I'm too busy with my life rather than browsing youtube nowsday.
YouTube tests blocking videos unless you disable ad blockers
921–930 of 1001 posts
Re: YouTube tests blocking videos unless you disable ad blockers
#922To 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),…
> To be fair, YT Premium is one of the few subscriptions I think is a no-brainer and good value for money.
I cannot think of any subscription that offers literally no upside beside what a free browser extension that you install in 1 click already provides.
Youtube Premium is literally the worst value for money that I can think of, because I can get effortlessly the same for 0 cost.
Re: YouTube tests blocking videos unless you disable ad blockers
#923What 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.
A paywall works. Or rolling your own ads together with partners wanting to sell stuff.
Re: YouTube tests blocking videos unless you disable ad blockers
#924One argument I heard at some point is that google is better of if people who don't click ads use ad-block.
If you care enough that you install ad-blockers you will not click on any ads anyway. If they block ad-block then their click-per-view metrics will go down which looks bad to advertisers and makes ad spots sell for less
Of course that is a very simple view of a very complex problem, but there is definitely some merit to it. For example ad-block these days has been normalised enough that too many people do it, even people that would click some ads. Also, specifically for youtube, by allowing ad-block you reduce the value of youtube premium (which is not true for google search for example, there is no google search premium)
Re: YouTube tests blocking videos unless you disable ad blockers
#925They are going to start an arms race. This will likely lead to much further advances in ad-blocking that would be a bad outcome for them. This is a balancing act for sure. I guess they must see lots of people blocking ads to think it's worth while going for it. This could even be a smaller team looking at bumping up their metrics or hit perf goals without seeing the larger impact across the company.
Google is big, wealthy, and tech-savvy enough to, at the very least, make ad blockers unreliable and annoying most of the time for most of the users. This is not good news, and it's probably not going to be a lesson in humility for the company.
The fact that they control Chrome should scare everyone.
Re: YouTube tests blocking videos unless you disable ad blockers
#926They 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.
I'm not sure why they would fail if they really wanted to.
From what I understand, currently, the ads are distinct videos, which is why external tools can block them. For example, you don't get ads with youtube-dl.
But if Youtube used the uploaded video to create a new one, with ads injected in it, I can't see how adblockers could block that reliably. Perhaps you could build a database of timestamp of ads per video? And hope that the compute power required to build new videos with ads in it is too much to be done widely?
What am I missing?
Re: YouTube tests blocking videos unless you disable ad blockers
#927To 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),…
uBlock Origin is literally free
Re: YouTube tests blocking videos unless you disable ad blockers
#928To 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 a…
Pretty much all big tech companies figured out this is the recipe for infinite money
Only Microsoft seems to be aware this causes Dutch Disease, min-maxing your monopolistic platform revenue is terrible long-term for you company
Re: YouTube tests blocking videos unless you disable ad blockers
#929We first get adverts. And gee-golly-whillikers, they're also malware vendors and other terribvle horrible nogood crap you just don't want. And exploits. So yeah, you block ads with Ublock Origin.
Some shit site gets the idea to "block adblock". Detects a few common ones. But disabling javascript almost always works. But annoying.
So http://reek.github.io/anti-adblock-killer/#filterlist is created. And it "anti-block adblock" is here. And works well.
By the time the chumps make "anti-anti-block adblock", we'll neuter that as well.
The endgame is something terrible like a WebAssembly that does forced downloads to get the content you want all in a VM like thing. That's what Widevine is already doing, kind of. Im just surprised that more for-profit news/media companies aren't doing exactly that, since now you have to pop off the payload in a container and try to detect what an ad is and isnt.
As an aside: If you're running Firefox, download Sponsorblock. It skips over the shit in-video adverts on Youtube with "a message from our sponsor". Oh, and you dont get this even IF you pay youtube.
Re: YouTube tests blocking videos unless you disable ad blockers
#930What 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.
it's a heuristic based approach, but essentially, you ensure that your ad-script would set some sort of global variable, or a property somewhere, and your detection script would look for that property. If it's not set, you have a good probability that the ad was blocked.
Of course, this doesn't detect element hiding.
To do so, you'd need to setup a bunch of mutation observers https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/MutationObs... , and detect that your ad's container or div/image was removed. It's a bit annoying, but doable.
Lastly, you could try to detect the adblocking scripts as well.