I have an old Google subscription (remember Google Play?) and it now serves as an ad-killer for YT. But I’m dying to know how to stop all those pop-up suggestions at end screens. How do you get rid of those?
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That’s what the “Unhooked” extension does for me. It also has options to block comments, and several other things. Highly recommended! (Unhooked is the Chromium version; I know there are similar extensions for FireFox.)
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Feel like Google is ready for their end game of shakedown everyone: advertisers, content creators, and users.
They have been at this shenanigans for years with Firefox, where Youtube and all their products use extensions that only Chrome implemented:
YouTube page load is 5x slower in Firefox and Edge than in Chrome because YouTube’s Polymer redesign relies on the deprecated Shadow DOM v0 API only implemented in Chrome.
Recently, their relentlessly push for Manifest V3 which basically neuter the adblockers by severely limit the extend how an extension can intercept a request. Now, only the browser can do it, which put all control on Google hand to decide what user can and cannot see. By hijacking the W3C and using Chrome dominance, they become de-facto web standard.
Both this and the Manifest V3 push happening at the same time is not a coincidence. Their target is clearly adblockers and openweb standards, where thing can interact independently from their walled garden platform.
They literally use Microsoft’s playbook of “Embrace, extend, and extinguish” (EEE)
Back then, M$ got an anti-trust suit hit by the DOJ which stopped them on their track, which ironically, what give Google the chance to flourish. I’m not sure we can bring another anti-trust hit to Google. They’re basically Microsoft 2.0 with much more discreet and subtle violations as seem like they learned from Microsoft’s antitrust case.
Also hoping this adblocks backsplash will push people back to Firefox. They’re one of the few non profit org that still supports the open web. They have been sabotaged by Google from inside and outside for years and losing users as a result.
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You beat me to it; I use Ublock Origin and Brave, and I’m not about to stop.
Agreed, that’s true of most creators I follow as well.
Some More News is a good example:
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I’ve subscribed to Premium for a while, because I subscribe to a lot of great YouTube channels, and the Premium fees go (in part) to creators, like ad revenue. And I hate ads. Win-win. So this change doesn’t really affect me. Though I will say, because of other aspects of the platform, mainly what I’ve heard about demonetization difficulties, I’ve been enjoying other services YouTubers have been moving to, or parallel posting extended videos to, like Nebula. Not gonna give up my Premium subscription yet, but this doesn’t look great.
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Pfui. Looks just like any website during the 90s, before applying adblockers. XD
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Dear CEOs and services, If you require users to view ads then stop claiming your services are “free”. My time and attention are obviously worth money to you. Find an honest word.
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Hell, this is YouTube NOW!
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… YT is working normally for me 
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At least in the old days of TV they’d try to plan the programming so the commercials happened at a convenience break in the storytelling. Now with streaming the commercials just break in mid-sentence.
Add to that the thing where you see the same 3 ads over and over.
Ads always kinda suck but they’ve somehow seemed to make them even more annoying.
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Invidious instances have three good advantages here:
- region unblocking. The internet treats censorship as damage and routes around it.
- Adblock built in
- Not logged in, if you like the antipersonalisation.
Secondary benefit, it’s easier to download a vid than core youtube.
Back to core Youtube, I enjoy the SponsorBlock addon on top of ublock. I might turn it off for some more news because they turn theirs into an actual skit.
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solution? Disable YouTube!
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Time to explore The Fediverse…
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Came to say the same.
I am a YouTube creator. I make my living doing it. I honestly don’t care if someone uses an ad blocker and all the other YouTubers I know would say the same.
YouTube ad revenue is paltry. It’s fractions of fractions of a penny per view. The serious creators make their money from other means (sponsorships, Patreon, and merch being the big three). I have a good sized channel (see above re:living) and I don’t think YT ads even pay my internet bill.
So go ahead and block those ads. YouTube is trying to martyr us to justify their actions, that’s all.
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It would be most interesting to know why they aren’t doing it on the server side.
The adtech vermin do have a lot of congratulatory writeups of “server-side ad insertion” and its benefits; and doing it that way certainly does defeat standard client side adblocking approaches; as well as simplifying the client side of the video playback since it no longer has to do anything except play back the stream it is fed.
I can only assume that doing it that way imposes higher encoding costs, makes caching harder, or otherwise increases difficultly of delivery; because from the perspective of playing whack-a-mole with untrusted clients it’s obviously preferable.
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I think you may find that’s a bug, not a feature.
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The problem for content creator is that if Youtube force to disable ad blockers to watch you tube, then people using adblocker will stop to watch videos and unsubscribe from channells and finally disconnect from the platform. And this will surely affect more the content creators.
Adverts in Youtube become more and more long and invasive. I used a Roku to watch youtube on TV, and I stopped because they were too many, and now use only a PC.
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Paying for the service you’re using is also an option, for what it’s worth. I’d obviously like as many viewers as possible, but YouTube Red (or Premium, I guess they call it now) doesn’t cost very much. If people can’t or won’t pay for that, they probably won’t pay to support my content either (which I spend 50+ hours a week making).
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You don’t even have to put it in the stream though, for a first pass. If the ad stream hasn’t reached the end and the proper amount of time hasn’t passed, the main stream isn’t accessible.
