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YouTube's Anti-Adblock and uBlock Origin

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Re: YouTube's Anti-Adblock and uBlock Origin

#151

Post by yborg »

bruce511 wrote: post #88

>> Maybe that’s how YouTube will win this war of attrition. YouTube will win because they are financially incentivised to so so. UBO and other free blockers will fail because there is so much downside, and no upside. Wars are always won by those with the most resources, whether it is money or people or both. I say this not to gloat (I'm no fan of google) but rather because it can be useful to understand both the goal…

>Wars are always won by those with the most resources, whether it is money or people or both

North Vietnam and the Taliban would probably beg to differ. Sometimes wars are won by the side that wants it the most.

Re: YouTube's Anti-Adblock and uBlock Origin

#152

Post by f33d5173 »

bruce511 wrote: post #88

>> Maybe that’s how YouTube will win this war of attrition. YouTube will win because they are financially incentivised to so so. UBO and other free blockers will fail because there is so much downside, and no upside. Wars are always won by those with the most resources, whether it is money or people or both. I say this not to gloat (I'm no fan of google) but rather because it can be useful to understand both the goal…

> wars are always won by those with the most resources

Youtube's early success was in large part due to enabling mass music piracy. That war was won, principally, by youtube and pirates, when rightsholders agreed to youtune them distribute music for only meagre advertising revenue. Besides youtube, torrenting music continues basically unchecked today, despite the massive resources available to combat it, and the strong financial incentive to do so.

Along those lines, a general solution to youtube (or other) adblocking looks like: person 1 records their screen with a high def camera while a video plays, removes the ads, and creates a torrent of it. A simple browser extension detects a link to a youtube video, and redirects to a web torrent of the same video. An approach like this has no possible response from youtube, though hosting might be expensive, and availability might therefore be poor.

An instance of a similar solution to paywalling of content on various sites like patreon involves scraping the content and rehosting it elsewhere. Websites hosting such content are frequently very popular. One would imagine that patreon would be well resourced in this domain, but apparently they have been ineffectual.

Re: YouTube's Anti-Adblock and uBlock Origin

#153

Post by bootlooped »

Mordisquitos wrote: post #35
ketzo wrote: post #8

Why, from first principles, should YouTube allow this? Why shouldn’t they go thermonuclear? I understand ads are annoying - I block as many as I can! - but I’ve never seen someone put together a coherent defense of the practice.

If I were an advertiser on YouTube I would be very wary of YouTube's efforts on this. I wouldn't want to be paying YouTube for ad views of people who find advertising so annoying that they make such an effort to block it. Best case scenario, frustrated ex-adblock-users will ignore my ads by muting them or looking away, so I'm paying the same price for less value, sometimes as low as zero. Worst case scenario, these u…

I use an ad blocker just as a blanket response to too much crap on websites and being uninterested in having advertising be in my face as much as it would be without. However, that's not to say that all advertising is irrelevant, or that I'm immune to it. When an ad gets through usually my response is something to the tune of "oh well".

The devil's advocate argument against your second to last point is that you'd actually be getting higher value from getting an ad on the eyeballs of an adblock user, because your ad is a bigger slice of the total ads they might see in a day. Do you want your ad to be 10% of the total ads somebody sees, or 0.5%?

Re: YouTube's Anti-Adblock and uBlock Origin

#154

Post by crop_rotation »

andirk wrote: post #142

Let's consider other options. What about: - Select "Watch ads later" a few times, until required, so time sensitive situations aren't bothered - Choose "Watch 1 long ad, then no more today" and pay the piper all at once with a couple minutes of ads. - Only relevant ads! When I worked at [video game news co], video game content got video game ads. The now defunct Grooveshark's ads were bands showcasing their music and…

> Select "Watch ads later" a few times, until required, so time sensitive situations aren't bothered

- People will simply clear their cookies when it becomes required, and this will be automated via extensions.

> Like they have a lever and they're pulling it to 100% now.

They are not pulling it to 100%, I think yt-dlp and similar stuff is still working. If they want to do it at some point, they will have to do it before adblocking usage is more than 50% of the population, at which point the uproar will be even higher and the change impossible to make.

Re: YouTube's Anti-Adblock and uBlock Origin

#155

Post by zeroonetwothree »

seydor wrote: post #99

I wonder why Youtube does not try other kinds of ads.why not ads in the sidebar, under the videos etc. They know which products and keywords are mentioned, and sometimes i google them anyway. Why do they insist on silly clickbait ads that are much worse than old-time TV ads. I don't want that because i don't like people wasting my time beyond a few hundred milliseconds. They d probably have made more money if they sh…

Banner ads are completely ineffective.

Re: YouTube's Anti-Adblock and uBlock Origin

#156

Post by taftster »

tapoxi wrote: post #91
crimsontech wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> At some point these people are either going to buy premium or turn off the ad-blocker. Or they stop going to YouTube. In the past 12mo my use of these platforms has reduced a huge amount. I no longer visit Twitter or Reddit because they blocked 3rd party apps, forcing me to view adverts, I would rather not be a user on a user hostile platform. Deep down, most of us know these are huge time sinks providing very litt…

What's the viable alternative to YouTube? Tiktok?

There are no good alternatives. There's literally no place left to get good topical or technical content without just loads of crap to go with it.

It's either a very depressing thing, or maybe an opportunity, depending on how rose colored your glasses are.

Re: YouTube's Anti-Adblock and uBlock Origin

#157

Post by jamielife »

seasox wrote: post #114
jamielife wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not really a fair comparison. The equivalent to "looking the other way," on YouTube would be exactly that, looking somewhere other than the ad (opening another browser, going to the bathroom, etc.). Ad Blockers are essential painting over the bus stop ad completely, so you don't even have a chance to see it.

Ad Blockers are special glasses that allow the wearer to see an empty area where the ad is supposed to be. I believe people should be allowed to wear the glasses they want.

I agree. But services should also be able to require that you remove those types of glasses to use their service.

In that case, if you ride the bus for free, you see the ads or you don't ride the bus.

Re: YouTube's Anti-Adblock and uBlock Origin

#158

Post by FullstakBlogger »

microtonal wrote: post #100
tapoxi wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But you can pay for YouTube Premium, they already have an alternative to an ad supported business model.

I have YouTube Premium. But I worry that once a substantial portion of the user base goes Premium, they'll also start to slip in ads. I think the ad business has made everyone who cares paranoid.

This is such a huge downside with subscription services in general. The product itself can change right under your nose and there's nothing you can do about it but cancel. First I was paying to filter out content, now I'm paying for access? That's a totally different thing that I didn't agree to.

If you frame it in a different context it sounds ridiculous. "Actually we're getting out of the video streaming business and just mailing you postcards that we think look neat. Still charging you the same rate every month, though."

Re: YouTube's Anti-Adblock and uBlock Origin

#159

Post by anonymouskimmer »

tapoxi wrote: post #91
crimsontech wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> At some point these people are either going to buy premium or turn off the ad-blocker. Or they stop going to YouTube. In the past 12mo my use of these platforms has reduced a huge amount. I no longer visit Twitter or Reddit because they blocked 3rd party apps, forcing me to view adverts, I would rather not be a user on a user hostile platform. Deep down, most of us know these are huge time sinks providing very litt…

What's the viable alternative to YouTube? Tiktok?

Various channels mirror their content to Nebula (also a pay platform, but with premium features), Odysee, Rumble, and yeah Tiktok.

Re: YouTube's Anti-Adblock and uBlock Origin

#160

Post by AshamedCaptain »

taftster wrote: post #106
AshamedCaptain wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But I don't understand why this would be annoying at all to the developers. I have absolutely zero conundrum with just ignoring a request if I'm not in the mood to do it. Most of them I even delete outright, but I still have requests that were sent to me in 00s that I'm keeping just in case one day "I'm in the mood". And yes, people request (demand!) crazy things, and have done so for decades. There are even "If you…

I mean, you still read them though, right? And you somewhat sort out the ones based on how much of a buffoon the user is? Maybe someone with excellent writing skills and having demonstrated reading all the documentation and FAQs is still asking for help in a respectful and intelligent way, and so maybe you engage. All of that is mental tax. And it gets tiring, even if you're mostly ignoring the request. It's still ti…

> Maybe someone with excellent writing skills and having demonstrated reading all the documentation and FAQs is still asking for help in a respectful and intelligent way, and so maybe you engage.

You mean it gets tiring to find the entertaining messages instead of the random trash? Because it doesn't matter how much effort the sender has put, or how intelligent his request/question/contribution/comment is. If I'm not in the mood, I will ignore it. I'm doing it for the fun, not to provide free support, so I will only read stuff that is fun to me. Obviously being an intelligent question is likely to add points, but it's not always the case.

It's not like this is race to see who is the least Torvalds-like of the bunch. It's 100% OK to just ignore everything. The people who complain "I had to moderate comments while my mother was in the hospital!" look like they have an addiction, or a runaway hobby.

I even have an online board for this sort of requests and generally I just read the subject lines. Fortunately for them, once your software is popular enough, a lot of people seem to like to reply to other people's questions, for some reason.

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