Nope. They just need to move it server side. Insert it right in the stream and there’s nothing blockers can do
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if I could pay for BoingBoing Pro or something like I do Arstechnica Pro, I would. Especially if it got rid of ads and got rid of those stupid “buy a macbook pro from twelve years ago for 99 dollars” crap article things.
In a general sense, it seems like advertising supported web stuff helps ensure people go to websites. If you HAD to pay to view content from EACH website or see nothing, the web would collapse. Indirect payment by way of advertising subsidy unfortunately has created an ecosystem. And it goes back further - look at television, radio, newspapers.
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Yep. Ads have been ramping up lately.
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And pulling movies and shows that I want to watch.
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It comes up in the comments every now and then, i would be happy to pay a sub for BB if it was a modest amount
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If YouTube win, I’ll just stop visiting YouTube.
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In particular it’s what biologists call an “evolutionary arms race”, so it looks like the military people really got a lock on that metaphor. 
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I genuinely have no idea, but wouldn’t re-encoding the videos for pretty much every customer (because of the unique combination of location, language and changing ad campaigns) be incredibly punishing?
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Not if they don’t have to do the whole thing, hit a spot where it just can be inserted. I don’t know enough about video encoding to know if that’s entirely possible. If there’s enough metadata to allow fast forwarding, seems like there should be insertion spots.
I haven’t noticed this yet. Are people not using ublock origin? Is it because I also use Firefox?
Man, I couldn’t survive without Firefox and tab containers. Probably the best browser feature in years.
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There was a small window in time when if the collective will had been there, the idea of micro-payments might have taken off. I’d happily see all my assorted site usage across the web’s monthly micro-payments bill be up to maybe £20-30 a month if it meant I never had to grappled with an ad blocker again. I appreciate many cannot afford that and indirectly rely on adverts to subsidise their access, but if a micro-payments pool had got established, sites would at least have the option of participating and giving their users an option.
(Yeah - it would all have been horrifically complex and probably have collaped under its own weight, but a guy can dream of what might have been…)
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I quit using chrome other than V rarely once they made it clear no one has any privacy at all when using it. Firefox is all but exclusively my browser. I mean, fuck google anyway, but FFS! all the tube of you ads and this forcing ads on us BS is more than aggravating.
google now is first and foremost an advertising company, and can go die.
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I quit reading music magazines back in the 90s because 2/3 of the pages were ads, mostly ads for expensive AF clothing (?) featuring barely-dressed people.
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I’m still at the point where I’ve gotten a pop-up telling me I’m “not allowed” to use an ad-blocker (as if I was committing some sort of crime), but I just closed the pop-up and that was it. I guess they’ll escalate at some point, at which time I’ll just start using Youtube downloaders to watch videos.
Apparently anti-malware extensions are triggering the message too, which doesn’t bode well.
I tend to watch a lot of Youtube videos by skipping around to find relevant portions, and the ads seem to pop up every time I skip forward, which means without an ad-blocker, it’s like half ads, even on long videos. It’s insufferable.
Yeah, Boingboing is actually what finally got me to install ad-blockers in the first place - constant crashes, ads completely covering the images and videos, the text bouncing around as ads appeared and disappeared… an ad-blocker was literally the only way I could keep reading it. Some of that got fixed, but I sometimes try to read it on my unblocked phone browser, and it’s such a mess I give up after a few minutes. (My favorite annoyance, that eventually did get fixed, was the video pop-up window, where if you hit the ‘x’ to close the window, the video window stayed open, but the ‘x’ disappeared.)
I wonder… for quality purposes, Youtube surely must want to do some pre-caching, so it necessarily starts sending you the video data before the ads are over. Though I’m willing to switch to watching videos via a downloader, which perhaps most users wouldn’t want to bother with, such that Youtube wouldn’t be too impacted by them - in which case a 30 second delay in watching the video is just part of the process…
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My wife and I both use FireFox + uBlock Origin, me on Windows, her on a Mac. Youtube still works fine for me with no ads but hers is locked out. Maybe the Mac versions are not updated as frequently?
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Yeah, imagine if an online system thought through this issue and designed a system of micropayments that were centrally billed and collected, and did so about 40 years ago.
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I never even encountered a period where it wasn’t working. I was increasingly concerned it was going to happen sooner or later but it seems like that’s not the case.
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I’ve got uBO for Chrome (on a generic Chromium build) and still haven’t run into any problems. I wonder if one of the lists I subscribe to has been on the ball in terms of new blocking behavior.
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If I find something worth watching I download it with Easy YouTube Downloader (Firefox extension), then watch the mp4 file that has no embedded ads. The short wait time for the download is worth it to avoid the ads.
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