I’m sure many of you are already aware that YouTube has been rolling out anti-adblock detection for Chrome users for a few weeks now.
Today, as a long time Firefox user with the fantastic uBlock Origin extension installed, I got my first anti-adblock popup on the platform. Note that this may not happen to you personally for a while, but it is inevitably coming for everyone.
Thankfully, the fine folks at uBlock Origin have already advised a simple workaround (on Reddit, yuck!) which I will duplicate in a simplified form below for your convenience. I have tested it on Firefox and it is working fine for me (so far).
PLEASE READ AND FOLLOW ALL OF THE INSTRUCTIONS IN THIS POST.
Update uBO to the latest version (1.52.0+) . <== The extension itself, for technical improvements. You do this in your browser.
Remove your custom config / reset to defaults. <== This means removing your custom filters (or disabling My filters) and disabling ALL additional lists you’ve enabled. It might be quicker to make a backup of your config and restore to defaults instead.
Force an update of your Filter Lists. <== This is within the extension. Lists are what determine what’s blocked or not. How to update Filter lists: Click 🛡️ uBO’s icon > the ⚙ Dashboard button > the Filter lists pane > the 🕘 Purge all caches button > the 🔃 Update now button.
Disable all other extensions AND your browser’s built-in blockers. <== No need to uninstall, just disable them. They might interfere with our solutions.
Make sure you follow all 4 points above. If you’re seeing the message, it’s likely due to your custom config (either additional lists or separate filters in My filters).
Restarting your browser afterwards may help too.
Once you’ve gotten rid of the issue on default settings, you can slowly start restoring your config (if you really need it). Do it gradually, to easier find out what was causing the issue in the first place. Once you find the culprit, simply skip it in your config.
If you want to use Enhancer for YouTube*, you have to* disable its adblocking*.*
May the force uBlock Origin be with you!
Update
Just wanted to mention a few things that have been pointed out in the comments:
- There are quite a few projects that provide an alternative ad-free front end to YouTube. These include Invidious, FreeTube, LibreTube, Newpipe, Revanced, and I’m sure there are several more options I’ve missed. I don’t have any particular preference really but I routinely use NewPipe on my cellphone just because I tried it once and couldn’t be bothered trying all the others.
- In step 4 listed above, to clarify, afaik you only need to remove adblocker extensions (if you have more than one installed) that might conflict with the uBlock Origin rules and trigger the anti-adblock, not all extensions.
- If you hate non-stop ads but want to support your favorite content creators then be sure to give them some love on Patreon or whatever alternative options they provide. Creators typically make only a tiny, tiny fraction of what YouTube makes in ad revenue, assuming YouTube doesn’t just outright steal the lot, and it’s a shitty business model that’s ruining the internet. Even if you watch the ads, you’re only supporting YouTube most of the time, not the creators.
I’ve just noticed that this is in c/piracy. I suppose there’s lots of interest in the story here and everywhere else, but I’d just like to remind you all that ad-blocking is not piracy.
So annoyed at how all these services keep degrading for users. I was happy to pay for premium light. I don’t need download/music/etc I just wanted no ads. Simple as that. The price was fairly reasonable and I would have kept paying it. Now they got rid of the premium light and I have to pay at least 50% more for additional things I don’t and will not use.
Alright then, well you lost a customer and I’ll just use AdBlock. And if you somehow figure out how to disable that, I’m just going to find content somewhere else. I’m fucking sick of ads. I’ll pay a reasonable amount to remove them. But I will not be continually wrung out for more and more money. Just leave me alone.
The enshittification continues. Read up on Doctorow’s coining of the term on Wired.
It’s an ironic choice of site in my opinion, in that they used to have no reading limits and used to be in my list of daily sites to check. Now you have to JS-block if you want to use the site.Yeah I reference that article a lot. It’s happening everywhere. Feels like it’s accelerated rapidly in the last few years too.
It has. The pandemic helped a lot of people see their value as assets in the workplace, and unfortunately the owners and rich saw that new empowerment and immediately felt very threatened, so they have declared an all-out war on the working class. The fact that so many are taking so long to realize it unfortunately means that the rich are winning this war, too
Hell the last few months it has been very noticable.
Same here. I would have been tempted to pay for premium light but they removed that, and I’m not paying extra for things I don’t use.
Holy Hell, I just checked and Youtube Premium is more expensive than Disney+ here in Canada, and D+ includes STAR which is basically Hulu. Youtube Premium is a terrible deal.
Yeah it’s fucking absurd
I don’t think Youtube cares so much about losing adblock customers. They suck up a lot of video, which costs a boat load of money, for no revenue. Watch time alone is great for attracting investors, but Google doesn’t need investors. Youtube needs more money.
The truth is, Youtube isn’t very profitable compared to any other kind of content Google hosts. You can easily cost Youtube a dollar a day, if not more, by sicking down background playback. That’s not too bad, but you won’t be only one doing it. Look around and see how few Peertube instances there are compared to Mastodon and Lemmy: video hosting sucks much more, and Peertube cheats by using peer to peer redistribution to help with the bandwidth (which means everyone who’s watching the video along with you knows your IP is watching the same thing as them).
Google is in hot water with their real customers (advertisers) for making them pay for showing ads that actually never got shown. They need to fix their metrics to detect ad fraud (hard) or block any attempt to hide ads (easier).
Youtube has know who does and doesn’t use adblock for years. When creators get paid, they show how much revenue they didn’t pay out because of adblockers. I’m honestly surprised they didn’t do this earlier.
I think this is a well-thought out tactic. They’ll lose a bunch of users who never made them any money on the first place, but the ones that are addicted enough will come back and start making money again.
Honestly, I’m annoyed that I’ll be seeing ads soon, but I think it’s for the best. There’s no such thing as free Youtube hosting. People need to start paying for online shit or we’ll end up with megacorporations having more and more control over the internet, which isn’t something we want.
I know paying for stuff sucks, but if we don’t get rid of this “everything must always be free and without ads” mentality, the internet is only going to get worse.
I would be inclined to agree with you if they didn’t get rid of Premium Light. I think charging users for avoiding ads is completely reasonable, we live in a Capitalist country and video hosting isn’t cheap. Even still, axing Premium Light shows a desire to screw over users in order to achieve more profit, which in my mind makes YouTube scummy.
Bingo. This move right at the same time they killed premium light really muddies the messaging on this one
I agree, them killing off Premium Lite in some countries and then starting to offer it in other countries is idiotic and typically Google.
However, I don’t think Premium Lite covers the “let’s put youtube in the background for music” royalties to be honest. Royalties are even more of a pain than hosting content.
I didn’t mind the ads back in the day, like 10+ years ago. They were ads for cars, cleaning products, food and drink, movies, games, theme parks, shit like that. Regular products, wasn’t really any super scummy stuff there. Now half the ads are scummy mobile games designed to cause a gambling addiction, impersonation frauds and scams, crypto doubling scams like it’s fucking Runescape, and a whole bunch of other shit that is actively harmful or brainrotting. I don’t mind seeing a funny little fox selling me laundry detergent, but the fart-piss-and-shit mobile ads are just genuinely revolting. If YouTube wants to make me watch ads, they should have some standards and vetting processes for those ads. Like, I still listen to the radio. I hardly notice the ads there because they aren’t actively making me feel worse physically for having listened to them. Very rarely I’ll watch regular TV and, again, don’t really mind the ads there 90% of the time.
And that’s not even touching on what the creators actually get from the hours of my life I would end up watching ads. If you donate 2 bucks to your favorite creator or sub to their patreon or whatever, you’ve probably given them more money than they would get from your ad views in a year. It’s not the loss of adblock revenue that’s making so many creators take sponsorships, it’s the lack of revenue in the first place.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
How is paying more to said megacorp going to reduce their influence?
They’re currently offering video hosting for a price that’s impossible to compete with. Then they can keep razor thin margins.
It’s how Walmart and Uber and all those other huge tech companies ruined entire market segments: come in for ridiculously low prices taking investor money/the profits from one completely different business model, and using it to operate a new business at a loss for a few years. Nobody can compete with a business that’s willing to take a loss, so your local supermarkets shut down or get bought out, your local taxi company/delivery services goes bankrupt, and then the megacorp can raise prices to make a small profit.
We need another Youtube, and with current pricing, only Amazon, Tencent, and other megacorps can afford to even attempt setting up a competitor.
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I just replace youtube.com with piped.video all the time
Nobody should ever share data with american corpos - there is no example where corporations harvested data and anyone but the shareholders benefited. So for me it feels like a win whenever they fail.
Hey Google, maybe you assholes should realize that if people are willing to jump through this many hoops to not watch ads then maybe you should realize that ads are the problem, not users. Nobody wants ads shoved down their throat so kindly go fuck yourselves. Advertising is a cancer. I’ve been trying to convince people how dangerous attention grabbing billboards are but nobody seems to care.
Alternative solution: Since YouTube disabled all ads in Russia, you can just use russian vpn/proxy for the most effective YouTube adblocking possible.
Wow! What a great idea! What could be better than routing all your traffic through a Russian VPN provider and probably bypassing sanctions? What could possibly go wrong?
Please do tell what could go wrong. Is the internet sheriff going to turn up?
Good evenin’ ma’am sniff * tips hat * so, we’re in bed with the commies eh ?
Having all your data routed through Russia. What could gp wrong indeed. On top of that the VPN purchase giving more money for Russia.
Nothing is going to happen when your traffic moves through Russia. In fact, you have more chance that something will happen to you if you don’t.
must be why the Ruzzians are axing all non-state approved VPNs. I wonder why they want to have control over VPNs, almost like they want to ensure only certain content gets through or the ability to monitor traffic. Oh but that would be so silly.
What is silly is the idea that that is in any way relevant to what we were discussing here. And I use the word discussing lightly. There’s a big difference between the insinuation that a foreigner is at risk for tunneling into the Russia and the Russian government eavesdropping on its population.
It is very relevant actually.
For starters tunneling there will mean having sites blocked, and secondly a foreogn government having my data, particularly an enemy authoritarian state, is no better than a corporation or my own state (where at least I have some say to what happens to my data)
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And you don’t think they are paying money to have those servers in Russia? It’s all more tax money for Putin.
Even your dog will get hacked
Thanks for a solution that nobody will ever use
Nice try, Roskomnadzor
This one’s hilarious, but that one’s not gonna work for long as they will axe almost all non-government approved VPNs
Pretty sure its the same with Syria too
Why did they disable ads there?
Ukraine use ads for anti-putin propaganda. So the russian goverment told Google to moderate ads, or all Google services will be banned. Google decided to just disable ads in Russia completely.
I’d rather deal with the ads until they make me go insane than do that.
Maybe it is time that we start to write our favourite youtubers to start developing alternative means of distributing their videos. Patreon and so on.
I feel there will be a lot less people watching YouTube in the future and as a whole many youtubers will see their revenue drop significantly. Watching YouTube as a whole will become less and less bearable. I watch videos without ads on my pc, but on mobile i use the app and endure the videos (for now) as the app is just nicer to use compared to the browser.
But if I have to see ads all the time (also these unskippable 20s ads) I think I’ll simply stop using YouTube all together. about 90% ofy YouTube use isn’t neccessary at all. I’ll just watch it, because I’m too lazy to do anything else.
I could be should read a book instead. Maybe others will do that too in the future?
PSA: skirting their attempts to block ad blockers if you have a Google account you would rather keep may be unwise.
Google has been known for banning people for stupid crap, and this checks all the boxes.
While they were silent on this topic there was a gentlemen’s agreement that you could block ads. But now that they have voiced their opinion the jig is up.
I’d recommend people to use an alternative account if they are going to block anyway and they want to keep their gmail.
“What just happened?”
“War were declared.”
Going to be following these threads closely as I’ll be damned if my students are going to put up with adverts from a file hosting service.
Enrol today!
Would you like to know more?
I’m doing my part!
That’s way too much hassle. I guess, when the anti-adblock kicks in on my devices, I’ll just stop watching YouTube. I have tons of better stuff to do anyway.
I wouldn’t even mind giving some money to youtube if it was asking for donations or keep the the prices low and accessible, like $4 max per month to support the up keep)
YouTube could be one of the wonders of the world of we are looking at it at a content perspective.
It should be almost protected by UNESCO, if you ask me… yes even the stupid stuff as it is a record of mankind.
But google instead of recognising the value, they got greedy.
humankin created a massive information library which google at some point decided to monetize.
We all know what happened to unity right, just as a recent example ? it doesn’t take much to turn the users away, and I truly believe, even youtube can fail
They even had a semi reasonable premium tier that was just “no ads, that’s all” for something like $7. Now they’re kicking everyone off that plan and removing it and your next option is to pay 50+% more and you get a bunch of additional crap that I didn’t ask for. I just wanted no ads.
These people seem to adamantly not want me as a customer.
platform capitalism
Yeah I’d pay up to $7 per 1000 videos, that does seem like a fair price. It’d cover about 3 years of my typical usage.
To bad there are upkeep costs. I mean it seems nobody realizes how much it costs. I imagine they well start pruning videos next because it isn’t worth it to keep it all available.
This has way less to do with upkeep costs and way more to do with “big number must go up at all costs.” This publicly traded company capitalism bullshit won’t be satiated until it eats eats itself alive and before that happens it’ll chew consumers up first.
Youtube’s margins are 38%, much lower than most of its competitors (that are in the 80% range). The primary reason for the margin being so low is that they give a far higher percent of their revenue to the content creators.
Just a reminder… 38% margins are kinda low for the type of product Youtube is.
My CPM numbers are pretty out of date, perhaps their costs have gone up with inflation. On the other hand perhaps they’ve gone down with storage and bandwidth costs.
Unity has competition. That’s why people could leave.
YouTube will (unfortunately) not fail, because there is no viable competition. I was subscribed to Nebula for a while, but obviously that doesn’t have nearly the amount of content YT has.
the competition would be to stop consuming that much and instead search for the content you like in the remaining free part of the internet
the content you like
The content I like is on youtube though
exactly, they’re being so obnoxious and arrogant and they act like they just get to do it
YouTube, Gmail, Google search, and more are all really utilities and should be run like them. Google tried/is trying to do that by living off ads but the privacy problems are catching up to them. The service degradation in the name of profit problems are already caught up to them.
I might agree if Google had nothing to do with YouTube. But since it’s theirs, I would only be worried about individual content creators and archivists, and they’d be better off with a support mechanism not controlled by Google. The ones not already raking it in with Google’s, I mean.
You do know YouTube was not profitable for a long time. I can see them wanting to make some of their money back. The storage and bandwidth cost must be insane for them. Saying that yah I block the ads but I know I don’t because I want to and it isn’t a right of mine or anything.
Stop shilling, YT already cut their costs drastically. If they can’t pay the bills, it’s because they burned their own PR with advertisers by running the company like morons.
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Man how low have we fallen … Don’t mind paying someone to not do something he shouldn’t be doing in the first place … YouTubers dont start to make videos as a job but for passions someone found a way to monetize other ones free time and passions and only when it comes clear he was making so much money he agreed to pay the creators in the most horrible way catching everything vane excuse to not pay them at all …
Why should YouTube be compelled to operate for free?
Yeh here we go fine… do you think that a 8.63 to 7.96 billion dollars salary in advertising is a fair salary for basically just hosting some content ?
Of course not, but I certainly don’t think they should be expected to survive without any revenue.
I wonder what made youTube decide to fix this loophole? These days the vast majority of people use phone apps or smart TVs to watch. The number of people using Firefox plus ad blockers must be quite small and it’ll be a constant effort to keep updating their anti ad block algorithms.
I started using freetube for linux a month or so ago. This is so much better than native youtube. The entire interface is smoother, I get less “loading” moments (none really) and it does not try and constantly reduce my resolution by “auto adjusting”. No ads, no BS. Just better all around.
So, Youtube’s dying.
Maybe not right now. Maybe not next year. But they’ve decided to make everybody miserable, for a “business” that still won’t cause enough misery to turn a profit.
Meanwhile creators are censored worse than broadcast TV. Nevermind the effective ban on swearing - they can’t even reference concepts without a surveillance program declaring that their latest video doesn’t count, even though they’ll still slap ads all over that bitch.
Those people have things they want to share with an audience that wants to see. Any middleman can either help, or become irrelevant. Bandwidth is cheap. Some creators are just in it for the money… but the money is bad, on Youtube, and it’s getting worse. Patreon is more direct and far less stupid. As with all these lumbering ruins of 2010s internet media, the network effect of being the default will keep them relevant for a while, no matter what they do. Twitter’s on fire and it’s still not dead. But its prospects sure aren’t getting better… and not because people changed.
People are sadly predictable. These idiot robots exploit that masterfully, to a point, and then act bewildered when more pressure stops making more money. Like they forgot we can just leave.
Decided to start using Freetube on desktop, Newpipe on mobile. It works!
Also got the damned pop up a few hours ago myself. Luckily all that it seems to do is cause the pop up. Once I clicked close it would start playing.
YouTube really is trying to generate competition fast as possible with all the nonsense over the past couple years. Sure. Ads a big revenue. But forcing people to watch them will not work. People will leave and go elsewhere or at least break it and use ads anyway.
Thats only step one. Step 2 adds a timer until you can close it. Step 3 completely locks the video. So far ublock filter updates are working though
I’ve heard anecdotally that they’ve done small user trials of fully blocking people for X amount of time for using adblock.
I’m going to right click and try to use adblock to block the popup for the adblocker if it comes up.
