YouTube has been cracking down on adblockers recently. Naturally, this has resulted in an arms race.
Adblockers became an essential part of perusing the Internet. I can recall those pop ups a couple of decades back – they were annoying and tended to infect the host computer with malicious code, requiring a reset to get rid of them. The adblocker stops this at the gates.
I’ve never seen any adverts on YouTube, precisely because I use adblocking technology. Those who have, complain about intrusive, overly long, loud adverts not only at the beginning of a video, but in the middle as well, making it unwatchable. So YouTube is getting greedy.
You could argue that those of us watching without upgrading to Premium are stealing from YouTube. However, I feel no particular compunction to pay an inflated price for the service – and it is too high, so they aren’t getting any money from me one way or another.
The reality is is that I’m not costing them lost revenue anyway. I don’t buy products from people who push their products in my face. Ergo, if I’m not buying, the advertisers are wasting their money, so I might as well block the ads and save everyone’s time. When I watched live television, I would find something else to do during the ad break. When it was possible to record programmes, I would fast forward through them. I will not watch adverts, so given this, it’s a waste of time trying to make me. I’m not going to buy and if it became impossible to get around the AdBlock block, I’d switch and go somewhere else. Either way, they have lost nothing, because they were never getting it anyway. Bearing in mind their propensity to demonetise creators they don’t like, I feel no guilt.
I pay for this site. There are no adverts and there never will be, because I practise what I preach. In other words, I’m giving it away for free, despite it costing me a monthly hosting bill.
I realise that YouTube’s servers cost a damned sight more, but the principle stands. All they have done is upped the adblockers’ game and alerted users to the existence of adblocking technology. I still don’t see ads on YouTube and have no plans to, come what may. Let battle commence.
I’ve used ABP for more than a decade because I can’t remember ever seeing an ad on YT. Few weeks ago videos started to buffer for half a minute or so. Then they went back to normal ie no buffering, videos started immediately. Currently in some videos there’s a 5-second buffering delay but I can live with that.
I use Brave as my browser.
Filters all the adverts out without fuss.
Hilariously, the YT “you can’t watch this with an adblocker” popped up. Clicking ok then just took me straight to the video.
Don’t even see that any more.
Thing I can’t understand is how the advertisers can’t see that intrusive adverts are counter productive. I resent them interrupting what I am watching and resolve never to buy any product that is pushed in this way. I don’t mind waiting 30 seconds or so while someone tries to persuade me at the beginning of a video, but not in the middle. As far as I can see everyone putting up videos does it at their own cost,not youtubes, therefore grabbing cash for adverts strikes me as being just greedy.
I have the same problem with our mainstream tv, the adverts are so crass, they would never persuade to buy anything.
Not entirely at their own cost: there is the cost of delivering that content to the viewer, a heavy bandwidth charge for the data required for video. For a plain html site the hosting cost is not significant, but it could be for video. What you rarely see nowadays is the ‘slashdot effect’; a unexpectedly popular site unavailable because it has exceeded its bandwidth allowance. Youtube covers that risk, but it costs, so I don’t blame them for trying to recover the cost. On the other hand, intrusive ads are counter-productive. I use three browsers, Firefox and Opera with blockers, and Chrome with none. Occasionally I use Chrome, if I hit an ad then most often I decide the site isn’t worth wasting my time and close the window.
I use Proton VPN on most of my devices.
What I notice is that I only see ads on devices that I can’t use the VPN on (usually because the VPN won’t run anymore on an old out of date operating system, whether it be MS or Android)
This includes Podcasts on subscription Spotify
I use SBP so never see ads on YT videos on my PC…
I sometimes watch YT on the tellybox and the ads are really annoying! As you say, I’d never buy from one of these advertisers…
The bizarre thing is that with the remote in my hand I can ‘skip’ 90% of ads as soon as they start – you’d think that those stats would be available to advertisers and they’d realise how pointless it was…
I sometimes get the “Ad blockers violate YouTube’s Terms of Service” message so I disable my ad blocker, turn off the sound and stare off into the distance until the ad finishes or I can skip it. About 99% of the ads are for things I’m not interested in anyway.
I think it was Lord Lever of Lever Brothers who lamented that half the money he spent on advertising was wasted, but he didn’t know which half. I think today it would be closer to 99% wasted.
I assume advertising is like scam emails, most of it is wasted but there’s enough return to make it worthwhile.
I haven’t seen a YouTube ad in years. Sponsor bits are okay. There are plugins that’ll try to filter them out, but I don’t bother. You might call them “intrusive” in the sense that they aren’t the content you came to watch, but at least they cut in organically, under the creator’s control. YouTube’s ads come in right in the m EAT AT JOES! iddle of words sometimes. Sod that.
That’s always been my beef with web advertising. I know some of the developers of adblockers take a vaguely Lefty anti-all-advertising stance, but it’s the distraction that I can’t stand: animated GIFs jumping around in the sidebar, videos floating around over the text… try to sell me anything you like, but don’t get in my way.
@LR
Which adblockers, browsers do you use?
@BiC
SBT? More info please
Ublock origin and scriptmonkey.