.
- Anecdotally at best. I know it's not what you want to hear, but you're making a conclusion based on something one person said.
I was wondering if this was coming. I don't use YouTube in-browser much if at all, so I don't see this. But I am not surprised. The fact that they're slowing down people who pay for premium is kind of an act of war. It shouldn't be a thing, and the fact that it's happening at all is a misstep on Google's part. Not that the whole slowing down people who use ad blockers isn't. But this will detrimentally affect adoption of premium subscribers which I thought was the last thing they'd want. Because they obviously don't make enough off ad revenue to support the platform. That's part of why they push premium so hard. They need more premium subscribers. This is idiocy.
- I can't remember what video I watched that talked about the unsustainabilty and likely the late stages of an ad revenue driven internet content model, and this situation reeks of that.
  I don't know what new paradigm might replace it if this is the case, but the current model feels like it's absolutely failing.
Ha! Serves you right
After getting premium I just switched the adblocker off for YouTube. Premium would be far too expensive if it didn't also include YouTube Music :-/
- uBlock Origin works on YouTube Music, too.
  If you want to throw a few bucks at the people providing you a service, then donate to an ad blocker for helping make the Internet a safer, better, and more user-friendly place. ...not the big fuckers like YouTube who are contributing to the enshitification of the entire web.
I have premium, uBlock Origin, and Mullvad VPN. In Firefox the other day, the stream was dying every 10-30 seconds. Like it would just stop and give me a spinner. I would have to "Copy URL at current time", open a new tab, and paste it in to get it to go any further. I do have bad internet, but this was nuts. And then I gave up and used Duck, and it played flawlessly in their embedded player.
Good job, Google.
If it happens again, I'll try disabling uBlock Origin on YouTube and see if it improves.

Oh no (continues to watch on freetube) anyway....

Revanced Extended ftw!
Alternative front ends are a god send.
What is freetube? (Sorry for the stupid question)
- One of many different "third party frontends" for YouTube which, amongst other things, cut out ads and avoid performance throttling.
  Personally I use one called NewPipe, and previously one called LibreTube. There are others too.
One of the few uYou+ users on iOS.

I know it's a pain, but what's to stop us from using download-clis? In theory I could "collect" the urls that are recommended to me from my home page, call the clis, click all the videos to update my recommendations then close the browser.
- I know it's a pain, but what's to stop us from using download-clis?
  The answer is right there.
- using the browser isn't necessary to keep your watch history up to date.
  yt-dlp can log in as you by reading your cookies from your browser, and, with the optional --mark-watched flag, mark your downloaded videos as watched in your YT account.
- Care to share any of the recommendations? I don't use YouTube often but would be happy to visit and use an alternative
Next step is guaranteed to be limiting the number of views without being logged in.
- I have YouTube premium. It still detects the adblocker. It's infuriating.
The no competition in the market, is the issue. Hope the situation improves in near future. With it innovations will gradually increase & the demand within the markets will point the directions.
- If everyone keeps expecting everything for free there will never be competition :)
I wish I could do the same thing with my 2008 VAIO laptop :/
Thank you for reminding me to get myself an invidious instance set up. It isn't a huge pain or anything, right?

I don't have an ad blocker, I just have the standard strict tracking protection enabled in Firefox. What's more, I pay for YouTube Premium. But still they add a five-second delay every time I visit a web page. It's infuriating.

Might as well just stop paying for premium then if they're going to ding you anyway.
there is no way the 5 second sleep before loading isnt anti competitive, because last i heard, unless they changed it, it only checks for the firefox user agent.
Actually insane that someone would willingly implement that.
Why pay when you can watch it for free without ads through piped video! Pirate everything, live for free!!
- If I were to guess, non-android smart tv. There are very few options if any for these TVs. Since I got my TCL google tv I just put smarttube on it and that was it, no more ads and cast still works. But can't do that with parents' old chromecast or lg TVs

Pornhub owns most of those alternatives.
- *Aylo
People dont really care where their content comes from, so long as it loads properly. But content creators dont want to migrate from the platforms they have all their followers on. If i have a decent YouTube channel that is large enough to be my primary income, I'm locked in because there is no real way to migrate all those followers over to a new platform. Nebula is the closest i think we have to a true YouTube competitor, but it's a tiny fraction of the user base and most Nebula videos are available on YouTube for free.
- Reputation, if you think Nintendo is copyright happy when people put their things on YouTube wait for it to be on “pornhub kids”
  LoL wouldn’t even let YouPorn’s team compete
People will pirate porn, they don’t care to pirate COD montages
- Use a different front end like piped video! All the content is free and no ads!

That's why Invidious exists.

Nationalize YouTube.

Specifically, nationalize the backend, Google can keep their website. And place it in the hands of something like the UN, rather than any specific country. I hardly trust Uncle Sam any more than Google's investors. They've successfully monopolized video hosting, now turn it into a public resource.

And open it up to the world, too. Google might get to keep their website, but everyone else can access the same database, too. May the best front end win.

Sorry to burst your little bubble but the UN charter specifically states it is an intergovernmental organization whose stated purposes are to maintain international peace and security, develop friendly relations among nations, achieve international cooperation, and serve as a centre for harmonizing the actions of nations.
As much as some may want to believe the UN is some sort of «Global Supreme Court», it is not. It mainly functions by consensus of all other nation (including those who explicitly chooses to abstain). Therefore, by making the UN somehow responsible for the “backend”, as you have said, or as the custodian of the entire repository/library of videos uploaded to YouTube, every member nations would then have their own priorities on what to "keep" and what to "remove" from the repository/library. Since the UN works principaly by consensus only a very small subset of all the videos will be kept as being universally non-controversial. Hence, the majority of videos will be irrecoverably erased.
Perhaps you meant a NGO (non-governmental organization) or a non-profit organization such as the Internet Archive. However, storage and maintenance for such a vast collection of large media (videos) is non-trivial and expensive that very few non-profit could administer.
Alternatively, with a fediverse-like protocol, everyone will be responsible to host their own videos and also videos they consider important/valuable to archive and/or help distribute. Thus, no single point of control and no need to "nationalize" YouTube. Of course it is hard and complex, nevertheless it is only the first step toward a more resilient and a more equitable video sharing/distribution infrastructure.
These are some very pretty words that express ideas without much self-reflection on why the ideas might be bad.
I mean, I suppose you did say it yourself that you can't trust the US government... but why would you trust ANY government? You know why I trust Google more than any government? I understand Google's motivations ($$$). Put something into the hands of government and suddenly that thing is burdened by the desires of every politician and their special interest financiers.
"Place it in the hands of something like the UN" would mean some international body I assume. Comprised of and led by whom exactly? And also, who would fund the thing? You suggest nationalization, so.. taxpayers? Sure, here's your $99/year Degooglebase access ~~fee~~ tax I guess? And beyond just making sure there's enough money to keep the lights on, we need to make sure there's enough money to pay creators. After all, YouTube isn't just a library. It's an economy larger than some countries and there would be consequences to destabilizing that economy. People aren't just posting content for the love of the shared experience.
Please don't take what I'm saying here to be a defense of Google. Google is a shitty company for so many reasons. But advocating for nationalization of YouTube is just a horrifically bad idea in such manner as it was presented.
But - all is not lost. First: for the creators you enjoy - find ways to support them other than Google. Make it possible for them to continue when YouTube stops being lucrative enough.
Second: find, use, and advocate for the use of alternative services. There is no single site that is going to be able to replace YouTube. It simply isn't going to happen unless PornHub wants to step up to the game and create their own SFW site YouTube-killer. They have the infrastructure and capacity to host and share absolutely massive amounts of video and have the business capabilities to accept income and pass it on to creators on a large scale. But that's an entirely different discussion.
Best to look at things differently. Like the Fediverse and the internet itself, it might be better off if the platform were distributed.
Curiously, that would mean a peer-tube network of server instances for which YouTube becomes a frontend.

Don't worry, YouTube, I won't be using your website anymore. But my yt-dl will be ripping max quality videos by the hundreds, just for shits and giggles.

Yarr harr, it's the pirate life for us!

And this is why we use Newpipe

Time and time again we can only conclude: Piracy is justified!
- Do people seriously think there's something wrong with doing that?

Anything better than listening 3 songs and getting 5 ads.

Stop being trash youtube. Be normal like you once were and i would actually consider a paid subscription IF i get to fully exclude shorts on my side of the platform.

Not at all a solution, but worth mentioning that in a YouTube URL you can replace /shorts/ with /v/ and get the normal player for the same video.
- I just want the short form content out of my life, but your tip might help others who dislike the player and not the video's.

I don't always click on a YouTube ad, but when I do it's a UI failure because it's an accidental click. How much do you want to bet this crackdown is a distraction from the fact their ad system doesn't perform as well as advertised?

Or it's just straight up hostile UI. They started camouflaging ads to blend in really well with random search results now! Infuriating.
- Speaking of which... Don't you just love how changing the volume on your phone causes the audio indicator to overlap the button that let's you skip ads?

Fuck YouTube

And Google. And Corporations.

Good things come to those who wait (and block ads)

Also I'd rather wait without ads than wait with ads, like what's the point?
- If you wait in front of an empty screen it's much more pleasant than being in front of visual and audio spam drilling into your head.
  It's of course true that YouTube can't support a website for free, so it would be the correct thing to watch some ads: problems arising are that (A) some ads are malicious (either as misinformation or as viruses or as links to those), (B) they've grown from a reasonable amount to an unreasonable one and often interrupted at the worst possible time)

If you run mpv https://url it will stream it from youtube and play it in mpv, without having to wait for the whole video to download first.
- And another win for free and open source software fellas!

Been using revanced, sometimes using Iceraven (ff fork) w/ ublock origin on phone, and using librewolf (another ff fork) also w/ ublock origin on desktop. So far never encountered slow down since November 2023.

Is this slow down only on select extension issue? Although when it first happend (late 2023) I was thrown up by sudden yt not loading on my librewolf but it only happend only on single day, afterward it gone.

I don't understand how anyone can put up with youtube without premium. Every time I visit a friends house I am shocked at the level of bullshit they are ok with. I'd pay a lot more than 10 bucks.

I'd happily pay for premium as I use YouTube religiously. But it's Google so fuck them, they already process my information in order to show me ads and profit off of my data. I think that's payment enough, so I'll just find any free way possible to watch YouTube without ads.
- so fuck them, they already process my information in order to show me ads and profit off of my data.
  So you don't have any services like Netflix, Hulu, etc? I can guarantee they do the same things in one way or another.
If I started waving little billboards in front of your face, how much would you pay me to go away?
- Do you have anything to offer besides the billboard in my face? If not, you get dropped.
- But muh free stuff
Youtube is my reminder on new browser installs to install Ublock Origin. And I saw this newest effort to block it once. Updated Ublock, restarted the browser and it was gone again.
I don’t understand how anyone can put up with youtube without premium
https://piped.video
I was a day 1 subscriber of Google Play Music All Access, which I converted into a family plan when that was available, and was told that the rate I was paying would be grandfathered in. I didn't like the switch to YouTube Music, but it did the job and came with ad-free YouTube, so I was okay with it.
But then they told me that they were changing the $14.99/mo I was paying to $22.99/mo despite being grandfathered in, a more than 50% increase, and I said fuck that. Unsubbed, swapped to Spotify, and never looked back.
Would I pay for just ad-free YouTube? Maybe. But not for almost $300 each year. I'm keeping Spotify, so if Google made a plan for no ads for like ...$1 or $2 per month?, maybe then I'd consider going back.
The end result now though is that I just use YouTube less.
- I was/am in the exact same boat, but share the subscription three ways (wife+brother) so the numbers are still somewhat favorable given our music and YouTube usage as a household.
Or just use an adblocker and save the $$
Easy: Just use the right browser and adblocker, and you basically have premium, but without the ads they still throw at you.

I remember when they first put ads in and people rebelled. Frogs in a pot because it's not like any of you will actually use peertube

People dont use Peertube because that guy over there doesn't use Peertube. Or that other guy. Other that person who makes content. I think you get the picture.
- It can rip content though

I am for sure one of the smaller number of people doing this, but I watch YouTube on my TV using the TV app. As a result I always had to watch ads. I wish I could avoid them. I suppose a could watch from an alternative and then AirPlay it to my TV, but that’s about it.

I bought a chromecast with google TV specifically for this purpose, with it you can download "SmartTube" and watch youtube completely ad-free
If you had an android device you'd be allowed to install an alternative YouTube app.
Changing your router DNS to something that blocks ads (or a pihole at home) and you'll never have to watch ads ever again, YouTube or elsewhere
- YouTube video ads can't be blocked with just DNS blocking unfortunately, they are served from the same hosts as YouTube videos.
- Of course this is possible but this involves more than just pihole. I'm running this with a combo of adaway + mikrotik router with port based NATing.
  People downvoting you are like the angrycry meme about the low to high IQ gauge.
- This doesn't work for many types of ads
- Does a network pihole block YouTube ads?
Just install smart tube
Same but with my PS5. But I don't think there's any way of getting an ad block on there

Man, it's wild to see Youtube kill themselves in real time.

They are going to be fine, we said the same thing when Netflix banned password sharing. People who still use YouTube don't care.
- Imagine still giving Netflix money after they consistently shit on their customers every single chance they get lol. What a bunch of suckers

I feel its slowing down Smarttube too, because I have to wait a few seconds for the video to start now. I don't know if it's a bug

I've noticed the same. Particularly tonight.

I do not care. I only watch 10 channels and these are in my favorites. I do not use the algorithm and thanks to European law the frontpage is deactivated. I also ever watch only one video per day and then do something else, so they can slow down the website as much as they want since I am not scrolling. I click on a channel and on a video, that's it. If it gets too bad I rather not use Youtube anymore, it is not the end of the world.

You tube is a central repository for hundreds of thousands of hours of learning. So while you might know everything is a great equalizer for those who are still learning
I mean this wholeheartedly and by no means do I mean to be rude or snarky. I'm glad that works for you but unfortunately there is a ton of us who have to use it for a huge list of things. I personally use it to learn how to fix or make things because for me I need a video for it. I use a bunch of work arounds and such but eventually this will become a bigger issue. Soon embedded videos will stop working for news websites and such at this rate.
- They're shooting themselves in the foot if embedded videos gets disabled.

User-Agent changer fixes this issue completely for me

I wish Mozilla would add the ability to set User-Agent for the different containers they offer in Firefox with their addon. Would be sweet to set it to Chrome in my YouTube container only.
Problem is, it shows the internet that there id a higher share of chromium browsers.
Which is bad.
- You're showing a google owned website though who cares lol.
So does Invidious

Try opening a link from Gmail in Firefox or searching Google for a specific piece of information. SSDD. Fuck Google. At this point they're in par with the evil Amazon.

Can someone create (or does it already exist?) an app that plays the videos in the background, remove the ads and then let you playback the whole video ad-free? Sort of like you did back in the VHS-days....

On Android, there's Newpipe which doesn't run ads, and Newpipe x Sponsorblock which clips ads out from the video. On desktop there is FreeTube which also has SponsorBlock you can turn on.
https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp allows you to download them and watch them on your leisure
You can get this same functionality with Youtube Revanced! Free on android! No Ads! Sponsorblock built in! Background playback! And more!
Last I checked, you can just download a youtube video. There are plenty of websites and some apps for that. No need to play it in the bacground.

deleted by creator

Wasn't this confirmed to be an AdBlock (Plus) bug? https://twitter.com/gorhill/status/1746263759495077919

because of People like you, the Services in these kinds of Countries gets more expensive for the People that actually live there.
Doesn't that idea fall apart when you get to the payment method? The payment service knows in which country your bank account or PayPal account is registered that isn't IP dependent right?
How do you pay for it? If I try to use a visa cc for an acct outside the US they demand I have a bank acct in that country and verify a deposit AMT.
I had one in Argentina for ages, until they pulled this trick

I’m not very tech savvy, my Adblock sometimes works and sometimes doesn’t. I’ve been using Firefox with extensions incognito for YouTube or I just avoid the site these days. I really liked it for music videos, since in unwilling to pay Spotify. So far my strategy is working.

Does it affect Invidious front-end as well?? I have been noticing that for a while now, but I thought maybe it is because the page doesn't use native yt js code to track video download. the same videos would load battery smooth when accessed through YT.

i feel like this has been going on for months now no? or maybe it's the fact that my laptop is 11 years old now lol

Never seen the "turn off your adblock prompt" because I never login to Google. Not that hard.