Business YouTube viewers outraged after site ‘tests’ banning ad blockers - A chronically incompetent site with a history of making bad decisions makes yet another bad decision

https://www.dexerto.com/entertainment/youtube-viewers-outraged-after-site-tests-banning-ad-blockers-2141315/

https://archive.ph/e92a3

Virginia Glaze ❘ Published: May 10, 2023, 18:22 ❘ Updated: May 10, 2023, 18:22

YouTube viewers are raising alarm bells after being greeted with a message saying the site is now banning ad blockers.

YouTube is one of the most popular video-sharing platforms on the internet, boasting an active user base of over 2.5 billion monthly users as of February 2023.

A large number of content creators have made careers for themselves by uploading videos to the site, ringing in a new era of entertainment far ahead of the curve of other influencers on sites like Instagram and TikTok.

Over the course of the site’s existence, advertisements have played a major part in revenue for both the platform itself and its massive catalog of creators. However, many users have complained about the length and frequency of the ads they’ve been seeing — some of which last 30 seconds and are completely unskippable.

YouTube reportedly “experimenting” with banning ad blockers​

Many viewers have found a way to get around ads on YouTube by using ad blockers. Unfortunately, it looks like this method might be going in the bin soon, according to some users who’ve encountered a new feature that the platform is purportedly testing.



In early May, users posted a message they’d allegedly received while attempting to use YouTube with an ad blocker. The message reads: “Ad blockers are not allowed on YouTube.”

“It looks like you may be using an ad blocker,” the message continues. “Ads allow YouTube to stay free for billions of users worldwide.”

The message then prompts users to switch to YouTube Premium, a service it officially launched in 2015 that allows users to bypass ads and even watch with their phones locked in exchange for a monthly fee.

Users aren’t happy with this purported change and took to social media to warn others about the possibility of being unable to watch YouTube with an ad blocker.

“One ad before each video was fine, but they got greedy and started playing multiple unskippable 30-second ads,” one user said on Reddit. “That’s when I went for adblock. There is zero chance I am ever deactivating it or paying for premium now, that ship has sailed.”



“If there’s SO MANY ads that your users are going out of their way to download and use ad blockers, maybe [it’s] YOU’RE the problem, not the people using them,” another said on Twitter.



According to a moderator on the YouTube subreddit, a YouTube employee allegedly confirmed that this is an “experiment” the website is currently running, and has not been rolled out to all users at the time of writing.



Dexerto has reached out to YouTube for comment. For more entertainment news and coverage, check out our page here.

 

[Markass the Worst]

It's a "test" all right. A test of how much bullshit Youtube can get away with. Fuck that shitty website.

 

[tehpope]

Laughs in Freetube, Piped, Invidious, et. al.

https://github.com/digitalblossom/alternative-frontends

 

[Lone Wandering Courier]

Laughs in Freetube, Piped, Invidious, et. al.

https://github.com/digitalblossom/alternative-frontends

Yep, I've been using freetube and it's been working nicely.

 

[Agent Abe Caprine]

You will watch 10 30 second ads before a 1 minute video and like it!

 

[Fungible penis]

One of the dumbasses posting is paying for Twitter blue, but whining about YT ads? Just get premium you fucktard.

 

[Bruno Powroznik]

I use MPV + yt-dlp to watch videos. I can't imagine doing it any other way, no ads, no bullshit. You can even use a script to skip sponser stuff with sponserblock.

 

[Trans Fat 41g]

On the topic of NewPipe-SponsorBlock, I really have to appreciate its UI being as basic as they get. Bonus for not needing a gimped Google Services for feature-completeness.

 

[Cuckoman]

Just need a new type of adblocker.
Current adblockers, simplifiedly speaking, just filters the html and removes the links to ads. And the site can detect that "the client loaded the page but never loaded the links to the ads".

A new style of adblockers are needed that still downloads all the ads but it just skips rendering them to the screen.
I.e. instead of filtering the ads on the html layer, instead have the rendering layer just not write the pixels to the screen.
Good luck trying to detect that.

 

[Barry McKockner]

Youtube lost me with the MULTIPLE midroll ads.

 

[CarlosDanger]

Yeah I have been using Freetube as well.

 

[Bland Crumbs]

Fatt Jarbo keeps raking in the wins.

 

[Matt Damon]

If there were no way to block Youtube ads, I'd stop watching Youtube. Hell, I'm already most of the way there.

 

[Daddy's Little Kitten]

I've been using ReVanced and it's still working. I'll have to check on my PC.

 

[Schwarzwald]

I would be so happy to get off of YouTube forever. There are so many awful changes that they've made, and their policies are atrocious. But Google's market share, resources, and monopoly give them a virtually unassailable advantage, free to make whichever questionable decisions they please with very little consequence.

As much as I despise pretty much everything about the site, I always find myself crawling back. I did away with Google's search engine years ago and use it very sparingly now, but I've never seen another service that remotely gives me what I'm looking for as far as videos go versus YouTube.

 

[Lone Wandering Courier]

I would be so happy to get off of YouTube forever. But Google's market share, resources, and monopoly give them a virtually unassailable advantage, free to make whichever questionable decisions they please with very little consequence.

As much as I despise pretty much everything about the site, I always find myself crawling back. I did away with Google's search engine years ago and use it very sparingly now, but I've never seen another service that remotely gives me what I'm looking for as far as videos go versus YouTube.

A number of creators I follow have an odysee presence, but a lot of others don't. Some of the ones that do have an odysee though sometime lag behind in uploads at times and their comment sections are empty.

 

[Matt Damon]

I've never seen another service that remotely gives me what I'm looking for as far as videos go versus YouTube.

I've been using the Tubeshift extension for something like two years now and a surprising amount of what I watch is on alternative sites.

Definitely not everything, but a lot more than I would've expected.

 

[Pee Cola]

Laughs in Freetube, Piped, Invidious, et. al.

https://github.com/digitalblossom/alternative-frontends

For now. It won't be long until YouTube starts constantly breaking its API, and all these alternative YouTube consumption apps/sites keep breaking every week instead of a couple times a year.

Might be time to go Odysneed.

 

[REGENDarySumanai]

How to turn the userbase against you in less than a second.

 

[Vect]

It seems to only affect extensions. For now, Brave seems to screen ads without issue.

I don't see why they can't just have a standardized structure for ad breaks - something like, every two videos, one 15 second ad, then a 6 second ad every 5 minutes or so. Why anybody is making a 30 second ad in the Tik-Tok era is...befuddling.

That said, I'm a bit more sympathetic to YouTube here - they can't admit it, but they're given conflicting priorities from Google and the userbase they're supposed to cater to, the website is cluttered and bloated with huge amounts of useless, unwatched content and that's on top of the fact that no 'creator' is losing more money than YouTube does itself. Despite the fact it has no real competitors, the long-form video gallery format is obsolete from a marketing and revenue perspective when you compare it to successor social media. Videos already have to pass very high bars for monetization (no swear words or 'controversial' topics) and that's only for the channels that have the required views. If you've ever been on those video sharing websites where you're basically playing whack-a-mole with pop-up windows for camgirls and Chinese vitamins, I don't think anyone can really justify getting worked up over a few midrolls. Does anybody remember the period of 1 hour long unskippable mid-roll ads?