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YouTube tests blocking videos unless you disable ad blockers

bleepingcomputer.com

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Re: YouTube tests blocking videos unless you disable ad blockers

#911

Post by zdragnar »

blakesterz wrote: post #901

It really surprises me that they DON'T do this for everyone yet. Is it a technical thing? Is it hard to detect blockers for them? Are they afraid of losing views? Genuinely curious what's holding them back at this point.

Given that they have the largest analytics platform, they should be able to fairly easily see that sites that employ adblocker blockers suffer very high bounce rates for visits coming from search.

Personally, I would absolutely stop going to youtube if they tried to block me from visiting while my adblocker is active.

Re: YouTube tests blocking videos unless you disable ad blockers

#912

Post by Oxodao »

blakesterz wrote: post #901

It really surprises me that they DON'T do this for everyone yet. Is it a technical thing? Is it hard to detect blockers for them? Are they afraid of losing views? Genuinely curious what's holding them back at this point.

A/B testing. They're doing this for everything, a few months ago they blocked videos to 3rd party apps (Newpipe, Revanced, ...) only for certain accounts in certain countries

Re: YouTube tests blocking videos unless you disable ad blockers

#914

Post by squaresmile »

blakesterz wrote: post #901

It really surprises me that they DON'T do this for everyone yet. Is it a technical thing? Is it hard to detect blockers for them? Are they afraid of losing views? Genuinely curious what's holding them back at this point.

Maybe manifest v2 will be removed for real soon.

Re: YouTube tests blocking videos unless you disable ad blockers

#915

Post by inetknght »

kingstoned wrote: post #908

What is the best way to detect if a user has enabled uBlock or Adblock? I wanted to do it for a project I'm working on, but many solutions fail.

> What is the best way to detect if a user has enabled uBlock or Adblock?

1. Don't.

2. If the user blocks your advertisements, then the user doesn't want them. You should respect the user's desires.

3. If the user blocks your scripts, then the user doesn't want them. You should respect the user's desires.

4. If your site breaks because of things, then your site sucks. You should build your site to fail gracefully.

Re: YouTube tests blocking videos unless you disable ad blockers

#916

Post by iLoveOncall »

Yiin wrote: post #909
techwiz137 wrote: post #904

They will try and fail. The solution that will be left...is one that many will not like, especially if your personal and/or work email is on Google.

Inserting ads directly into the video stream doesn't seem to be counterable, no? It's not cheap, but might be worth it.

I've seen a browser extension that analyzes the video using AI to detect the sponsored segments, so detecting the ads would be probably even easier since they are even more disconnected from the normal content than sponsors.

Re: YouTube tests blocking videos unless you disable ad blockers

#917

Post by runtime_blues »

john___matrix wrote: post #905

To be fair, YT Premium is one of the few subscriptions I think is a no-brainer and good value for money. Sometimes when I've forgotten to log in and see what it's like without, it's amazing anyone can watch videos on there. Like a lot of people I've generally been OK to watch ads in exchange for free content but it seems over the years instead of ads getting better and/or more relevant to my interests (even broadly),…

As the old saying goes, good ideas shouldn't require force. If they have a "no-brainer" offering, no need to strong-arm people into using it, right?

I get it that they are not a charity and can monetize or paywall their platforms as seen fit, but there's something just sad about the model where you build a customer-friendly and open platform, then progressively crapify it once you capture a niche and eliminate most alternatives, and then start penalizing users for trying to work around that.

Re: YouTube tests blocking videos unless you disable ad blockers

#918

Post by carlosjobim »

zdragnar wrote: post #911
blakesterz wrote: post #901

It really surprises me that they DON'T do this for everyone yet. Is it a technical thing? Is it hard to detect blockers for them? Are they afraid of losing views? Genuinely curious what's holding them back at this point.

Given that they have the largest analytics platform, they should be able to fairly easily see that sites that employ adblocker blockers suffer very high bounce rates for visits coming from search. Personally, I would absolutely stop going to youtube if they tried to block me from visiting while my adblocker is active.

Exactly, they should want those people to bounce and not come back.

Re: YouTube tests blocking videos unless you disable ad blockers

#919

Post by Reason077 »

I think they’ve been testing this for a while. Noticed a couple of ads slipping through uBlock on Mac Safari a few months back. Haven’t seen it happen recently, though.

Personally I don’t mind a few ads, but the volume of them was just getting completely out of control for a while there on YouTube. It’s what prompted me to finally install an ad blocker!!

Re: YouTube tests blocking videos unless you disable ad blockers

#920

Post by htrp »

On a related note, I hate how A/B testing has become an excuse to aggravate a subsegment of your customer base to 'quantify' a feature or service.

Getting an adblocker denied message on youtube to determine exactly how much YT can annoy you in the service of stuffing more ads into your videos is both actively user-hostile and very definitely evil.

In most medical research, there are all types of consents that are required before you get subjected to this.

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