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Tell HN: "Ad blockers are not allowed on YouTube”
91 points by barbariangrunge on Oct 6, 2023 | hide | past | favorite | 155 comments
I opened youtube this morning to see a big popup:

Ad blockers are not allowed on YouTube

- It looks like you may be using an ad blocker.

- Ads allow YouTube to be used by billions worldwide.

- You can go ad-free with YouTube Premium, and creators can still get paid from your subscription




Until YouTube starts injecting ads into the video stream (like Twitch), it's not going to be effective at all. There's no way to do a client-side anti-adblock and not have it bypassed.

And TBH: since YouTube is not doing that, I think they might've decided the cost of that solution outweighs the projected revenue so they've chosen a cheaper solution.

In Twitch's case, more of the audience might be techy, so ad injection ended up being the more optimal option.


This is, in my opinion, shortsighted. It's straightforward to create ads that you can't block on the client so long as you are the server of the ads yourself, as Google is. I'm not going to detail how since I don't want anyone on HN to get any ideas and build a business of it, but I'm sure it will happen eventually. For the time being I suspect it's cheaper to keep the current tech running since it brings in enough revenue, but if that ever stops being the case, I expect things not to end well for people who don't like ads. Google search is a good example of this, ads are literally intertwined into the search results, if you take this a few steps further you have ads that you literally can't block on the client.


> Google search is a good example of this, ads are literally intertwined into the search results, if you take this a few steps further you have ads that you literally can't block on the client.

I'm not sure about your "few steps" so this may be moot. Is there no sufficient workaround of this nature?

  document.querySelector('.waste-of-money')?.remove();
Google might detect that the element was removed; ad blockers use CSS shenanigans to hide the element. Google might detect such shenanigans; ad blockers are forced to change. And so on. Is there really a way for Google to end this cat/mouse game in their favor?


I think the issue here is that it might take the adblockers longer to update than it takes google. If google has a team of people doing anti adblock then I suspect it would take them less than a week or maybe even a couple days to update the app to counteract whatever the adblockers come up with. And with each iteration the adblockers have to become more creative.


> Is there really a way for Google to end this cat/mouse game in their favor?

Yet another "update" to the web extension manifest.


That will affect a large number of users but if word gets out that this weird fork of Firefox[0] will allow them to view YouTube with no ads, Google is suddenly forced to enable browser attestation such that only versions of Chrome will allow people to use YouTube. That will likely affect those in the US but EU authorities sometimes like to curb these antitrust behaviors. I also get the feeling that such a change will cause them to lose American business to competitors. Amazon seems primed to start eating their lunch with Twitch; they would mostly need to start building and promoting more video on demand features.

0: It sends a "this is totally Chrome" user agent and possibly includes other APIs that YouTube will use.


> Amazon seems primed to start eating their lunch with Twitch

That seems extremely unlikely, Twitch has already destroyed a lot of the goodwill they had with creators. Policy changes (or attempts) regarding baked-in ads, revenue splits, forced exclusivity, there's probably more.


All good points and I do agree. What I mean is that they have the compute infrastructure to manage it, assuming Youtube makes some colossal mistake with the goodwill they have with viewers.


I used to work in ads, and I agree this is an arms race that the advertisers could win, at least in cases like YouTube where they control the whole stack. I don't think it would be trivial, but YouTube could do it if they decided to.


Are there any workarounds for smart tv apps (browser, player)? They probably already "won" there and the user experience is horrible.


SmartTube for Android TV


Maybe a pihole.


If it is Android, try NoRoot Firewall app.


I see the future of streaming video ad avoidance being something like an AI-empowered Tivo, possibly as an HDMI dongle.


As someone who doesn't like ads, I just pay for a premium YouTube subscription for my family.

It's not the case with Google search, though, they don't offer me a way to pay. I will rather pay Kagi instead.


Sponsorblock already exists as infrastructure to slice out ads embedded into the video streams themselves. Of course, the sponsor segments weren't put there by youtube, but the same (or similar) solutions would apply if they were.

It's much easier for anything non-live.


Sponsorblock would be easy to work around if ad-breaks were randomly selected. Whenever you upload a video YT could process the video and "search" for good ad-break locations, at display time client bits get pushed ads randomly, making time-code blocking useless.

They could even upsell to content creators by giving them the means to dynamically replace sponsors in old videos using the same tech, maybe with some knobs and switches for content creators to select where sponsor breaks occur.


Maybe someone could use train a AI for something useful like skipping advertisement? Switching from time to content id, i.e. like they use for copyright strikes, would work even better than status quo.


Sponsorblock tagged videos would serve as excellent training data for an ad-detecting AI.


I guess something could detect if the frame shown is a frame from the video and if not skip


The ads don't always have to be injected into the exact same parts of a video, and YT can also choose not to stream any more bits until it thinks something's been "watched".


Sponsorblock only works because YT allows you to skip anywhere in a video.


This. It's why in-stream ads were so straightforward to implement for Twitch too. Can't fast forward a live stream.


If you're willing to buffer a few minutes of video, you can work around this. Tivo is a decent example of how this has been done in the past.


Oh yeah, that works. Cable TV + Tivo is a good analogy for all of this.


Even if they try to prevent that, with a modified client, you can skip anywhere in a video and there's nothing they can do about it.


That requires them to pre-serve you the bits for the part of the video after the ad, which they aren't going to do.


Unless they want to completely break the ability to seek in the video timeline, regardless of ad placements, that's not going to work.


It already behaves this way if you aren't blocking ads. If you seek too far ahead in a video with mid-video ads, it'll show an ad before playing at the timestamp you selected. If they want to prevent ad-blocking, they can do the same thing except not serve the video ahead of time.


The insidious aspect of this is the bait and switch YouTube did to consolidate their monopoly. A huge amount of videos were uploaded under the (idealistic and misguided) pretence they would be freely accessible without ads and so on. Had the YT UX been this way the whole time then the online video landscape would be much more competitive today.


There's several instances in which creators deliberately uploaded videos unmonetized under the understanding that this would comply with some kind of noncommercial licensing requirement[0] (e.g. NCommander's video on the MSWord 1.0 source). Such uploads are now retroactively illegal unless you're already partnered, since YouTube now only allows partners to disable monetization.

To be slightly fair to YouTube, they never added NC clauses to their Creative Commons declaration support, but I doubt that was evidence of a 10-year plan to demand monetization.

But on the other hand, they also made a huge stink about keeping Partner status out of the hands of people who shouldn't have it. That move now retroactively looks like YouTube trying to front-run smaller creators on ad revenue, especially if something they make goes 'viral' before they can make partner.

[0] For the purpose of this comment let's pretend that 'not monetized' satisfies whatever flimsy 'noncommercial' license declaration exists


Hmm... the biggest category on YouTube is music, which until a colossal lawsuit was all pirated.

It has and was built on piracy.

Maybe you odn't believe me because it's "different" in your opinion today.

Look anywhere else in the world, it's piracy dude. For example, here's a search for "seinfeld s01e03" for video lengths 10-30m on Bilibili:

https://search.bilibili.com/all?keyword=seinfeld+s01e03&from...

I don't know. On the one hand, end users take from Google by blocking ads. On the other, Google takes from creators through piracy.

At the end of the day, the problem with video is the lack of business innovation that's anywhere near comparable to games.


> It has and was built on piracy.

Shiver me timbers, buckaroo. Won't someone think about the digital robber baron tycoons?

Most of the internet was built with public dollars and content is engaged with (not necessarily hosted) generally non-commercially. If we look at total harm, content users tend to get the worst of it either by having to wade through malevolent ads or user hostile design. Yet, we collectively put up with it because we recognize the Internet is not a zero-sum game. Tay-tay is making enough money from the free marketing channels the Internet enables, she doesn't need more from a Youtube stream.


This scam has happened with many sites and apps (Instagram). Build community and then sell it.


How would youtube work without ads or subscriptions? Do you just not want there to be something like youtube?


Federated. Lots of people willing to host some videos on a server in their basement.


Where did it say or imply they'd be accessible without ads? YouTube has had ads since the early days (2008 specifically).


It used to be the case that you had to be a YouTube partner to monetize your videos. They changed it so that you now have to be a partner in order to demonetize your videos. So anyone who just uploaded a video in the ~12 years between YouTube having monetization and monetization being mandated got ads put on their work retroactively and without permission.


There's a difference between being monetized (i.e. creator gets money) and YT running ads. So are you saying that YT used to only run ads on monetized videos, and recently they started running ads on non-monetized videos too? Because I remember starting to see ads on clearly non-monetized videos quite a long time ago, like 2014.

And it doesn't seem like a big deal; they didn't promise to host your video without ads forever, nor is that a reasonable expectation.


Your memory might be hazy. YouTube made an explicit ToS change on June 1st, 2021 in order to allow them to monetize non-partner videos. They call this the "right to monetize": https://support.google.com/youtube/thread/110289140/updates-...


> 2008 specifically

Perhaps the parent comment is talking about pre-Google and you are talking about post-Google? I don’t know if the parent’s claim is correct about a bait and switch, but I can confirm that pre-Google YouTube did not have (video) ads and felt very much like a place for small independent creators.

And from my memory, widespread ads on every video did not come into existence for many years. Originally they were only on selected monetized videos.


This is where I get conflicted with ad blockers, on the one hand most website ads are trash, on the other hand there is great content on YT and I want those creators to make enough to carry on to get to the level where they proper sponsors. But, YT is so egregious with its ad insertions at times that it drives me mad and I don’t trust the creators will get fairly compensated if I go to premium.


The creators get more money per view from a premium member than an ad-supported viewer. So not only does being a paying member give you a better experience, it puts more cash in the pocket of those you watch.


It depends. The last numbers YT released was that they took a 45% cut and that they used watched minutes, not views. The obvious way is distributing the remaining 55% out porportionally based on what you watch.

If you watch twice as much, your profit/minute must be half.


Not arguing for the sake of it but is that confirmed? I assume the more I watch the less each creator gets? No idea what the algorithm is they use to share the money out


You can find lots of discussion with a quick web search, but yes, it seems to be pretty well supported.

Speaking more broadly, there's the simple fact that people deserve to be paid for the work they do. Many places don't allow you to pay with money, they force you to pay with ads. I find viewing ads to be an unacceptably high price, so I use an ad blocker, and I just go away if they turn me away for that.

But for places that do give a money option, like YouTube, I jump for it, as I find that to be a far more ethical business model[1]. I'm happy to support businesses that give me the option to pay by doing exactly that.

In other words, I wouldn't worry so much about the very fine details. And supporting your creators on Patreon will give them way more money than any amount of individual YouTube viewership.

[1] Yes, I know they're still tracking me. That doesn't bother me as much as viewing ads or supporting the ad-based clickbait attention grabbing business model, so I think it's still a win.


> I assume the more I watch the less each creator gets?

I think this is true, but it still works out such that given the amount the average Premium subscriber watches, creators' typical per-view revenue is still higher for Premium views. They can apparently see the breakdown (ad revenue vs premium revenue, etc., ad-supported views vs premium views, etc.) in the backend, and various people who make Youtube content for a living have reported this to be the case. See, e.g., https://twitter.com/hankgreen/status/1513177490730061829 .


I don't think there's any explicit youtube rule that guarantees they will make more money from premium viewers, but it's confirmed by creators who have showed their income reports, or at least talked about their income breakdown. And Premium views always pay better.

Another anecdote I've heard from several creators is that much longer videos (like a 5 hour livestream recording) are now much more profitable because of premium viewers. With ads they either need to include an ad every 10 minutes, which means 30 ads in one video and turns people away. Or they only include a few ads in which case people do watch it, but it's far less profitable than a 10 minute video with a midroll ad.


I think they sum up global watch minutes, despite the bias that causes.


Is this how you define fair though? I tend to think more about the revenue split percentage.


Louis Rossman has been saying that he gets much more money if you purchase something from his store rather than from ads, and that for this reason he doesn't care if viewers use an adblocker or not. This is just a single data point though, other youtubers have a different stance on this matter.


Presumably he would care if users used an ad blocker that deleted his ads for his store, given that he appears to be using YouTube as a way to advertise his real business.


He is using YouTube to promote what he does, but AFAIK not in the form of YouTube ads, instead he publishes content about what he does in the form of videos on his channel.


But ad blockers are happy to edit videos to remove sponsorship segments, so they'd also be happy to remove his self promotion. Ad blockers don't care about the exact form of ads, right? They just want to get rid of all of them leaving the content.


I think you're not familiar with Rossman's videos, he doesn't have sponsorship segments.


I know, but what I mean is that he must obviously inform people about his shop in some way, and so ad blockers can just remove those references. With modern AI they could theoretically even re-render his videos on the fly to write out any indication he's selling anything.

The point here is either you're OK with ad blockers in which case, you accept all your work is charitable and unmonetizable (because you can't even advertise what you're selling directly), or you have to accept ads in any form.


On his YouTube channel, he mostly cares about the bigger picture of right to repair rather than talking about its shop. I'm also quite sure he doesn't see his videos as a source of revenue. But saying "it's ok to remove ads from videos" doesn't imply saying "all the work I do is for free, including repairs". Those are just two different things. In discussing ad blockers you're also talking about how they could potentially work in the future, but there's no indication that what you talk about will happen. If it will happen that someone starts using AI to deeply modify a video, content crearors can re-evaluate their stance on the topic, as it would present a very different scenario than the current one.

I would also add that the real world isn't just black or white, one could totally be fine with a certain kind of ads and not with others, as long as is able to provide an argument for it.


YT is so egregious with its ad insertions at times

It's worse than broadcast TV. I'll usually sit through an ad at the beginning and maybe the end of a video because I want to support creators. But YT just sticks them into the middle of things, frequently ruining the experience of the surrounding content.

Meanwhile they promote absolute trash like Nikocado Avocado, which is my view is no different from shooting up heroin.


> they promote absolute trash like Nikocado Avocado

I have never had one of his videos promoted to me. You may have a different filter bubble / reccomendation algorithm pushing it towards you because you watch similar content?


I personally don't, because for potentially sketchy content I watch it logged out or in a private browser. But just the fact that the guy has millions of subscribers and they monetize is his videos at all is bothersome to me. I can't see any qualitative difference between him and a fentanyl aficionado.


For the creators I really care about, I make Patreon donations and the creators generally publish ad-free videos for their supporters - just take YouTube out of the mix altogether from the funding perspective.


> there is great content on YT and I want those creators to make enough to carry on to get to the level where they proper sponsors

Just donate to their Patreon/Kofi or click the big "Thanks" button under their video.


I don’t feel like there’s any conflict.

The ad blockers want a free ride.

We all know what would happen to YouTube if 100% of its users were able to block ads. It would become paid-only or go out of business. The only reason it’s tolerated by so many websites is because only a small sliver of users know how to install ad-blocking software.

These are real people spending real time and money making content. On the YouTube corporate side of things, the people who make YouTube what it is are real people with real families to feed with their salaries. They work full time and then some to keep the site running and lots of resources (computers, energy, etc) are used to serve the content.

It’s funny to me how the software engineering community seems to be the most enthusiastic about stealing the fruits of their own labor. I see people on HN all the time advocating for forever licenses of software, pushing back against the service business model. It’s like you all want a lower salary.

You’d rarely find other types of professionals and artists trying to advocate for their own customers finding ways around paying for their work.

YouTube Premium is a great product and one of the few streaming services I’m enthusiastic about.

I will admit, I do use an ad blocker, but I’ve got as much right to do that as a website has the right to cripple my experience if they detect that I’m using it. In those cases, I just turn it off and add the site to my exceptions, or I don’t return to the website. It’s not a big deal.


> It would become paid-only or go out of business.

Fantastic. Then people would have to host their videos elsewhere, perhaps on PeerTube.


Who do you think would donate all the bandwidth to replace youtube? How would legal complaints and other ops costs be handled? OSS is great until the government shows up and arrests you and you can't afford lawyers.


Yeah, I'm in the same boat. There's some quality content on YT, but A) I don't trust that more than a millionth of my YT premium free goes to these creators, B) normal YT is so intensely terrible that I don't feel good about rewarding google for their practices of pushing me towards premium and C) by paying for YT premium, I can't shake this vague notion of me enabling the further closing down of the internet by getting everything interesting locked up behind paywalls and monthly fees.


Calculate what a creator earns per view. Donate or buy merch with that money.


This is a nice idea, but it's like all those open source projects out there that you use that could use donations, but few remember to actually donate (or buy merch). Long-term subscriptions of one form or another (e.g. Patreon) are really the only way to ensure sustainability.


My approach to that is not to try to donate a few bucks to every project I use, but to randomly choose a few about quarterly, especially among the ones I use the most, and make larger donations to those. Otherwise it is too hard to remember to donate, and just plain too much work.

If a lot of people do that, it'll even out.

I'd like to have an automated way to make my choices more random, and to weight the probabilities better toward the projects that give me the most value, or are the most generally underfunded compared to the global value they produce. At the moment, I do that more or less by guessing. Unfortunately it sounds Hard(TM) to do it right.

It'd also be nice if you didn't have to go searching for how to donate to every project.


Potential solution: download all videos locally [1] As an added benefit, you'll skip all sponsored content.

Just put this in your terminal once you install yt-dlp:

yt-dlp --sponsorblock-remove all URL "put a youtube URL here without quotes"

[1] https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp


This was to come as ad blockers impacts Google's revenue directly. I mean it's just one guy maintaining an addon against a trillion dollar company that spies us constantly.


https://invidious.io/

https://invidi.link/


Invidious is great and all but they need a complete redesign. It looks like it was design by a developer


I get that it's annoying, but YouTube Premium is by far the best value streaming subscription I pay every month. I once cancelled it and couldn't make it a day before re-subscribing.


I think it depends how much YT you watch. I’d say I watch about 2-3hrs a week and use an as blocker so premium just isn’t worth it for me. If I watched much more i totally would pay


YouTube has been getting passive aggressive lately. My homepage is gone now because I have search history off. It used to just show me videos of channels I'm subscribed to but now I have to click on "Subscribed" to instead. Anyone know a quick way to redirect the root and ONLY root page of Youtube to my subscriptions on Firefox and Safari? I'm a premium subscriber btw so this is just obnoxious. For those unaware, if you browse anonymously you get ads even if logged into Premium.


I just bookmark the "subscriptions" page instead of the homepage.


What I do is click the 'Report' button in the corner of that notification and then file a report saying that I received this pop-up, but that I do not have an adblocker.

I like to think that if enough of us file reports, Youtube will think their system is falsely detecting adblockers.


I cancelled YT premium because it would still show me ads while using chromecast sometimes. 100% chance they will start showing ads to premium users if they actually manage to shut down ad blockers. Just like cable TV does. Pay for the service, watch ads half the time anyway.


At this writing, Invidious and Piped don't seem affected. These are alternate front-ends which can be self-hosted or have numerous public instances.

I suspect yt-dlp and VLC will also function well.

Your best video option is a third-party media viewer, in any regard.

Invidious: <https://invidious.io/>

Piped: <https://piped.video/>

yt-dlp: <https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp> Fork of youtube-dl, command-line client which can download or stream to a local player, supports video, audio only, and many, many, many, many services / hosts other than its namesake.

VLC: <https://www.videolan.org/vlc/> Full GUI media player, includes streaming capabilities for multiple sites & services.

There are numerous other media player front-ends for Linux and other platforms such as Xine, mplayer, and more, check your OS's package archive / repos.


Simply put, "Ad blockers are not allowed on YouTube" means that YouTube does not allow users to block ads while using their platform.

This policy is in place to ensure that YouTube can continue to provide free access to their site and services to billions of users worldwide.

If you are seeing the message "Ad blockers are not allowed on YouTube" while trying to watch videos, there are a few things you can do to fix the issue.

Method 1: Use The Brave Browser

Method 2: Use UBlock Origin

Method 3: Use Anti-Adblock Killer Script

Method 4: Use Third-Party YouTube Apps

For detailed explanation for each method check: https://wealthquint.com/bypass-ad-blockers-are-not-allowed-o...


They're not actually ad blockers. They are javascript exploit protection. It just so happens a good fraction if not the majority of exploits come in through ad systems in general. It's a rare thing a website itself is going to attack you. It's always some code/media imported from a third party domain/ip. ie, ads.


You're right, YouTube ads are notorious for being JavaScript heavy and served by a third party.


I can't tell if you're being sarcastic? YouTube ads are served by Google, just like the rest of YouTube. You can verify this by looking where your network requests go in devtools.

(I used to work on ads at Google, but in a different area and don't know anything about YouTube beyond what I can see in devtools.)


As soon as I get that, I'll be having yt-dlp very handy.


I have something ridiculously overengineered for this. An ios shortcut that you can call on a webpage, that puts the webpage url onto a queue; a worker on my home server pulls these urls from the queue and calls yt-dlp on em, downloading the urls to Plex.

Mainly used for allowing my kids to view some content I can screen for appropriateness, that also gets rid of the ridiculous ads.

A thing yet to do is to use a LLM to automatically categorize these downloads into folders


While that works for now, if Google ever took interest in it I think it would be pretty straightforward to break any libraries like that. If you change either the endpoints or the model or etc with any reasonable frequency the library authors couldn't possibly keep up. Google can orchestrate their rollouts so their things always keep working while the library users are always in for a surprise. This is one of those things that could also be automated and put on a cron if one was really into it. In general though, I think for the time being this is luckily not a big enough of a dot on their radar for them to care.


> this is luckily not a big enough of a dot on their radar for them to care.

Funnily enough, Google doesn't allow yt-downloader extensions on the Chrome web store. They will cite you rule #4, and send you a rejection letter for "Facilitating unauthorized access to or download of copyrighted content or media, specifically, YouTube." The irony of course is that they allow downloader extensions for other websites. That they specifically prohibit youtube downloaders while allowing downloaders for almost any other website smells suspiciously like anti-competitive behavior to me.

On the other hand, Firefox's addon store is free from these restrictions, so you can find tons of yt download extensions there.


It's usually not that easy for companies to move that fast as there's a lot of devices with YouTube apps that are still actively used but not updated frequently. Think old Android devices or Smart TVs.


They've already been experimenting with that for months. Using yt-dlp can get your IP address blocked:

https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp/issues/7860


I don't quite get the holy outrage at commercial websites including ads. I mean, I like annoying irrelevant intrusive ads as much as the next person, but that's part of the damn product. Don't like it, don't use it. Or pay YouTube premium.

I don't take much issue with ad blockers either, but think it's totally fair enough if YouTube wants to dump their shitstream of ads on consenting users.


I do not understand why people refuse to pay for other people's work, even indirectly.

YouTube Premium gives creators a pretty decent cut as well, coming from someone with monetized youtube vids...


Youtube Premium is a waste of money, they bundle a crappy $11/m music service with it, for $13/m.

I'd pay $2/m, or even $4 bucks, for ad-free Youtube, but I'm not buying an additional music service.


How much is this decent cut?


It's actually been a bit. I haven't published in 90 days, because of that I lost monetization status and I can't see my previous payment breakdowns.

^^ Reasons I don't like youtube. I will keep looking. If I remember correctly it was like 15-20% of total revenue I was getting - of course it depended on the period.


FWIW, I'm not seeing this at the time I'm writing this comment.

Not sure if it's A/B testing, or my combo of Chrome Extensions, or something else at play.


Pretty sure it's A/B testing. I'm logged in with uBlock Origin and no anti-adblock is visible. I've seen someone on Reddit complaining they were getting this and loads of people replied to say they were not. They're probably trying to figure out how many users/views they will lose or how many new premium subscribers they get or something like that.


I hate A/B testing. Puts the feedback and protest mechanism working on those who complain the most.

If you are a techie, you are forced to yell or silent quit the website, and most of the times I really don't have the time to waste yelling.


My team rely on a/b testing. It’s the only way we can test whether the tweaks in our ML model produce positive results or not.

Playing devils advocate here I think it’s actually a good idea that YT are testing this. They need to understand how big of a negative impact this would be if released. If enough users hate this change as you and I suspect then hopefully YT see these results in their tests and revisit their approach.

A/b testing stops the worst user experiences from getting rolled out. Our company did a high profile a/b test that got a lot of negative feedback from users and the whole redesign it got canned because of it.


I'd prefer Google to impose those changes on 100% of it users so it could generate outrage and incentivize people to jump ship, instead of enabling them to push it slowly and cooking everyone without them noticing.


Welcome to capitalism my friend


> I hate A/B testing.

I agree. As a user, A/B testing is a horrible practice.


I also started getting that yesterday, but curiously I was still able to watch videos after closing the popup (without turning off my ad blocker).


At least for some users, they eventually start completely disabling the video.


Honestly that's one of the reasons I use Brave, I want to support creators.

Pure adblocking doesn't.

Micropayments require cash, which sometimes is not handy to spend.


https://wealthquint.com/bypass-ad-blockers-are-not-allowed-o...


I got the same, but I don't run an adblocker, I just run Brave, which doesn't block ads, but does block trackers.

Anyway it is only on a subset of accounts, because opening the link in private mode worked.


Youtube premium doesn't stop the adverts, you need sponsorblock for that.


This is conflating two otherwise unrelated things that just look similar if you squint.


An advert for grammarly inserted by youtube and an advert for grammarly inserted by the content creator. Both are adverts.


The video ads and the native video ads.


Ah, that's why the videos stopped working for me at home over PiHole.


Was a solution finally built to block YT ads with PiHole? I haven’t used it in a year or two and last I heard it was very hard / impossible to block YT ads because (like Facebook and Instagram) the ads are all served from the YT domain.

How did you do it? Can you link to a guide or docs to do it?


I didn't. What broke was now embedded videos (at least in iOS Safari) no longer work and I have to click to see them in the app.


Most of the channels I follow report having been demonetized (and for bogus and/or unspecified reasons.

Why should I care about channels I don't watch?


I got this last night too. Somehow I got past it by refreshing, or going back/forward, I can’t remember exactly. I’m sure it’s coming permanently soon though. Sad days.


I opened youtube this morning and did not see a popup because I already pay for Youtube Premium. They even have cheaper pricing in developing markets.


Related:

YouTube's crackdown on ad blockers intensifies - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37782171 - Oct 2023 (140 comments)

YouTube is testing new “skip ads” button that makes it just a bit harder to skip - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37224622 - Aug 2023 (12 comments)

YouTube is testing a three-strikes policy for ad blocking - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36747367 - July 2023 (72 comments)

YouTube is blocking videos for users who block ads - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36583277 - July 2023 (91 comments)

YouTube Threatens to Cut Off Ad Blocker Users After Just Three Ad-Less Vids - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36538577 - June 2023 (50 comments)

YouTube confirms three-strikes test for ad blocking - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36535417 - June 2023 (7 comments)

YouTube is testing a more aggressive approach against ad blockers - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36517238 - June 2023 (1343 comments)

YouTube Blocks Ad Blockers Amid Declining Ad Revenue - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36277079 - June 2023 (30 comments)

YouTube on TVs getting unskippable 30-second and pause screen ads - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35986992 - May 2023 (190 comments)

YouTube is going to stop you from using ad blockers - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35954648 - May 2023 (23 comments)

YouTube tests blocking videos unless you disable ad blockers - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35892512 - May 2023 (1405 comments)

Apparently Ad Blockers are not allowed on YouTube. Is this a new thing? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35883457 - May 2023 (52 comments)

YouTube May Force You to Watch 10 (Or More) Unskippable Ads in a Row - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32911676 - Sept 2022 (128 comments)

The free YouTube tier is about to become unbearable with even more ads - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32866976 - Sept 2022 (96 comments)

YouTube ads appear to be ramping up, with as many as 10 unskippable ads - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32859438 - Sept 2022 (143 comments)

YouTube Free Is Silently Testing 5 Ads, Instead of 2, Before Your Video Starts - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32851367 - Sept 2022 (21 comments)

YouTube currently testing 5 to 10 unskippable ads before video starts - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32835071 - Sept 2022 (266 comments)

YouTube will now show ads on all videos even if creators don’t want them - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25149206 - Nov 2020 (758 comments)

Tell HN: Adblocker doesn't block YouTube ads anymore - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22658093 - March 2020 (17 comments)


Incidentally, along with other strengthened paywalls, this might impact HN's own acceptance of YT videos, which may not be generally available to many HN readers.

In 2023, youtube.com was the single most frequently appearing site on HN front-page stories (based on HN's front-page archive), with 105 stories (of 10,950), about 1% of the total. (Based on my HN front-page analysis.)

Edit: Corrected above from 10% as initially written.

As previously noted, the New York Times saw front-page appearances fall to 25% of its prior level after that site's paywall strengthened in August 2019.

I'm anticipating a large number of comments addressing YT's anti-ad-blocking rather than the contents of the video itself.


Uhh, 100 stories would be 1%, a big distinction.

I am sure if worst comes to worst, a solution will be found. I haven’t heard anything about YouTube planning to block embeds for example.


Gah! You're right.

I should have caught that as the largest category ovrall (all years) is general news sites at about 8.5% of all FP stories. So no single site should rank above that.[1]

YT is still the single top site for 2022 front page stories though. Top 10:

  Site                            Stories     Points (   mean  )  Comments (   mean  )
  ------------------------------  -------     ------ ----------   -------- ----------
  n/a                                 432     167275 (  386.32 )    125304 (  289.39 )
  youtube.com                         105      27243 (  257.01 )     12489 (  117.82 )
  nature.com                           80      17694 (  218.44 )     11716 (  144.64 )
  wikipedia.org                        68      12258 (  177.65 )      5855 (   84.86 )
  nytimes.com                          67      21190 (  311.62 )     21765 (  320.07 )
  arstechnica.com                      63      18319 (  286.23 )     12057 (  188.39 )
  ieee.org                             53       9432 (  174.67 )      5933 (  109.87 )
  reuters.com                          53      28360 (  525.19 )     29033 (  537.65 )
  theguardian.com                      49      12228 (  244.56 )      8677 (  173.54 )
  quantamagazine.org                   48      11293 (  230.47 )      5519 (  112.63 )
  science.org                          47      12485 (  260.10 )      7655 (  159.48 )
"n/a" are posts without links, typically Ask/Tell HN, Who's Hiring/Wants to be Hired threads, etc.

________________________________

Notes:

1. "General news" has actually fallen in recent years, with programming/code submissions (frequently Github/Gitlab repos, plus language-specific sites, etc.) at 10.5% of all front-page submissions in 2023, blogs at 10.25%, academic/science (5.2%), and general news (4%).


Is this with uBlock Origin or ABP?


Not OP, but I got this with uBlock Origin earlier.


Good to know. I have uBlock but haven't seen this push yet. I wonder what the technical implementation of their anti-adblock solution looks like


I use Firefox now and don’t miss Chrome at all. The ad blocking continues.


[flagged]


I don’t mind ads in principal but I use an adblocker.

Because there’s a big difference between placing a tasteful ad or two on a page, and forcing me to watch 2 or 3 obnoxious irrelevant commercials while still placing ads all over the screen and making me click annoyance-optimized [X]s or skip options.

And I’m already paying for two multi-user GSuites and Nest, despite their constant efforts to make those services shittier and claiming necessity of annual price increases. I would be far likelier to subscribe to YouTube premium if every single one of Googles products wasn’t constantly decreasing in quality over time. Google home worked better in 2018 than it does today. They don’t need my ad revenue, they need to overhaul their performance evaluation because there’s diminishing returns on how many ads a person can watch per day and they must be approaching the limit if they’re resorting to targeting techies who won’t click ads anyway.


I don't use an adblocker. I agree that sites with obnoxious irrelevant ads are quite frustrating. I simply don't visit those sites, they're usually garbage in the first place.

What's an example of a site where:

1. There is no option to pay to remove the ads.

2. The ads are obnoxious and intrusive.

3. The content is worth consuming in the first place.


The contempt of ads network to serve outright scam or malware ads astound me also.

When Newspapers of record are filled with 'sponsored link' leading to obvious medical scam, you know something is wrong.


Exactly. In principle I don’t mind advertisements; newspapers, magazines, and broadcast TV shows have ads, and I have no problem with them. I also don’t mind certain Web ads, such as the banner ads that were commonplace in the 1990s. What I do mind, however, is when advertisers feel they could do whatever they want to users. It started with annoying pop-up ads back in the late 1990s and early 2000s, which led to the creation of pop-up blockers. Then the ads started delivering malware, which necessitated ad blocking as a means of protection. Then ads started carrying audio with them, and later video ads were introduced. The ads themselves started to become scammy and in some cases outright grotesque in ways that would never be allowed in reputable newspapers or magazines.

I use YouTube Premium because of YouTube’s massive music collection; it and SiriusXM are the subscription services I use. I don’t mind paying for content, but what I do mind is the notion that somehow the website owner has a right to my screen and my computational resources. If I mute my TV or change the channel during commercials, it would be absurd to suggest that I’m “stealing” from the TV station. If I skip past the BMW or Tiffanys ads in a magazine, I’m not “stealing” from Time or Life or National Geographic. Why is blocking an ad on a website different? If I put a piece of paper over the ad, am I still “stealing”? Give me a break! Once something is downloaded on my computer, I have control over how the data is displayed, period. It would be different if users were hacking into systems to bypass paywalls.

My support for ad blocking is not about users feeling entitled to free content; it in reaction to the anti-consumer attitudes some website owners and advertisers have, which have led to degrading the user experience of the Web and increasingly desktop computing in general. Ads by themselves are not bad, but certain websites have brought the situation upon themselves by behaving in ways that are contemptuous to users.


> Google pays for the bandwidth and storage, and in many cases, pays royalties to the video creator.

If the amount that is paid to content creators compared to the amount of bucks that google makes, I'd agree. But its not 50/50. It's more 99/1.

I pay for the bandwidth not google. They pay toss all, they have local peering, local cache. Doesn't cost Google a dime meanwhile I have to pay for the bandwidth wasted from the advertising.

Storage, meh. Part of digital infrastructure.


Yeah but I don't see how I personally am contributing by watching an ad without buying the product being advertised. Either the advertiser loses out or YouTube loses out, and I'd rather pick the option that doesn't waste my time.


> I don't see how I personally am contributing by watching an ad without buying the product being advertised

The company pays YouTube for every person they claim they showed the ad to. You do not need to buy a product for YouTube & the Content Creator to get paid.

How is the advertiser losing out? Not every ad has the purpose of causing a purchase. Brand awareness. Easing buyers remorse. Propaganda.


They lose out because I don't pay attention and absorb brand awareness from ads. Maybe everyone thinks this and tends to be wrong, cause obviously it's still profitable overall, but that doesn't stop me from thinking it too.

If everyone ignored or blocked ads like me, advertising wouldn't work, and YT would have to charge subscription instead. That'd also be fine by me.


I'm old enough to remember when YouTube neither had ads nor YouTubers created videos to make money off it.


You mean the less than 2 year period in a product that has been out for 18 years? Short lived.


No, most Youtube videos by far are created for free and at a loss.

Most ads are also paid at a loss, by companies doing an experiment then closing it.

Youtube only brought the marketing around their brand of being the first platform. They inherited this position from the early days of the internet.

They did acquire it for $1.65bn circa 2006, then maintained it at a great cost. But the second on the market doesn’t stand a chance.


Where was that logic when they were crushing all the competition by subsidizing Youtube with the rest of Google's money?


you're mad they didn't start charging and pushing ads earlier?


I'm annoyed that people act like it's narcissistic or entitled for users to be mad that now that YouTube has killed most of their competition by subsidizing the business with Google money, they want to start doing the exact thing everyone else had tried to do, except now there isn't any other comparable option.

Normally when a business takes massive losses to drive competition out in an industry that's hard to break into, then once they're sufficiently dominant, starts to raise prices, it's an antitrust issue.


The income has to come from somewhere. All new businesses will probably operate at a loss for some length of time. Sure, maybe if they forced ads earlier on, in an effort to be a profitable division earlier another competitor would have arisen.

Whoever wins the online video site thing contest is going to end up making money one of two ways, subscriptions or ads. Idk that it makes a lot of sense to me to be mad at Google about it. If not them, some VC or something would have just taken the hit instead.


Actually, yeah, that's a reasonable thing to be upset about. They used the lack of forced ads to ensure that competitors also could not force ads. Now that they've captured the market, they force ads.


Well if they forced ads earlier than whatever competitor they had that didn't would be doing the same thing but with a smaller runway.

If all free video sites had ads, I think just on pure speed and scale youtube probably had higher costs overall anyway.


I'm happy to pay for content, as soon as sites provide me with a remotely reasonable way of doing that.

Advertising is not a reasonable way. A separate subscription, with a credit card interaction, for every site I happen to hit once a year, is not a reasonable way. Demanding a bunch of personal information is not a reasonable way. Trying to lock me into an "ecosystem of partners" is not a reasonable way.

Globally accessible, ungated, anonymous micropayments, with one or two universally used protocols but no central gatekeepers? Sign me up. Extra points if I get to see how much of my payment is going to the actual content creator and how much is being eaten by the "platform".

The core technolgies exist. All the pieces have been available for many years. What appears to be missing is will.

Meanwhile, I'll use an ad blocker. If you prevent me from accessing your site using my ad blocker, I will go elsewhere.


Give me a break.

You don't want advertising, you don't want to subscribe, and you don't want a network of sites using the same subscription. What possible solution exists that satisfies your criteria, which are way more demanding than "remotely reasonable"?

This is just an excuse you've fabricated to justify your own convenience, stinginess and/or laziness.


I said what solution I wanted. Micropayments have been researched for 30 years. Anonymous crypto payments have been deployed for maybe 10. Yes, there are scaling issues. No, they're not that hard. The real problem is getting everybody to agree on what to use.

... and if a site directly tells me it doesn't like my ad blocker, I leave. I haven't gone to the ad-blocker-blocker level. I don't think that's unreasonable.


The hard problem with micropayments is that if your site sells access or content to individual users for micropayments, and you have users in multiple countries or multiple states/provinces within a country, you might have to deal with VAT or sales tax on those payments in multiple jurisdictions.

For direct micropayments to work for sites that have users in multiple jurisdictions and do not wish to find themselves on the wrong side of the law in those jurisdictions one of these approaches is probably needed:

1. Some sort of international agreement to either make it so online sales of digital content is just taxed in the seller's jurisdiction.

2. Some sort of international agreement that makes it so that even if the seller has to collect taxes for multiple jurisdictions, they can report and remit all of the collected taxes to one jurisdiction and that jurisdiction's tax office will deal with divvying it up to the others.

Europe does something like that for VAT. You register with one EU country (Ireland is a good choice for US companies). Then you just send them a quarterly report with a list of how much you sold in each country and pay them and they deal with it. You don't have to deal with tax authorities in any other EU countries.

Another approach, which does not require any new international agreements to be made, is for sites to sell through an intermediary. You structure this so that the end user actually buys from the intermediary, and the intermediary buys from your site.

If the intermediary is handling many different sites they might be big enough that they can afford the cost of dealing with sales/VAT taxes in potentially hundreds of different jurisdictions. Your site is only transacting with the intermediary and so only has to worry about at most two jurisdictions, the one you are in and the one the intermediary is in.


> ... and if a site directly tells me it doesn't like my ad blocker, I leave. I haven't gone to the ad-blocker-blocker level.

You may not be aware that many such messages are themselves blocked by the default lists in ublock origin. Examples:

https://github.com/uBlockOrigin/uAssets/issues?q=is%3Aissue+...


I did not know that, and I suspect that having found out is gonna make my life much less happy than it presently is.

For anybody who's interested, I just posted a question in uBlock's Reddit forum about how to stop using such ad-blocker-blocker-blocker features while still getting most of the rest of the features of the extension. https://www.reddit.com/r/uBlockOrigin/comments/171rorw/optin...

Then I'll have to find out if I can survive like that...


I don't want advertising tracking me. I don't want advertising introducing products I don't want. I want advertising to let me choose what advertising I want to see.

I want to see advertising promoting environmental friendly products. I want advertising to promote cleaning up litter, but you don't see that do you? We have the tech.

Advertising, a blood sucking evil exploitive parasite.

I would turn off all blockers if they didn't play with PsyOp strategies of evil manipulative social exploits. Exploits that are replayed on kids, you and us. Of such that Google promotes on their network.

If advertising was clean, did not impeach on my privacy and just kept advertising to "just this video" I wouldn't block advertising. But they don't, wont.

They are vermin, evil parasites. But you don't see that do you?


> I would turn off all blockers if they didn't play with PsyOp strategies of evil manipulative social exploits.

That'd be a bad idea, actually, because advertising is a massive security problem as well as being bad for your brain.

Just a week or two ago they announced a WebP library bug that allowed simple images to own any of the major browsers. It's just not a good idea to let hundreds of random sources stick content on every page, even if you think you've somehow sanitized it.


Such a sad comment to see on a tech enthusiast hacker site


As I said, “narcissistic self-entitlement”.

You use YouTube once a year? Please.


No, I actually use YouTube enough to subscribe to it. Which I've tried to do, but they don't offer their premium service where I live yet.

Actually my usage is falling off now, so it may get too low before they get around to making it possible.


I use ad-block everywhere, but this is the right take. Youtube even gives an option to use it without ads.


The youtube company wants me to stop unblocking their ads. That's okay, I'll still keep watching that garbage.




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