A reminder to use YT less, or to use third party YT browsers. How convenient!
this post was submitted on 21 Mar 2025
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Technology
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The moment they actually succeed in forcing ads on me, is the moment where I simply stop watching. Ads have become so frequent, so distracting, and so dangerous (scams, malware, disinformation) that they are pushing the world -- not even just the internet -- to the brink of destruction as more and more outrageous shit gets manufactured in the hope for clicks.
I will never pay for YouTube and I will NOT visit any site with ads. I do, however participate in patreons and other methods of paying creators.
Google is there own enemy. They could make ads less awful but they instead wonder why everyone is blocking them.
Everyone? The majority of the world still uses Google
They're clearly talking about ads here, dude
Oh.
No that went right over my head
Best I can do is stop going to YouTube.
HDMI to a capture device + com skip, then torrent.
Would be nice to see some people work out moving to and maintaining monetization on peer tube.
If I really wanted to watch it I'd just run ytdownload on the URL. Peertube is pretty cool though.
The second they seriously figure out ad blocking, ytdlp is gone
The second they seriously figure out ad blocking, everyone will figure out ways around it including the ytdownload app and Ublock Origin. This has already happened probably hundreds of times. There will never be a way to stop it because there are myriad ways around it.
They are approaching the issue from the wrong direction: They need to make the service better, not worse, and they will make more money! Steam/Valve is an excellent example of this because of their CEO's philosophy on "piracy", he views it as a service issue with the product itself instead of blaming people who are fed up with bad service and high prices.
Taking the approach of trying to extract more value out of customers ultimately kills the product, driving customers away and hurting profits compared to what they could have had if they'd just made a really great product with ads that aren't onerous, prices that are reasonable, as well as adequate compensation and treatment for the creators (nobody gets randomly demonitized on Steam because they featured a particular thing for example).
It’s an asymmetrical arms race, essentially. Google has to discover and block everything you could do to get around adblock-blockers. Adblock devs (et al) just need to periodically find one new way that they haven’t discovered yet.
YouTube is not profitable, that is the number one problem. The infrastructure to keep it running costs billions per year, mainly in storage and bandwidth. Offering a better service won't bring money for two reasons:
1 - they don't have competition 2 - more people coming to YouTube will increase costs
Steam's running cost is nowhere near the cost of YouTube, plus it has several methods of generating income, unlike a "free video streaming platform"
I feel like it's disingenuous for Google to say they don't make any money with YouTube when their revenue is largely from ads and selling people's data. Part of me suspects they're pulling something akin to movie accounting to claim a loss for tax purposes.
Sure, video hosting and streaming is expensive, but they have been running YouTube for 20 years now. If it was really losing that much money, they would've pulled the plug a long time ago.
Do we really know that YouTube doesn't make any profit at all and there isn't some creative accounting going on?
I didn't say Youtube doesn't make money, I said it's not profitable, that is, the service alone does not generate enough money to pay for its own existence. If this HackerNews thread is to be believed, it's unlikely even google execs know whether the thing is actually profitable or not (it did generate 50B USD in revenue in 2023-24, which is obviously a lot, but only 11B more than Netflix (39B) despite serving a much, much wider audience)
Youtube exists in a situation very similar to that of Twitter pre acquisition. It's a money drain, but it's extremely useful to control and own. Elon Musk saw that he could buy Twitter, he bought it, ruined its value, but we're seeing that he didn't buy "the company", he bought a significant portion of people's mindshare, so to speak. When Google bought YT in 2006, they saw the writing on the wall, that high speed internet would lead to more people watching videos, which turned true, and they also used their power to fully consolidate Youtube as the place to watch free videos online. Facebook likely played a bigger hand in destroying any possible competition than Google, but that's a different story.
I remain skeptical despite Google's claims and I have to wonder how much money they spend on fighting stuff like ad blocking when most people don't even use any.
If they actually aren't profitable (which I doubt), it would be pretty funny if it were because they wasted a shitload of money trying to stop ad blockers.
There will never be a way to stop it because there are myriad ways around it.
Just because it has been that way in the past absolutely does not mean it works that way in the future.
What happens when they force login, then when they detect discrepancies in watch time vs watch + ad time and they ban your account?
What happens when they force ads to play before you get the main roll and simply don't send you any video streams for 5 minutes?
What happens when they force screen recording rights to make sure you're displaying ads on mobile devices?
What happens when they start using DRM and roll the encryption so often yt-dlp becomes useless?
The theoretical myriad isn't any bigger than their theoretical ways to break that myriad, but the catch is that they're funded.
There are LOTS of ways they could shut it down that are beyond checking agents and changing API's around.
They pull that wild bullshit and users will drop like flies lol, AND there would STILL be ways around it both in terms of tech/coding as well as old fashioned methods.
I think someone’s quarterly goals include “reduce ad-free viewing hours” because every few months we get a half assed block that is countered hours later.
aww, they're trying so hard.
I believe they will end up winning.
Supposedly if you’re using a vpn albania is one of the few places that hasn’t been tainted by YouTube adware
I lived there for a year and am moving there permanently in a couple of months. Albania is such an underrated country in so many ways. It has its problems, but man, it is a bajillion times better than living in the US.
I’ve got this a few times on both my Windows and Linux machines. Uninstalling uBlock Origin, restarting Firefox, and reinstalling uBlock Origin had always fixed it for me.
reinstalling shouldn't fix anything, it's not buggy. that probably fixed it because technically you updated the filterlists. but there's a button for that.
I didn’t know that, I’ll try that next time!
Sometimes it does not let you do it in the filterlists menu, because it thinks it was updated recently enough. I guess some users were needlessly spamming it or something. when that happens, you can still force update it, if you open uBO's menu and click the message bubble button (expand if you don't see it)
Thank you!
Websites dont have the ability to see what addons you are using. Youtube must be tracking and storing local traffic data to accomplish this.
Seems illegal
You can tell when someone is blocking ads without seeing add-ons. Many ad blockers aren't even add ons
Hanff first reached out to the European Commission about the use of ad blocker detection tools in 2016. In response to his concerns, the commission confirmed that scripts used to detect ad blockers also fall under Article 5.3 of the ePrivacy Directive, a rule that requires websites to ask for user consent before storing or accessing information on a user’s device, such as cookies. “Article 5.3 does not limit itself to any particular type of information or technology, such as cookies,” the commission wrote at the time. “Article 5(3) would also apply to the storage by websites of scripts in users’ terminal equipment to detect if users have installed or are using ad blockers.”
https://www.theverge.com/2023/11/7/23950513/youtube-ad-blocker-crackdown-privacy-advocates-eu
Tldr:Just googled it and this came up. wasnt sure if it was illegal (its not). in the EU theres a guy named Alexander Hanff who very much thinks it should be and I agree.
They are monitoring traffic and scripts and storing information about the user without consent. In other words spyware. And from what you said "many adblockers arent even add ons" isnt that worse? The Pihole for example being detected and a corp like google storing that your ip has one. Makes me very uncomfortable.
please no replies with "youtube is providing a serivice that needs to be paid for, ads are a nessecarry blah blah blah." It doesnt justify spyware.
You don't need to store any cookies to detect adblockers. I don't know what method YouTube is using but a trivial method is to simply track which of your requests are passing. If all of them are fine except for all the tracking and ad scripts, you can be pretty sure that there's an ad blocker. This works especially well for pi hole or whatever, because blocking requests is the only method they have for blocking ads.
It could be a simple as you completed the 15-minute stream in 15:00 minutes at 1x and aren't a paid premium subscriber
I think youre locked into percieving this as a user who has a google account who has agreed to google's terms and services. I can go on youtube with no account and watch content with an adblocker on a completely fresh system and IP adress and have the same experience. From what you are saying by simply visiting the website you are agreeing to be tracked and marked as a adblock user. (This obviously happens all the time but lets not let google get away with it) Regardless of the detection method.
I think this would be fine if google forced you to click agree to terms to veiw content. But they dont, so in essence they are collecting data about you and your terminal without your consent which should be illegal. Obviously im bias against google, but i genuinely think it sets a bad precedent. Especially with how shitty and ad flooded the internet has become.
I can go on youtube with no account and watch content
You think they can't change that at the flip of a switch? I'm honestly shocked they haven't forced login. There's not really any serious competition, people would still watch it.
Just because they've been dumb with privacy laws, doesn't mean they have to do that to find adblockers.
It's not illegal for them to record IP's and Sockets It's also not illegal for them to track what requests you make and when based on that IP. The same requirements to stream video to your browser can be used to track your watch time.
On those two pieces of data, they could refuse to serve video data.
They could also, at the drop of the hat turn on DRM for everyone. That would destroy yt-dlp for ages as the original team refuses to implement it and there aren't any plugins yet that would do so. It would also be very difficult to keep up with that.
In the not-so-distant future, they'll break downloaders in ways that aren't easy to fix which will more or less break adblockers as well because it's different sides of the same tech.
We can still login/watch/record/decommercial at that point. I suspect if it gets to that, they'll just run commercials while the streams are running like broadcast tv has been. maybe picture in picture, maybe overlay.
I agree with every single point youve made. Except
There's not really any serious competition, people would still watch it.
If youtube stared pulling a reddit and implementing changes that users felt offended enough by many people would probably do what we are doing now. And find a decentralized platform like peertube or lemmy. Obviously reddit and youtube are not going anywhere but its still competiton even if its not "serious". a few hundred thousand users is alot in terms of profit.
Just because they've been dumb with privacy laws, doesn't mean they have to do that to find adblockers.
Google has all of the cards. like you said forced logins, drm, in stream adverts are all 1000% in our near future. I just think that before we actually get there we shouldnt roll over and take the abuse.
Genuinely appreciate the discourse on this, but im slightly frustrated that i simply implied that it "seems illegal" and I have multiple people explaining that its not illegal, they dont need to x and y to detect adblock, and that google has all the power. IM AWARE i just wish we could hold them accountable for the MANY infractions on privacy that theyve been guiltly of in the past, and continue to be, and see little to no repercussions.
What they're doing is likely illegal in a number of locations. Unfortunately, they don't have to do the illegal things to catch people, they kinda went overboard.
I think the most prudent thing would be to work out better monetization for Peertube and work out Peertube desktop clients and some form of buddy system to lock in backing up content. Youtube is already strangling the smaller content providers. We need some kind of open advertising market that links content creators with advertisers. Nothing like leaving the platform to rot as a repercussion :)
An open source adverts market acutually sounds like an insane, yet viable solution ive never considered. Not only would it be benefitial to users. But the adverts themselves would save money based on the fact that large corps fake advert data to bolster the price on their platform. curious did you come up with that or was this an idea thats been floating aroud?
I've not heard of it from anywhere else, But I wouldn't be too terribly surprised to find projects for it. I haven't really looked, but it seems to me like the next natural outcome.
It'll probably be rife for abuse, and require heavy policing maybe light opsec. It might need the protection of a real company in the form of a non-profit at least.
Scum gonna' scum.