YouTube crackdown leads to ‘hundreds of thousands’ of ad blocker uninstalls | Hacker News Reader

YouTube crackdown leads to ‘hundreds of thousands’ of ad blocker uninstalls

9to5google.com

21 pointsmikece45 comments

Funny, my wife asked me why people are so annoyed by ads. She didn't know about our pihole. I VPNed around it, and...she understands.

One of my students came to me with a question. She had a browser window open, sidebar filled with blinking, animated ads. How do people stand it?

The ad industry consists of parasites, sucking people's attention. Today, most people are free of physical parasites (worms, fleas, lice, etc.) Maybe someday soon we can eradicate advertisers?

On Firefox, uBO and AdGuard don't appear to be doing badly despite the crackdown these last few weeks. ABP has being declining in popularity for years, 7.75M users in 2020 and now down to only 4.22M (-3.53M). Since 2020, uBO has gained 2.25M users.

ABP [1] (Oct 18th - Nov 3rd): -16707

uBO [2] (Oct 18th - Nov 3rd): +197610

AdGuard [3] (Oct 16th - Nov 3rd): +11258

[1]: https://web.archive.org/web/20230000000000*/https://addons.m...

[2]: https://web.archive.org/web/20230000000000*/https://addons.m...

[3]: https://web.archive.org/web/20230000000000*/https://addons.m...

I found that adblocker when paired with uBO actually circumvented the uBO filters specifically for the premium spam. So after disabling adblocker uBlock was free to do it's thing. Very strange but uBO seems to do everything now with a good filter list.

Am I the only one paying for Youtube Premium?

Everyone's always saying "if you aren't paying you are the product", but Google actually offers an easy way to pay to not get any ads!

Unfortunately you still get the ads -- sorry, sponsorships -- baked into the videos, but the obnoxious interruptions and scummy links are all gone for 14€/month. Compared to Netflix this seems like a fantastic deal, there's so much more stuff on Youtube than on Netflix.

Or is it because Youtube used to be free that people just don't want to pay for it?

I don't agree with this sort of advertising as a business model. I don't like being extorted to not see ads. I don't agree with the assumption that me watching youtube without such invasive advertising is a valueless proposition for youtube, given what has been argued to mean value in shareholder meetings over the years. I don't like this idea that I must accept a firehose of data that I have no interest in, that I am not allowed to filter what renders on my own machine. I also don't agree that a 1.62 trillion dollar company now needs to start penny pinching.

How are you being extorted? Who is forcing you to watch Youtube videos?

Unfortunately for youtube, they have positioned themselves as a de facto public utility now that things like local council meeting recordings and even federal announcements go directly onto their platform, not to mention things like conference recordings, school lectures, job training videos, the works. So yes, in theory, sometimes you very well can be forced to watch youtube at this point in time. We are no longer in the age where youtube was merely one of many equivocally popular media hosting sites on the internet. They have eliminated nearly all competition and monopolized most video hosting.

The stuff on YouTube is very low quality and not worth my money. Google also interferes too much in what people can and can't say on it, so you have history channel's avoiding saying wrong words like Hitler or COVID. And no I'm not a conspiracy theorist but google is pretty much convinced only tin hatters think about such things. And the way they comply with DMCA is so insane I refuse to reward that with my hard earned cash.

And if the video is good, I'd rather pay the channel maker itself rather than have the web hoster take a cut of it.

Video hosting is expensive because they have petabytes of videos no one watches hosted on their servers. It's not my fault they can't have decent budgeting skills or any customer support.

If you think the stuff on YouTube is low quality, you might not be watching the right content.

I am constantly shocked at how much awe inspiring, educational, or creative content you can find for free on YouTube.

Pay $42.99/month or watch multiple low quality garbage advertisements per video. I assume Google is using the carrot and stick method?

Not sure where that number comes from. I'm a happy subscriber and it's $14/month and comes with YouTube Music.

It's not the ads that I care about (as much). I would pay (and do - eg. Kagi) to not be tracked and profiled.

Youtube doesn't offer a way to pay to opt out of tracking and profiling and even if they did, no one would believe it because its fundamentally at odds with its business model.

YouTube is still free. You can access the same content (just with ads) by paying nothing at all, so the fact that there is more content than Netflix is beside the point. You aren't paying for access to the content; you are just paying for no ads and for the other features included in YouTube Premium.

I am trying out YouTube Premium (halfway through a three-month trial). I disabled adblocking a month before I started the trial because I wanted to do a fair comparison and see if YouTube Premium is really that much better than the base experience.

I have concluded, for me, it is not. I have found that I don't really use any of the other features besides the ad removal.

YouTube Premium also introduces some annoyances. For example, it bugs me to use the music service whenever I navigate to a music video. It also requires me to install an app to download videos (which means I can't download videos on my laptop, which is where I really wanted them for offline viewing), and I have found that I don't like the app due to some UX isses.

They want $18 AUD for this. I would maybe pay $10-12 AUD, but any more than that feels like a rip off. I would rather watch ads than pay that much.

(Of course, in reality, I will just re-enable adblock once I cancel, and it will be a better experience than YouTube Premium.)

I will never give YouTube money to stop showing me ads because YouTube isn't going to stop building an ad profile for me based on my watch history.

To pay to remove ads feels like paying YouTube for the privilege of getting my data tracked. At least with ads I know what they think about me.

I also understand this is an illogical and personal conviction so most others likely won't agree with me lol

Soon: 'hundreds of thousands' of ad blockers reinstalled as people discover the state of the web without one.

The source of this article appears to be https://www.wired.com/story/youtubes-ad-blocker-crackdown-sp...

See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38128765 (3 hours ago, 151 comments)

And how many people reduced the number of subscriptions by 90% and their video watch time by roughly the same amount?

I don't know, but it's at least one.

Two. Those particular ads are so intrusive and annoying that I never finish a video. I’d like to figure out a way to youtube-dl just by clicking the video link.

Haven't tried it on YouTube in the past few months, but the VideoDownloadHelper browser extension is shockingly effective despite maybe looking a bit sketchy https://www.downloadhelper.net/

At least two, and I expect many more to follow. It'd be great to have some other platforms to emerge (back), as this quasi Monopoly doesn't seem very healthy to me

They tried that on my 15 years old account, then they reverted it back because I could still watch them in incognito windows, or stopped completely watching Youtube.

I am not very profitable to them anyway, but they appear to test you for a couple of days and see how you would react.

uBO on Firefox is still giving me ad free YT like it always has. When and if that changes, I'll stop watching YT. Nothing there is worth watching ads for IMHO.

YT is still performing A/B testing. So probably your on group A.

And I agree. Instant tab closure at any advert. I'm not going to watch five seconds of adverts on a 15 year old video of 30 seconds.

Sponsors, I'm fine with.

I'm in group B. The ads definitely make it harder to perform "mindless scrolling", but if I actually "need" to watch a video (e.g. a setup video for a product purchased recently) I'll just eat shit and watch the ads.

My favorite thing to do is mute unskippable ads (like on the Youtube app on my TV). Just cuz I can't skip it doesn't mean I have to actually listen or watch!

I only started getting hit a few days ago

I mean, I totally feel you. At the same time, I'm fine with a few ads. But holy balls, YouTube throws so many at you, it's unbearable. And it's the same ones over and over and over. Do they not have very many advertisers, or what? Also, I'm not going to be forced into paying for Premium, especially when they're still making billions of dollars in profit every year. They just need to keep making MORE money. Then after that, EVEN MORE. I mean for no real reason at all, they've jacked up the price of premium twice just recently...

It's like back in the day, a banner ad didn't really bother me. But 52 blinking ads all over everything with one paragraph of real text? Fucking bullshit. Just like YouTube.

Ad marketplace is a hell of a thing. Advertisers want your specific demographic and they’ll pay to dollar compared to others. So you see 4 companies ads 1000 times

I have ABP on my phone, it usually allows 1-2 ads at the beginning of the vid but no interruptions. If i ever get them i simply do not watch the video, i already hate to watch a 15min video that explains something that could be written in 3 paragraphs. Does people not read anymore?

Youtube encouraging people to uninstall adblockers at all is going to do a number on general network security in the population, isn't it?

To say nothing of the climate cost of the massive waste of compute rendering an ad about tide laundry detergent on millions of cpus.

Uninstalled? Not just turned off on youtube? I'm surprised.

So tl;dr they uninstalled a shitty ad blocker and probably install uBlock origin

Somewhat related, YouTube seemingly fixed an issue with this event which had been giving me ad free viewing without an adblocker everywhere i was logged in. I essentially had premium for free for 4-5 years.

I wonder how many other accounts experienced this which are now being served ads again.

You might have just been in a small holdback group. Not getting the same experience as others doesn't always mean it was an accident on their part.

4-5 years in a group specificly with no adverts.. from a company who's business model is ad revenue.. seems unlikely!

I just want to say that there are ways to watch youtube without ads that don't involve adblockers and vpns. Hint: it just works for me without ads by default and I am in the US. It's nothing fancy but I won't advertise it so they won't crack down.

Oh interesting, i too had been experiencing no ads but what they did recently caused me to get them again. I could never figure how i caused it to happen. Good to know it is/was purposefully causable.

Yeah, it's not hard. I've got an app on my phone and plug that redirects to a different front end on desktop. It all just works

You are a bad rabbit :)

Invidious gets around the ads. You can even just run it locally without hosting

You can pry uBlock from my cold, dead hands.

I'll continue smashing that "Purge all caches" button for as long as I need. And I will not pay to watch content that was provided to YouTube for free.

[dupe]

More discussion over here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38128765

Why uninstall when you can disable it just for yt and keep for everything else...

Because you're in the middle of trying out a new adblocker

Reply on news.ycombinator.com