Mobile Ad Blocker Will No Longer Stop YouTube's Ads | Hacker News Reader

Mobile Ad Blocker Will No Longer Stop YouTube's Ads

gizmodo.com

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It's one of those things - they are totally in their right to do it, but I still think it sucks.

At the end of the day, both parties benefit: Youtube won't have to serve me videos for free and I'll gain back a bunch of free time.

At this point, I download all videos (Downie.app on Mac; it's awesome) and play them locally. The day I no longer have a workaround I will stop watching. I have enough other content to keep me going. Too much, really.

Just use NewPipe. It's just a better Youtube client even if it had ads.

https://newpipe.net/

Does it show the same video adds as YouTube?

There are no ads.

No, but this is entirely YouTube's fault as they don't offer any sort of API or method for third party apps to display ads.

I'm sure they don't out of concern about ad-fraud, but it would be funny if they had such an API, demanded third-parties used it, and didn't charge for/track those ad views.

I'm also quite a big fan of NewPipe. I just wish you could sort videos by views.

Seconding NewPipe. Though recently it's been unable to load comments and the error banner keeps popping up as a result (no comments may actually be a plus?)

I still use the regular Youtube app for shorts but NewPipe is definitely a better experience overall. My main gripes with the official Android Youtube client: - They made it so annoying to choose your video resolution (Seriously, who tested this and found it better than the old method?) - I can accept not being able to play in the background, but if you lock your screen while in fullscreen mode and then unlock it, there is a very noticeable lag before the app exits fullscreen mode, and in this period you cannot resume playback.

Youtube seems to be doing some A/B testing with the comment system which has made proxies like Invidious and yt-dlp/Newpipe unable to load comments. There is a patch for Invidious [1] which solves this problem but it is not in master yet. I tested it on my own instance and it does solve the problem.

[1] https://github.com/iv-org/invidious/pull/4576

Equivalent on iOS?

Just hoping I’ll be able to use ublock origin on Firefox once it’s available on an I dependent App Store…

Not a direct equal but https://github.com/iv-org/invidious is nice

> Equivalent on iOS?

Try Yattee [1]

[1] https://github.com/yattee/yattee

I tried using it for a while, but it always took forever to start loading the videos. It was significantly slower to the point of being annoying. I gave up.

Though in some cases it may take little longer time, it is very rare that the video never loads.If an issue like that happens, you can submit a proper bug report in GitHub with details, or from their in-app bug reporting process.

I remember once that the video never loaded.I went to their gh repo to find that the issue is already known, there were some api changes from google side.

Worth trying again, I use it daily and have never experienced that.

My experience with Newpipe has been disappointing.

It freezes about 1/3 of the way into every video

It fails to display comments.

It crashes constantly.

For me, the less-complicated client called "DVD" is more reliable for downloading than the client called "Newpipe"; the later stops working intermittently. YMMV.

Neither are as reliable as using own custom command line programs on desktop, or mobile via Termux. If Google makes a change I can fix/workaround immediately. No waiting for app developers.

For me, Newpipe works well as a Soundcloud client.

From the Kotlin source for "dvd":

Video downloader app powered by yt-dlp (formerly youtube-dl).

Features

Download video/audio from 1000+ sites supported by yt-dlp.

Run custom yt-dlp commands.

Update yt-dlp version from settings.

Share link via other apps.

References

dvd - https://github.com/yausername/dvd

youtubedl-android - https://github.com/yausername/youtubedl-android

yt-dlp - https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp (formerly youtube-dl - https://github.com/ytdl-org/youtube-dl)

> In October, YouTube made it nearly impossible to watch its website while using an ad blocker.

Did they revert that? I saw those for maybe a week. After that, I assume uBlock Origin had already worked around that. Probably the same will happen with mobile clients.

Same here. I don't know about mobile, but on desktop with uBlock Origin I see absolutely zero ads.

Firefox on Android has uBlock, and I see no ads. Just change the setting to ask to open in an external app.

I've never seen ads either, though I did see a total of one message saying I wasn't allowed to watch a video because I had an ad blocker.

Lately I've been seeing videos suddenly skip four or five seconds forward occasionally; it's possible that's related to an anti-adblocking effort of some kind.

It mostly impacted ABP users, because UBO just has a much faster turnaround on bypassing adblocker-blockers.

Ubo has been working hard to make sure you don't see it. YouTube keeps tweaking it's stuff so that the filters break, presumably on purpose.

Don't use Youtube without going through a proxy like Invidious [1] or Newpipe

Don't use {site} Search without going through a proxy like SearxNG [2]

Don't use TwiXXer without going through a proxy like Nitter - this has gotten more difficult lately but it still works as long as you feed the daemon some registered accounts. Video does not work at the moment but that seems to be fixable.

Don't use Reddit without going through a proxy like libreddit [4]

Start noticing the pattern? Maybe it is time to start producing promotional posters:

The only thing to come between you and ADS could be a proxy / ADS. I'ts just not worth the risk

ADS / New rules for a sane net / Sane net protects you, your partner and your community

A proxy here and a filter there, ADS nowhere

The more you tighten your grip, ${site}, the more viewers will slip through your fingers

[1] https://github.com/iv-org/invidious

[2] https://github.com/searxng/searxng

[3] https://github.com/zedeus/nitter

[4] https://github.com/libreddit/libreddit

Extremely misleading title, made worse with the HN autotrim. This is simply about YouTube de jure telling that ad-blocking is forbidden, which is just putting this previously-de facto policy in the legal realm. It's not even specifically for mobile devices: I'm not sure why the author of this article have linked it with mobile devices.

I think between Invidious and Freetube there are enough alternative feeds to to Youtube these days.

Sadly Youtube has been actively blocking Invidious instances for a while now. These days it only works for me ~50% of the time.

Freetube is getting 400 responses, too, and attempting to fallback on the Invidious API.

They're cracking down pretty hard.

If you're on Safari, use Vinegar¹ to substitute the YouTube player with a simple <video> tag. Ad-free and much more battery efficient.

The companion app Baking Soda² does the same for non-YouTube sites.

1. https://apps.apple.com/us/app/vinegar-tube-cleaner/id1591303...

2. https://apps.apple.com/us/app/baking-soda-tube-cleaner/id160...

MONOPOLY. If Youtube officially offers no public service anymore, it's time to vigorously prosecute them for this and their insane number of copyright violations.

If YT implemented a p2p option then I wouldn’t need to use their bandwidth and block ads. The world’s video library belongs to all. If you want to act as gatekeeper to all the knowledge so you can profit then we’ll work around it. But that’s just my opinion, man.

I watch hobbyists who upload interesting things just to share information, like how YT used to be. You can gatekeep ‘content creators’ like Jake Paul behind a paywall for all I give a shit.

You are delusional if you think ISP's will just lay down and take it when every one of their subscribers becomes a video CDN.

ISPs got a ton of free money from the government to set up internet infrastructure and have been milking taxpayer money without improving access significantly or reducing costs. They can accept it or get nationalized imo

They might complain, because that is what ISPs do, but they won't necessarily be that bad off. Popular content can be mostly circulated within their own network, saving peering bandwidth. This will be somewhat offset by less popular content that generates a bit extra outgoing traffic. The scale of YouTube would make the advantage much more pronounced than it has ever been for torrents.

Brave on iOS still have no issue with YT ads.

Personally I just pay for Youtube Premium. Yes it's $10/month but I found that if you watch alot of Youtube, it's well worth it. Now anytime I'm at friends house and an ad comes up before a video I'm always like "oh right Youtube has ads"

I'll never understand why people don't think twice paying for the array of streaming services (netflix, hulu, disney, apple, etc.) but the thought of paying for a service with creator profit sharing (and a majority share at that) is unthinkable.

I personally don't pay for any streaming service. Too damn expensive for the few shows I'd have any interest in, most of which aren't even available here, or would require me to subscribe to 5 different services. Along with that, I prefer having the highest bitrate versions possible available to me.

Which I can't with a legit service, as I don't usde HDMI.

I won't pay for Youtube, ever, because even if I pay, I still get sponsored segments in videos. To skip these, I have to get SponsorBlock so I might as well block ads too. Maybe if Youtube Premium also gave access to the same videos without sponsored segments I would reconsider.

The thing is Youtube screwed themselves years ago: they were dicks to content creators (by being overly agressive with demonetizing, even giving creators money to DMCA trolls and completely ignoring fair use laws) so they couldn't rely on ad money and had to fallback to sponsoring instead. The shit situation we're in today il all Youtube's fault.

On the other hand, I pay for Crunchyroll because it has a huge catalog for 5 bucks a month, and for Netflix because they never pissed me yet. However if they increase their subscription price one more time (>13.49€ per month), I'm out for good.

I already unsubscribed from Disney+ because they pissed me off by removing shows without any warning, and from Prime Video because I got tired of finding movies just to realize they weren't actually included in the subscription.

It's funny; I pay for lots of things, even other streaming services in order to not have ads, but I absolutely refuse to give YouTube a single penny. The difference is that every other service made the deal up front - pay X for content, pay Y for content and no ads, and here's the website and here are some mobile apps - while YouTube started out free for all with some really minor ads that you could block if you wanted and loads of 3rd party apps plus the website and 1st-party mobile apps, and then over time removed features from the free version and cranked the ads up to 11. Basically, if your selling point is "we made the free version worse" I don't want to reward that behavior.

Youtube has had ads since 2007. And complaining about it becoming harder to circumvent ads is silly. Youtube has a clear business proposition, and anyone is free to not use youtube.

Not like their is any real competition though, it only takes two second of business analysis to see that users want a video service where you foot all the costs and charge nothing (ads or subs) for it. Read about what happned to vid.me

I don't see the part of my comment where I said they didn't have ads. I did say that the ads were less awful.

Also... if you're free to not use them but they have a monopoly, are you free to not use them? Nobody's forcing you to use Standard Oil; you're totally free to just not have oil.

Youtube doesn't have a monopoly.

Nobody else wants to compete because just look at the comments in threads like this. Everyone is entitled to no-ads no-subscription. Again, read up on the story of vid.me, who actually was stealing market share from youtube for a while.

It sounds like you're describing why they have a monopoly. If you want to argue that they don't have one, you would need to point at an alternative with even remotely equivalent content. (Edit: Even a paid alternative would be interesting; last time I looked Nebula only served a tiny subset of equivalent content)

(There is perhaps an interesting discussion to be had in how they got/keep that monopoly; certainly I'm open to users not wanting to pay being a factor, but that seems like it would quickly devolve into "well Google dumped an absurd amount of money into them, killing off even the possibility of competitors" which is... even worse, in terms of being an unnatural monopoly)

Again, please read the story of vid.me

Youtube didn't kill vid.me, it's entitled user did.

For me, I use revanced in large part just for the removal of shitty "features" such as shorts.

Also, I really don't like double ads before vids and such. So I am happy with revanced.

I'm in a similar boat, in that I won't pay Google for anything because they push technology that is not in my interest.

I currently spend way more on patreon then I would with YouTube premium. And I sincerely hope that that always remains ad free.

What country? It's $14/mo in the US now, or $23/mo for a family plan.

I wish they would unbundle the stupid Youtube Music from Premium.

But uBlock with browser that supports it still does :-)

(If you have android, try kiwi browser if you haven't - it's chrome based and you can use regular extensions with it)

If you have Android use Firefox, you can use extensions with it and get real uBlock Origin which does what it is supposed to. Add something like Privacy Redirect pointed at a number of service proxies (Youtube->Invidious, Reddit->libreddit, TwiXXer->Nitter (need a private instance for now), Search->SearxNG, etc) and you're close to ad-free.

Yes, I also use "real" uBlock origin with kiwi browser. It's exactly the same addon as the computer one installed via chrome store.

https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/uBlock-Origin-works-b...

Eh, if I have issues watching Youtube, I'll just watch less Youtube. My time would be much better spent in other places anyway.

> We want to emphasize that our terms don’t allow third-party apps to turn off ads because that prevents the creator from being rewarded for viewership, and Ads on YouTube help support creators and let billions of people around the world use the streaming service.

Ah yes, it’s all about the creators, you see. The money Google makes from it has nothing to do with it, no siree. As we all know, Google’s magnanimity always puts the creators first, and that is why every creator is so thankful to YouTube and no one has ever complained or criticised the platform. Hooray!

Why can’t it be both? You don’t expect them to provide Youtube for free do you? Also if they don’t profit how do you want them to monetize the creators? Don’t get me wrong I hate the ads, but the problem is there has to be some kind of profits for them or for anyone else to run a platform and not just youtube no?

> You don’t expect them to provide Youtube for free do you?

I don't expect for monopolists (of search, of ad, and also of video markets) to be given free rein to impose whatever terms they want. They provide me nothing for free, they are selling me

Which free rein? They enforce the one thing that pays them by forcing us to watch ads on their platform is not free rein. Also which monopolies? For ads theres bing, DDG, Kagi and many others same as Youtube, I think, they have become so big because they historically provided a better service and people chose them as the main one. I don’t get much of what you are saying.

> You don’t expect them to provide Youtube for free do you?

Most people I know do expect that. They don't care about the economics of it.

My objection isn’t that YouTube makes a profit for Google, but that in their statement they skirt around that truth. They only mention the creators and word it as if that’s the reason they crack down on adblockers, when we all know that’s not the whole story. Own up to it!

What I’m objecting to is them being disingenuous.

I think Youtube got caught offguard a bit by creators making in-video ads and sponsorships a few years ago. They don't get a cut of that, and it softens the blow of people who do use Adblock.

I use SponsorBlock for those. The issue I have is that YouTube and sponsored creators want to take up so much of my time. YouTube videos are already too long and filled with boilerplate nonsense.

Adblocking on YouTube is a security requirement given how much fraud and malware is advertised on YouTube.

I'll disable my AdBlocker when YouTube stops trying to sell me crypto currencies from supposedly Elon Musk.

Revanced is absolutely amazing, just saying.

> mobile ad-blocking apps may result in buffering issues

That seems like a rather gaslighting passive aggressive approach.

If the video content is loaded from the same place as the ads, and the blockers are blocking the source, that statement would make sense. I'm not sure it's gaslighting. Passive aggressive? Maybe but the point is to tell you not to do this so perhaps that's justified?

"Buffering issues" implies the video would take longer to load, or have to pause during playback to load more of the video. Blocking the servers providing the video content would mainly result in a complete inability to play the video.

This is called “throttling”, no?

YouTube Premium (which avoids ads and still pays creators, plus offers downloads) is $14/month.

Put another way, let’s say the average Hacker News commentator makes $150k/year or $75/hour, that’s less than 15 minutes of work.

Just reeks of “I don’t believe tipping is fair to workers, that’s why I don’t tip.”

Edit: downvoted in less than a minute, haha

Why are you conflating the extremely broken tipping culture/minimum wage system in the US and a multi-billion-dollar company's revenue strategy?

Why are people unwilling to pay creators (in attention or dollars) for making the content they watch? It’s the same with piracy. It was one thing when the content was simply unavailable, now most content is available via a streaming service for an incredibly cheap per monthly cost.

I pay the creators I care about, but I do it through Patreon, not Youtube. Of those $14 of Youtube subscription fees, approximately $0 would go to the creators I care about. If Youtube made some guarantee that the money I spent would only go to the creators I watch, I'd subscribe instantly.

https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/6306276?hl=en#:~:t....

“Revenue from YouTube Premium membership fees is distributed to video creators based on how much members watch your content. As with our advertising business, the majority of the revenue will go to our partners.“

That sure sounds like they divvy up the money based on total viewership, not my individual viewership. I don't like the thought of a large chunk of my subscription money going to channels I don't personally watch.

> If Youtube made some guarantee that the money I spent would only go to the creators I watch, I'd subscribe instantly.

Do you mean that all $14 would go to creators you watch, or do you mean that whatever fraction of that $14 goes to creators after YouTube takes their cut only goes to creators you watch?

I meant the latter; I'm fine with Youtube getting a cut, I'm not fine with Mr. Beast getting a cut.

Youtube gives 55% of your sub to the creators whose videos you watch. It is not at all like spotify.

Because those creators I actually care about, I throw a few bucks on a platform that gives them a much better cut than youtube does.

I agree with your statement, but the tipping thing is totally unrelated. Youtube pays creators for the content they produce (via ad-share or premium sub share). There is no tipping in the loop here.

It’s the mentality. Many of the people that don’t tip aren’t really doing it because they disagree with tipping, they’re doing it because they cheap.

I don't tip (except for the classically tipped positions) because it is not on me to pay for employees. If the business owner wants to pay their employees more, they can raise prices to do so, and I can decide if I want to pay those prices or go elsewhere.

Tipping has just become a way for businesses to pay employees less and promising more while offloading all the guilt onto customers. No thanks.

For US users who are interested, paying annually discounts it to $11.66/mo. Comes with YT Music for better or worse (I rarely use that side of the membership).

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