Raymond Hill (gorhill), the creator of uBlock Origin, has done some investigation and has found that this only affects AdBlock and AdBlock Plus[0]. Both of which are owned by the same people, and share the same ad blocking engine.
uBlock Origin is not affected.
I posted this on HN earlier today[1], but it unfortunately gained no traction. I guess outrage spreads easier. Gorhill explicitly points out some websites that spread the outrage, but not the real diagnosed issue.
Except for a pop-up initially I haven't experienced any change using yt with uBlock Origin. If I didn't follow tech news I could easily have overlooked the yt development. Boggles the mind that anyone uses AdBlock & AdBlock Plus. Can't be any other reason than the name squatting.
I use ublock origin on Firefox along with a few other privacy extensions. I do not use Adblock. YouTube doesn’t even finish loading the page for me but videos do start playing after 10 seconds or so. I tried without blocking ads but I gave up because the experience was even worse with how many ads there are now.
I’m hoping that, at some point, someone at YouTube will ask a User experience researcher to look into users’ motivation to block ads and realize that there are glaring issues with their model.
What has been happening to me is that, for the last decade or so, I only see ads in languages that I don’t speak or understand. I wrote about it—a lot. Nothing. A friend worked as the head of Analytics for that part of YouTube and he told me, “They don’t care.” I pointed out that it’s so common that Antonio Garcia Martinez wrote about it in his book _Chaos Monkeys_ (in 2012) and estimated that, at the time, it costs Facebook 4% of their ad revenue. I can confirm because I raised that point internally not once (in 2016 and it was fixed) but twice (the fix was overruled and I saw it again in 2020). In 2024, they are still wasting their time and energy, and 4% of Meta’s revenues isn’t chump change.
That’s not counting on pervasive ads for alcohol (illegal where I am), gambling (having an opt-out is mandatory in most jurisdictions), tax evading services (also illegal where I am), and specifically on Threads and Twitter, literal prostitution, and/or romance scams (I didn’t investigate which, tried to report, but was told that’s fine by their community guidelines).
I’m not a security researcher, and I refuse to investigate further than strictly necessary for my sanity (I expect deserved judgment from this community for that) however, in spite of that, I know ads are a constant vector for malware. Not much is done to address basic vectors, like not running any executable code in ads.
The only reason why enormous waste at scale, rampant illegal activity, and gaping security holes aren’t the only topics of conversation online is that everyone who can explain what’s happening has opted out. Forcing them back in isn’t the solution.
If anyone is curious whether I’m exaggerating, I had to check a vendor presentation for work. The video is on YouTube, and the first ad I saw reads:
> Beauties From Eastern Europe
> Chat and meet real Slavic women
> Sponsored
> love-stories
with a photo (presumably AI-generated) where to be completely honest, I could see that she was wearing red lacey underwear and had had a full bikini wax.
Do you know what kind of question I want to have from my boss when discussing a vendor? NOT WHY DOES GOOGLE THINK I WOULD FINANCIALLY SUPPORT LITERAL HUMAN TRAFFICKING.
So guess what I’m activating on my browser to NOT GET FIRED.
That book is garbage. Having been employed at FB, I worked with plenty of OG FB people who poked holes in all his claims. I even recall getting into an argument with the guy on an ex employee FB group about his upcoming book. Don’t take that book at its face value.
I respect people’s right to use as lockers on their machines, but it bears mentioning that YouTube is one of the last driving treasures of the internet. Paying for premium would go a long way to improving the situation for everybody, and I think it’s one area where if you can afford it, it’s not only right but also good.
> Paying for premium would go a long way to improving the situation for everybody
The recent change to Amazon Prime, where everyone using "Prime Video" was already "paying for prime video", which recently added advertising, with a new $2.99/month no ads option, implies that even if everyone "paid for premium" the siren song of advertising money would be too difficult for Google/YT to ignore, and even premium would then eventually begin to be infested with advertising.
I totally agree with you that YT has enabled a lot of really talented people to be successful and creative in a whole new way, and has opened up opportunities for many people all around the world to live profitable lives, where before TV channels were the gatekeepers of that creativity.
But the ad supported model seems to have slipped past the fair-to-viewers into the completely obnoxious and unbearable to nearly all viewers, so something has to give. Additionally it seems like content producers are getting a smaller amount than they used to get so it's less of an attractive platform, probably more so since the competitors showed up.
I heartily agree.
As an apprentice in the trades I was able to zoom forward at an incredible pace by learning from construction youtubers.
I met a guy who came out of poverty initially as a backhoe operator, how did he learn? YT, he literally mimiced fist person video of machine operation.
When I want to buy quality toold, ProjectFarm on youtube (of interest to anyone with even slight interst in tools and machines) provides a more objective and comprehensive analysis than any I've yet to see.
I've been struggling with this for a while. I object to a lot that google does and have had various problems with their services in the past, enough that I spent a good about of time trying to switch away from their products.
YouTube is the toughest one, since it's the videos created by people that I value and care about, rather than YouTube the product. I don't want people to stop producing good content, but I also don't want to support Google financially.
My compromise has been to use an ad-blocker, and to subscribe to the Patreon (or equivalent) of everyone who I watch regularly. It costs me more than a premium subscription would, but at least I feel my money's going where I want it to.
Sorry for repeating myself across a few threads on the YT ads issue the past days, I posted here[1] and here[2] the reasoning I'm pasting below, I will repeat it because I believe it's a core issue on how YT is treating their customers even when they were willing to pay:
I was willing to pay for "no ads", YouTube had the perfect product for me, Premium Lite, which I gladly paid for 2 years until I got an email in October:
> Subject: Your Premium Lite membership will be discontinued
> Thank you for being one of our first Premium Lite members.
> We’re writing to let you know that after October 25, 2023, we will no longer offer your version of Premium Lite. While we understand this may be disappointing news, we continue to work on different versions of Premium Lite as we incorporate feedback from our users, creators, and partners. [emphasis mine on the bullshit]
> To show our appreciation, we’re offering a 1 - month trial of Premium (even if you’ve had a trial before). With Premium, you can watch videos ad - free, offline, and in the background. Plus, stream music ad - free in the YouTube Music app.
I don't need nor want the other features, just no ads, and paid for it for 2 years. Then YouTube decided to fuck me over and force me into a more expensive subscription tier, fuck them, I'll use ad blockers for as long as they work.
I'd pay for YouTube Premium if it was bundled with the old Google Play Music. I can't stand the new YouTube Music so there's no chance of me migrating from Spotify, and I'll stick to adblockers + YouTube Revanced.
tbf, I was spooked by the initial "turn off your adblocker" banner stuff and I signed up for the offered 3-month YT Premium trial because it's linked to my primary Google account.
In the meantime, I set up a throwaway Google and set that YT profile to have the same subscriptions. Will I pay for YT Premium? Unlikely, but they could make me a pricing offer that's tantalizing enough. I've learned more dev stuff from YT that any Udemy-esque learning service out there.
Not sure if coincidental, but YT has been slower for the last few days. But I do have Premium + uBlock Origin running in Firefox (I don’t want ads + all the other crap YT has on their page).
Same here. YouTube was my TV. But it wasn't the ads (I don't get any and don't get blocked). It's the trashy content it pushes me which I don't even watch. So my startpage is full of garbage that doesn't inspire me. Thanks Google!
Why don't they just splice the advertisements in with the videos and play that instead? I know that would take a lot of crunching on the servers as different advertisers come and go, but it seems like a simple "fix", at least from a business point-of-view. Maybe they need to be able to align products with individual users.
Contrary to what the sibling posters are saying, they could do this if they wanted to.
Most modern video formats can be sliced and spliced at certain frames without needing to recompress or anything like that. If you operate all your own cache servers (which youtube do, AFAIK) you could splice a different ad into every stream, in real time.
Youtube would have to be careful, as plenty of users are used to being able to refer to timestamps in the video. Right now people are used to telling someone the interesting bit is 2735 seconds into that video lecture, and that's a time without ads counted.
Eyeballs are auctioned to the highest bidder in real time, as I understand it. And don't forget geo and language ad targeting constraints, no point showing American ads to viewers in Germany, or vice versa.
Even if you splice on a geo & language basis, there are two basic kinds of interest-based audience targeting: content and users.
Putting ads on topic-specific content is OK for brand advertising, but you got to watch out for saturation - you're wasting money if you show the same ads over and over again to the same person. So you want to stop showing a brand ad if someone has seen it too many times already.
Showing ads based on user interests has better performance for action campaigns. It relies on some way of tracking the user and / or their interests, but it leads to better conversion as part of a marketing / sales funnel. So you need to select the ad dynamically based on the interests of the user.
All this adds up to making it hard to avoid dynamically choosing the ads to show. I think it's still probably possible with careful I/O to do the media stream concatenation server-side, and I expect it's probably the direction things will eventually go, as long as latency etc. works out.
Lets say they have a contract with a company for X months, what would they do after those months? Iterate every video file and remove the old ad? Imagine the scale of this when you have millions of videos and thousands of advertisers
Apart from the other comments, this also could be defeated by something like SponsorBlock - tldr it's an addon with crowd sourced data for skipping video segments, e.g. intros, outros etc
I am fine with slower load if I dont have to see ads. Can't skip them on TV (yet) and its driving me insane, any short thing I want to show to kids has 20 seconds of detergents or similar stupidities. As a long term PC user with ublock origin getting smart tv with youtube has been a curse.
I know it's extra cost but buying Nvidia Shield TV Pro made things so much easier.
SmartTubeNext works great on Android and you can control it through your phone (Revanced).
I bought LG OLED TV and WebOS had been utter piece of shit so far. Disconnected it from the internet as soon as I got the Shield (I can also use Shield's remote to control the TV itself)
Use a Youtube proxy like Invidious [1], problem solved and you get to subscribe to channels without telling the Beast about your interests. Add Sponsorblock (which supports Invidious) to get rid of any in-stream advertising which remains and you'll be transported back to those hallowed times of yore when men were men, women were women and advertising was something you found in newspapers. Youtube will try to make this harder just like Xitter is trying to make it harder to use proxies like Nitter [2].
Still nothing here. I had the nag-screen when it originally appeared, did the setup for uBo as explained in the reddit thread (without deleting anything, so actually just adding one list), and it’s been no issues whatsoever since.
Maybe I'm being idealistic, but wouldn't it be nice if YT tried to engage with users of ad blockers in some way to see if a middle ground could be found?
I'm sure Google considers itself all-powerful, but in this case they cannot win. They should look at what happened with the music industry and attempt to engage instead of punish.
The middle ground is YouTube Premium, and a zillion other attempts to make it easy for people to pay to remove ads either via subscription or micropayments.
Why can’t YouTube just decide to host all the ads exactly like actual videos be hosted, making it impossible to block the domains that ads seem to come from?
They could, but things like sponsor block already exist, and if they disallow slipping ads, you can still have an extension that blacks them out and mutes them until they are over.
But even then it goes indefinitely deep: How about a video player that skips ahead once the buffer has enough frames and then plays the ad in the background while showing the caches video? So you need to disable seeking entirely. But what about an extension that preloads videos in your timeline to a buffer of the average ad length and then play from cache and put the ad in the background. So you have to introduce DRM, but I can do the thing above from outside the browser...
I suppose you'd either need to lock down the entire system, have crasy detection algorithms or make the bar just high enough that most people won't bother.
interesting. i was actually yesterday pondering whether youtube gave up on this since i have not had issues for months now. before i had to scrape all cache and logout. usually once a week. but then it stopped and all went back to normal. i am using ubo, still.
[+] [-] figmert|2 years ago|reply
uBlock Origin is not affected.
I posted this on HN earlier today[1], but it unfortunately gained no traction. I guess outrage spreads easier. Gorhill explicitly points out some websites that spread the outrage, but not the real diagnosed issue.
[0] https://nitter.net/gorhill/status/1746263759495077919
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38998419
[+] [-] tokai|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] goalieca|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|2 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] bertil|2 years ago|reply
What has been happening to me is that, for the last decade or so, I only see ads in languages that I don’t speak or understand. I wrote about it—a lot. Nothing. A friend worked as the head of Analytics for that part of YouTube and he told me, “They don’t care.” I pointed out that it’s so common that Antonio Garcia Martinez wrote about it in his book _Chaos Monkeys_ (in 2012) and estimated that, at the time, it costs Facebook 4% of their ad revenue. I can confirm because I raised that point internally not once (in 2016 and it was fixed) but twice (the fix was overruled and I saw it again in 2020). In 2024, they are still wasting their time and energy, and 4% of Meta’s revenues isn’t chump change.
That’s not counting on pervasive ads for alcohol (illegal where I am), gambling (having an opt-out is mandatory in most jurisdictions), tax evading services (also illegal where I am), and specifically on Threads and Twitter, literal prostitution, and/or romance scams (I didn’t investigate which, tried to report, but was told that’s fine by their community guidelines).
I’m not a security researcher, and I refuse to investigate further than strictly necessary for my sanity (I expect deserved judgment from this community for that) however, in spite of that, I know ads are a constant vector for malware. Not much is done to address basic vectors, like not running any executable code in ads.
The only reason why enormous waste at scale, rampant illegal activity, and gaping security holes aren’t the only topics of conversation online is that everyone who can explain what’s happening has opted out. Forcing them back in isn’t the solution.
[+] [-] bertil|2 years ago|reply
> Beauties From Eastern Europe > Chat and meet real Slavic women > Sponsored > love-stories
with a photo (presumably AI-generated) where to be completely honest, I could see that she was wearing red lacey underwear and had had a full bikini wax.
Do you know what kind of question I want to have from my boss when discussing a vendor? NOT WHY DOES GOOGLE THINK I WOULD FINANCIALLY SUPPORT LITERAL HUMAN TRAFFICKING.
So guess what I’m activating on my browser to NOT GET FIRED.
[+] [-] lopis|2 years ago|reply
Perhaps I misunderstand how their models work, but aren't they wasting only their customers' time and energy (and money)?
[+] [-] VoodooJuJu|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] someonehere|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] asimpletune|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pwg|2 years ago|reply
The recent change to Amazon Prime, where everyone using "Prime Video" was already "paying for prime video", which recently added advertising, with a new $2.99/month no ads option, implies that even if everyone "paid for premium" the siren song of advertising money would be too difficult for Google/YT to ignore, and even premium would then eventually begin to be infested with advertising.
[+] [-] another2another|2 years ago|reply
But the ad supported model seems to have slipped past the fair-to-viewers into the completely obnoxious and unbearable to nearly all viewers, so something has to give. Additionally it seems like content producers are getting a smaller amount than they used to get so it's less of an attractive platform, probably more so since the competitors showed up.
[+] [-] j-bos|2 years ago|reply
I met a guy who came out of poverty initially as a backhoe operator, how did he learn? YT, he literally mimiced fist person video of machine operation.
When I want to buy quality toold, ProjectFarm on youtube (of interest to anyone with even slight interst in tools and machines) provides a more objective and comprehensive analysis than any I've yet to see.
[+] [-] nlnn|2 years ago|reply
YouTube is the toughest one, since it's the videos created by people that I value and care about, rather than YouTube the product. I don't want people to stop producing good content, but I also don't want to support Google financially.
My compromise has been to use an ad-blocker, and to subscribe to the Patreon (or equivalent) of everyone who I watch regularly. It costs me more than a premium subscription would, but at least I feel my money's going where I want it to.
[+] [-] drawkward|2 years ago|reply
From where I sit, YT looks like one of the worst inventions humanity has ever created.
[+] [-] bboygravity|2 years ago|reply
I think it would be a net gain for the world as people would flock to better platforms with less censorship.
[+] [-] cebert|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] piva00|2 years ago|reply
I was willing to pay for "no ads", YouTube had the perfect product for me, Premium Lite, which I gladly paid for 2 years until I got an email in October:
> Subject: Your Premium Lite membership will be discontinued
> Thank you for being one of our first Premium Lite members.
> We’re writing to let you know that after October 25, 2023, we will no longer offer your version of Premium Lite. While we understand this may be disappointing news, we continue to work on different versions of Premium Lite as we incorporate feedback from our users, creators, and partners. [emphasis mine on the bullshit]
> To show our appreciation, we’re offering a 1 - month trial of Premium (even if you’ve had a trial before). With Premium, you can watch videos ad - free, offline, and in the background. Plus, stream music ad - free in the YouTube Music app.
I don't need nor want the other features, just no ads, and paid for it for 2 years. Then YouTube decided to fuck me over and force me into a more expensive subscription tier, fuck them, I'll use ad blockers for as long as they work.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38989006
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38966790
[+] [-] jacooper|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Vvector|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dataengineer56|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gear54rus|2 years ago|reply
What do they think is going to happen? We'll just be like 'oh well, sorry, we are going to remove adblock'?
LOL, I'd rather write a bypass myself then do this and give it to all my friends who can't code while I'm at it.
[+] [-] sirius87|2 years ago|reply
In the meantime, I set up a throwaway Google and set that YT profile to have the same subscriptions. Will I pay for YT Premium? Unlikely, but they could make me a pricing offer that's tantalizing enough. I've learned more dev stuff from YT that any Udemy-esque learning service out there.
[+] [-] eswat|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] slater-|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] RamblingCTO|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dkjaudyeqooe|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] paulcole|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mynameishere|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] michaelt|2 years ago|reply
Most modern video formats can be sliced and spliced at certain frames without needing to recompress or anything like that. If you operate all your own cache servers (which youtube do, AFAIK) you could splice a different ad into every stream, in real time.
Youtube would have to be careful, as plenty of users are used to being able to refer to timestamps in the video. Right now people are used to telling someone the interesting bit is 2735 seconds into that video lecture, and that's a time without ads counted.
[+] [-] barrkel|2 years ago|reply
Even if you splice on a geo & language basis, there are two basic kinds of interest-based audience targeting: content and users.
Putting ads on topic-specific content is OK for brand advertising, but you got to watch out for saturation - you're wasting money if you show the same ads over and over again to the same person. So you want to stop showing a brand ad if someone has seen it too many times already.
Showing ads based on user interests has better performance for action campaigns. It relies on some way of tracking the user and / or their interests, but it leads to better conversion as part of a marketing / sales funnel. So you need to select the ad dynamically based on the interests of the user.
All this adds up to making it hard to avoid dynamically choosing the ads to show. I think it's still probably possible with careful I/O to do the media stream concatenation server-side, and I expect it's probably the direction things will eventually go, as long as latency etc. works out.
[+] [-] bicijay|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] amoshi|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] saiya-jin|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] herbst|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nixass|2 years ago|reply
I bought LG OLED TV and WebOS had been utter piece of shit so far. Disconnected it from the internet as soon as I got the Shield (I can also use Shield's remote to control the TV itself)
[+] [-] the_third_wave|2 years ago|reply
[1] https://github.com/iv-org/invidious
[2] https://github.com/zedeus/nitter
[+] [-] Semaphor|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jsnell|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mchanson|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dkjaudyeqooe|2 years ago|reply
I'm sure Google considers itself all-powerful, but in this case they cannot win. They should look at what happened with the music industry and attempt to engage instead of punish.
[+] [-] UncleMeat|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|2 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] teknopaul|2 years ago|reply
The content was a advert anyway
[+] [-] hnthrowaway0328|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Waterluvian|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] camel-cdr|2 years ago|reply
But even then it goes indefinitely deep: How about a video player that skips ahead once the buffer has enough frames and then plays the ad in the background while showing the caches video? So you need to disable seeking entirely. But what about an extension that preloads videos in your timeline to a buffer of the average ad length and then play from cache and put the ad in the background. So you have to introduce DRM, but I can do the thing above from outside the browser...
I suppose you'd either need to lock down the entire system, have crasy detection algorithms or make the bar just high enough that most people won't bother.
[+] [-] hknmtt|2 years ago|reply