Submitted 1 year ago by ijeff@lemdro.id to technology@lemmy.world
https://www.androidauthority.com/youtube-ad-block-installs-3382289/
cross-posted from: lemdro.id/post/2883134 (!android@lemdro.id)
I’m guessing this isn’t what YouTube had in mind when they started this campaign.
To quote The Joker, “It’ll be funny if it weren’t so pathetic…oh, what the heck, I’ll laugh anyways!” 🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣
I just wonder how much of Chome’s browser share Google is willing to lose over this.
The article mentions people moving from Chrome to Edge to try and get around this. With how ubiquitous Chromium is as an engine behind a wide range of browsers, it seems most people won’t actually move away from a browser that Google has some control over.
IMO, one of the best Chromium based browsers is Vivaldi.
There’s more than this but these are the big names.
Firefox with ublock / Libretube / Libretube with Sponsorblock / Newpipe / Piped website if not on mobile.
Does any of those support YouTube shorts?
Firefox with ublock without any problems, and on my smart tv with smarttubenext I see them as well.
Newpipe on android doesn’t seem to show them, but I haven’t really looked for it either, maybe I’m just missing a setting somewhere.
Yes / yes / yes / yes / no / yes
Shorts are basically YouTube videos forced into a custom UI. There are still ways to force Shorts to load in the default UI.
Hah. Eat shit and die youtube.
I really like freetube on desktop, since I have liked the move towards less dependency on accounts. And freetube let’s me have a custom feed without needing an account.
And I love the built in sponsorblock and channel blocking feature too.
+1 for FreeTube. It’s so customizable. Besides the ad blocking and sponsor blocking by default, there are SO MANY features and interface improvements. Never going back.
The only problem I have with it is I can’t like videos. As much as people push it, I still want to do it for the people I watch.
But that’s not worth dealing with Youtube’s BS
Someone please add a vivaldi-like tab tiling feature in Firefox so I can switch to it and leave the chromium cancer away.
Hey using Firefox here too, but why Chromium is so bad?
I didn’t have ublock installed on my machines. I’d removed it a year ago because it was breaking sites and my pihole does a pretty good job, but I kept getting pop ups from sites about “turning off my adblocker”. I didn’t have an adblocker running. I was using vanilla firefox. I got so irritated, I looked up how to get rid of those messages and everything pointed me to ublock.
So, shout out to thinkgeek for reminding me what its like to browse the web without a ton of ads. If it wasn’t for your annoying popup about my non-existent adblocker, I would never have installed an adblocker.
Oh, and I hadn’t realized how awful youtube became over the last year or so with the ads. I was just dealing with it like an asshole. When I put ublock back on, my enjoyment of youtube shot up!
I was considering paying for premium too because I want to normalize paying for content and supporting things I like on the web. But I was struggling with the decision because usually you either pay with your data or pay with money. In this case I know I’d be doing both since Google will gladly take my money and also hoover up my data. Then they jacked the rates up to $14 a month…and now I have ublock installed again.
Its still a problem with the apps on my phone and appletv’s though. If they made it $4.99/mo I’d probably fork it over but $14 is more than my other streaming services and they create their own content. Youtube just hosts content.
you said you weren’t using an Ad Blocker but getting pop-ups saying you were. it’s because the pi-hole is blocking ads at a DNS level so the site detects that and sends that message instead.
uBlock will block the whole visual element FTW.
God, how far Thinkgeek has fallen. Why would a retail site even need ads? You already there to do shopping. I don’t think I’ve bought anything since they got bought out.
Oh, and I hadn’t realized how awful youtube became over the last year or so with the ads. I was just dealing with it like an asshole. When I put ublock back on, my enjoyment of youtube shot up!
Try getting some kind of sponsorblock, too. I didn’t realize how annoying those little messages were until I didn’t have to manually speed through them.
If you have an android phone you can look to NewPipe.
How did YouTube become the monopoly it is? Seems they were always riding Vimeo’s coattails and have been rewarded handsomely for it.
How did YouTube become the monopoly it is?
Back then Google was “do no evil”, and they had the infrastructure and the finances to support an endeavor like YouTube.
Google was willing to lose money for awhile.
indeed, this is this unfair advantage to these silicon valley behemots.
Storage, YouTube has way more data (crap) uploaded to it than vimeo.
From my perspective it was ease of use. I remember back in the day ( ~2009 ) that youtube became the defacto standard because its ui was simple, it loaded quickly, it was straight to the point, free, didnt require login and you could upload content straight from your android phone after recording it. So sharing was pretty much instant.
After that they came up with policies to help people create actual content ( reward content that had thought put into it, reward creators etc ) which helped with the rise of quality content and make youtube in the youtube it was today.
Vimeo is not for the same purpose. It’s more B2B. I read somewhere that after a certain threshold they start billing you for views.
On windows, Firefox + uBlock Origin. On Mac and iOS, Safari + Adguard.
But it does not help against YouTube ads trough
i have yet to see a single anti-adblock pop-up on youtube lmao
Me neither. I’ve tested Brave, Firefox and LibreWolf+uBlock Origin on desktop. Nothing. Firefox, Iceraven, Brave and NewPipe on Android. Still nothing.
What gives?
Well, besides YouTube giving us videos without ads…
I was getting them on chrome starting a couple of weeks ago. They have gotten more aggressive over time. I switched to Firefox with ublock and I have not received a single message
I’ve switched to Opera One and haven’t seen any personally. Been pretty great.
I got them on Firefox with Ublock Origin but only with my VPN on US or Canadian servers. Then a few days later, even on those servers they disappeared. Haven’t seen one since those first few.
Send email to your fav. Youtubers to start a channel on Odyssey. Hope we get a comparable alternative. Odyssey is pretty good. Load time is less and video quality is great. Just need content creators. Does anyone know if Odyssey pays its content creators?
Like a week ago, the company behind Odyssey lost a lawsuit and will be shutting down. As of now, no one knows what happens to Odyssey in the future. Maybe some other company buys it and continues to run it. Maybe it changes into something totally different. Maybe it just shuts down.
Odysee is based on Lbry, so content creators can get crypto that is openly tradeable for regular money. So yes.
Anything that get even near crypto might make a lot of content creators think twice before moving. I know I would.
content creators can get crypto that is openly tradeable for regular money
So no.
Odyssey, kick , rumble etc all need apps on motr devices
Thanks. Now I know kick and rumble exist. Can you share the link please
Tried it. The front page is nothing but conspiracy and crypto bullshit. So no, thanks.
Streisand effect
What prevents them from going in video adds? Technically difficult? Or what?
In video ads = no relevant ads based on the user. Less relevant ads = less revenue generated for people paying YouTube for hosting those ads. Thus, people would pay less to YouTube to host ads. Thus, less profits for YouTube.
Plus as another dude said: Sponsorblock.
I think it wouldn’t be that dificult to figure out what is interesting for people watching the video since channels themselves already usually have a target audience. If I am watching a video from a dude who focus on video games or tech odds are I’d be more interested in tech adds. But if Google REALLY wants to know what we need/want then yeah maybe you’re right. Shit it happened so many times me just saying the word pizza or shoes/snickersnwoyld set off a pizza ad later in my phone. These mfers want to inject ads on our souls.
There’s no reason they can’t mix relevant ads in the video stream itself. It’s just technically more expensive and complex.
Why can’t YouTube just render the video on the fly with the relevant add?
In video ads, even those by the content creators themselves, can generally be dealt with using SponsorBlock. This is community driven, users mark the segment of the video that’s just sponsor filler or credits or whatever.
You can even get a NewPipe fork that includes SponsorBlock.
jesus christ dude
I think doing that with programmatic ads would be difficult. Maybe hard coding a specific creative would be feasible.
They think they can do whatever they want but companies have been shown wrong time and time again.
ADGUARD FOR DESKTOP! LOAD IT WITH ANTI-ADBLOCK KILLER!
ADNAUSEAM!
Sorry. I have Tourette’s syndrome. I can’t help but scream the names of random software.
YOUTUBE SEARCH! COBRA EFFECT ADBLOCKERS!
Seriously just use invidious. Ad-free + doesn’t hard consume your resources
Yeah you heard them - Firefox.
Lmao
Cry more, google
Controversial take but:
As for myself personally, I watched YouTube with ads for the last 2 or 3 years, and more recently I decided to start playing for YouTube Premium.
YouTube Premium made sense for me because:
Before all of that, I used to use YouTube Vanced (RIP) and NewPipe, both great though not entirely legit ways of bypassing ads and downloading videos. I still use the latter to archive the really good content I come across.
If you’re ok to pay for YouTube, but it’s too expensive for the value you get out of it, there are alternative approaches. You can spoof your location and buy YouTube Premium in another country, like Turkey or India, and get it for as low as $2 a month. Google doesn’t crack down on this much at the time of writing.
YouTube provides two ways to “pay” for your content: with ads, or by paying for premium.
Not quite, unfortunately. You can pay by watching ads in addition to being surveiled, or by paying for premium and being surveiled potentially even harder (because you have to have an account with personal and payment information). Google does not stop tracking you and selling your profile just because you pay for Premium, so it’s not an option for me.
I hadn’t thought of it from a privacy perspective.
I couldn’t imagine using YouTube not signed in because of the dogs**t recommendations you get then. I imagine if you’re signed in the privacy loss is not significantly less than if you paid for Premium too.
I also use GMail so I’m already f***ed from that. I’ve basically given up on privacy at any other time than when I want to do private things, and I use a VPN and private browser.
They’re absolutely within their rights to try and block ad-blockers. And users are fully within their rights to circumvent the blocks in order to protect their privacy and the security of their machines and the data on them, as Google has proven repeatedly to be either uncaring or incompetent when it comes to ensuring the ads they serve aren’t spreading malware.
And users are fully within their rights to circumvent the blocks
This is factually false (depending on your country).
From a quick Google search (ironic) the following seems to be true:
And blocking is not, in itself, illegal. However, circumventing restrictions on content, like what YouTube has added recently, is.
See this article
I can understand your point of view. I was grandfathered in at $16 a month for the family plan for years since I was around from the beginning. Then I got an email telling me it’s going up to $22 a month. I used premium for music and ad free only. I don’t care about movies or anything else. I would still happily be paying for premium today at the understandable $16 dollars but they got greedy so now I use Revanced and pay nothing. I am also trying out Grayjay since it combines a lot of platforms.
Oh wow that really is expensive. Americans do make more money on average than Europeans, but goddamn does your stuff cost a lot of money sometimes.
I think it’s €15 here?
Idk if others are unaware, but there is a simple way to just google a video and not get ads. That is all i will say.
Umm no, NewPipe is not a website. That would be invidious/piped.
Vivaldi’s stock built in ad blocking has still been working for me, have yet to see an ad.
Honestly, Google did this to themselves with not properly vetting the advertisers that they sell space to, and with oversaturation of ads.
If they’d have stopped granting ad space to scammers and malware spreaders, and if they’d have stopped adding advertisements at the line most people find tolerable (which seems to be a single ad between videos… not multiple at a time, and certainly no mid-rolls), they wouldn’t have triggered quite the level of ad blocking that they did.
I see this “problem” that they have to be entirely of their own making.
YouTube is like a time killing drug. I’m trying to get rid of it. Any advice?
Books aren’t feeding as much off of the FOMO angle of stuff
NewPipe, just see what you want to see
I just made my own extension to get rid of ads. I didn’t want to wait for other blockers to figure it out so I found a way that worked for me.
But yeah, get fucked YouTube.
Technology circumvention and copyright infringement are just about the only power consumers have against the near monopolies and cartel like behavior from the tech/media industry since our government regulators have been neutered.
I am grandfathered into a family Premium plan from the old Youtube Red days. The price is close to doubling come April. In the absence of competition or government intervention to punish anti-compeitive, anti-consumer behaviour I will be relying on ad-blocking and other circumvention measures for a service I have always been willing to pay a fair price to obtain. The executives running these companies are completely disconnected from reality.
YouTube will win this battle.
but i saw another article saying that adblocker usage dropped by like … meh i dunno 80% or some awful figure that I didn’t want to believe.
i’d rather live in the version of the world where this one is true, that nobody is installing adblockers, but i know better (sometimes) than to simply succumb to confirmation bias…
if youtube were smart though, it’d make ads less shitty, intrusive, and obnoxious.
Next logical step is to modify the uploaded video itself to contain ads around the video frame or on automatically detected clear surfaces in the video.
memoirsofthedead@lemm.ee 1 year ago
So the article.claims that Youtube’s plan backfired because uninstall rates on some AD blockers increased and a percentage of those users cited “YouTube” as the reason.
I don’t know if it’s just me but that’s a massive stretch. I would like to hear numbers from YouTube themselves before jumping to any conclusions. These companies operate on scale and usually have enough data to back these decisions. Can it go wrong, sure. Has it already backfired. Not sure.