UPDATE 2 It seems that starting today, uBlock Origin is working to combat this Youtube Block. Mine started working again! Lets all thank the devs of UBO for fighting this fight!
UPDATE So as new info comes out, I’ll be posting it here. It seems as if this Rollout Has Several Parts.
Part 1
You get a popup message over top of your video, blocking the screen:
- This is the first sign. If you see this popup AND are logged into a YouTube account, your account has been selected.
- At this stage you can likely close or block these messages with an adblocker.
Part 2
This message will change, indicating that you have 3 remaining videos to watch without ads.
Will insert photo once one has been found
- At this stage your adblocker will imminently stop working in 3 videos time.
- Personally using Firefox + uBlock Origin and tweaking filters and updates does not even fix it.
Part 3
None of the video loads now, everything looks blank.
- At this stage you must tred new ground to avoid ads. I have posted methods in the comments. If you want to bypass this end page, read down there.
End of Update
YouTube has started rolling out anti-adblock to users inside the United States, which means that they are preparing to roll this out to the entire country. Personally, I have been blocked already. I want to gauge how common this occurrence is.
I’ve got so many layers of adblock it’s hard to know which one(s) are responsible for blocking the ads.
Same here. Was just explaining to a coworker who was complaining about YT ads that I “just” use PiHole+Unbound for network blocking, AirVPN with DNS blocking, mullvad Private DNS on Android, and then Libretube to view my self-hosted Piped instance. As I said it I realized how ridiculous it’s gotten and how deranged I probably sound.
This all sounds like extremely reasonable to me. Fuck the haters.
Reasonable, yes. Feasible for everyone? Not necessarily. I would like to get at least a pihole going at some point but for now ublock origin and ReVanced have been enough for me.
Same. Keep up the good work.
I just use use uBlock Origin.
I didn’t think that could block Youtube ads alone? Like Hulu and Spotify
Before this new behavior uBlock Origin always blocked YouTube ads.
PiHole+Unbound . . . AirVPN with DNS blocking, mullvad Private DNS . . . Libretube
This is what I pictured reading all that.
Why do you need adblock, when using piped?
For everything other than Youtube!
Because the internet includes more than just youtube…?
I genuinely think that advertising should be illegal at this point. It’s a ridiculous concept.
Based. Absolutely true, there is no good use for advertising.
How do you define “advertising”?
Is it advertising if a community government makes citizens aware that bus service will be changing?
Is it advertising to tell people that there’s a suicide hotline available if they need help?
Is it advertising to encourage people to volunteer for a local festival?
What about telling people that the festival exists using a poster? Is that an ad? Does it depend if the festival is free or non-profit?
Advertising is just fundamentally about bringing people’s attention to something. The spectrum can range from a municipal government “advertising” its monthly meeting so that local people can participate in their local democracy, to spam emails hyping a pump-and-dump cryptocurrency.
Different people will have different ideas where the cut-off should be. The extreme libertarians will say that nothing should be banned. Others will say that it’s ok to ban ads for alcohol and cigarettes but not for makeup or coffee. Even totalitarian states and supposedly communist states where one entity controls all companies have ads. Some of the most striking ads ever made were for Mussolini.
So, the question really isn’t about banning ads, it’s just where to draw the line.
An increasing number of states are banning billboards along highways. Travelers do need a low tech method for finding certain services though, such as food, lodging, fuel and restrooms. So you’ll see those blue signs that says “FOOD NEXT EXIT” with a Waffle House and Burger King logo. In order to put the logo on that sign, the business has to meet certain criteria (which vary from state to state like all highway laws), for example a restaurant must be within 3 miles of the highway, be open for at least 12 hours a day and feature public restrooms and telephones. The sign itself may include a distinctive logo and the name of the business in legible font but no slogans or ad copy. “This burger restaurant is nearby.”
This I see as an appropriate amount of advertising.
Paying to tell others that they should buy something they otherwise would not.
So, the government of Florida advising people to stock up on emergency supplies ahead of the oncoming hurricane – banned?
It is a great example of how an industry can survive with only self-reported effectiveness. I remember a freakonomics episode where it was shown that very infrequently do companies get a positive return on marketing spending. It will be very interesting if that industry ever collapses.
Advertising is about creating trends, and catching some impulse buyers. Effectiveness is likely overstated, but on the other hand it’s difficult to quantify the effectiveness of a trend. I don’t think it’s likely to ever collapse, people will always want to believe they can influence others more than they actually can.
Multinational scam artists
I’ll just stop using YouTube like I’ve stopped using Reddit.
I’m ready for that. When being a youtuber started looking like a job I think the site lost something.
That is something you just cannot avoid with a new medium. Eventually there will always be professionalization. It just sucks that youtube now just gives us the same shit over and over instead of making it easy to find new creators, like it used to be.
I remember one of the early Youtube sensations was this teen chick’s vlog that turned out to be a fictional soap opera basically. Because it hadn’t occurred to anyone to do that yet.
This was BACK IN THE DAY, around the same time Boxxy became a sensation, or that one chick who just sat still in front of the camera because the Japanese liked her huge eyes.
Yeah, YouTube was better when it was a bunch of amateur cat videos.
I’d say just smaller, less scripted content. Maybe that’s what tiktok is.
There was a sweet spot when cat videos went pro. Then the spam killed it.
I’ll quit YouTube before I watch ads.
Remember when some people said we’re nuts thinking Google will try to ban ad blockers with manifest v3? Yeah.
Google will try everything in their power to stop us from blocking their ads. It’s their main source of revenue, you don’t have to be a genius to see why they don’t like ad blockers
Wouldn’t this show that they failed, if they have to recur to site-based adblocker blocking? Clearly v3 hasn’t stopped people from using Firefox, yt-dl, or whatever.
The Gecko Engine (Firefox), holds a user share of 4%. When compared to Chromium’s (Google Chrome and its clones) whooping 72% (roughly) user share, it’s clear that Firefox has limited relevance to their business strategy.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:StatCounter-browser-ww-monthly-202011-202011-bar.png
Youtube’s use of A/B testing is very smart in that it’s actually nothing about testing user response and all about limiting the number of people they piss off at once with their god awful changes.
The day I can’t block ads on the internet is the day I stop using the internet.
targeted ads have broken the Internet, saturated our subconsciouses, hijacked the attention economy, and continue to erode what’s left of our dwindling privacy
advertisers are the de facto gatekeepers of larger and larger swaths of online content.
it wasn’t always like this. it’s gotten so much worse in recent years.
It’s only going to get worse.
Shoving more ads in people’s faces just desensitizes them to it so you can keep adding even more ads into the mix.
“You were okay with 2 ads, why not 3?”
“You were okay with 3 ads, why not 5?”
Repeat until the end of time, or until the masses stop being dumbasses and work together to topple the ruling class.
P.S. I have no respect for anyone in the advertising industry. They are all scum worth less than the gum under my shoe.
Advertising is poison.
The entire concept is intolerable, and it breaks whole industries. We’ve ruined televisions - not the medium of television, the physical rectangle in your living room - for the sake of cramming ads into the menus. They can show ads over your home movies. Paying for content to avoid ads is impossible because they just add ads. The siren song of slightly more money must not be ignored!
I always knew that funding the internet using ads wasn’t sustainable in the long run.
There’s constant fixes for it btw from the ublockorigin team now! :D
Ads would have happened anyway like it’s happening on the streaming services. They’ve got people paying subscriptions *with *ads. Double the money, double the fun, right?
For those who don’t know: VLC also takes a YouTube video address as input (in the menu: Media | Open Network Stream…).
VLC is so damn good
This has not worked for me in a very long time.
You can also pipe yt-dlp into vlc if that suits your fancy.
I’m going to start a discussion in the comments here about methods to bypass the message. I will add suggestions here, so leave comments if you find a method!
Methods to bypass Youtube Anti-Adblock:
- The easiest method is simply to comply and turn off your adblock extension.
My Method
- My method, and the one that will likely work universally is as follows:
Install Extension Enhancer for YouTube™
Go to the extensions settings and ensure that under the Ads Management section, “Block Ads” is turned OFF
Now find the Custom Script box at the very bottom and enter the following script. I did not write this code, it comes from egaudette on GitHub
(function() { 'use strict'; var clickInterval = setInterval(skipAds, 5); var ytpAdModule; var miniAdd; var skipButton; var currentVideo; function skipAds() { ytpAdModule = document.querySelector('.ytp-ad-module'); skipButton = document.querySelector('button[class*="ad-skip"]'); miniAdd = document.querySelector('.ytp-ad-overlay-container'); if (ytpAdModule !== null && ytpAdModule.innerHTML !== '') { ytpAdModule.style.display = 'none'; } if (skipButton !== null) { skipButton.click(); return; } currentVideo = document.querySelector('video[class*="main-video"]') if (currentVideo !== null && currentVideo.duration <= 5) { currentVideo.muted = true; currentVideo.play(); currentVideo.currentTime = currentVideo.duration; } } })();Lastly, ensure the “Automatically execute the script when YouTube is loaded in a tab” box is checked, and press Save
I’ll add more methods as they are discovered!
Thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you!!! ❤️
Please note that posting the script has html-encoded && <> and similar characters so you’ll have to replace those with the correct ones (or just get the script from GitHub)
Why would this work when others get blocked? Is it a novel way to block YT ads that’s not popular? Because I think YT isn’t looking for specific extensions but looking for certain kinds of behavior.
This method lets ads load for half a second but then get skipped instantly. i have not personally found a way to 100% block ads once ive gotten their block page.
The irony of the straw poll site throwing up an anti-adblock banner 🤣
That’s self selection bias if I’ve ever seen it
I have a VPN and I can’t vote.
deleted by creator
This. When YouTube finally succeeds in making it impossible for anyone to use their website without watching ads, they probably still won’t succeed in preventing people from downloading for offline viewing. When this happens I’m going to invest in making scripts that autodownload stuff ahead of time and I’ll only watch whatever videos are in my home network.
Im not watching their brainwash bullshit ass propaganda. I’ll find other stuff to do for entertainment before I give in to ads.
Fuck ads. I put in a decent amount of effort to make sure I see exactly 0 seconds of ads per day. So far going strong.
I wonder if the people having this issue are using chrome. On FF it has never been an issue for me.
Youtube has not blocked me with my uBlock but your poll did for being a vpn user.
I know it’s an anti-vote-fraud measure but it’s still kind of funny.
I haven’t used youtube.com to watch YouTube in years. NewPipe x SponsorBlock (polymorphicshade) on mobile, SmartTubeNext on TV, Invidious, Piped, or FreeTube on desktop.
Hadn’t heard of FreeTube before, thanks for mentioning it!
I’ve started to just download videos with
yt-dlpafter grabbing links via Invidious. Using Invidious itself has become somewhat unreliable lately, and this way I don’t have to put up with buffering and can watch in good quality. Cut out the middle menMPV can directly play yt videos (it uses a built-in copy of yt-dlp afaik), and it’s very configurable. I always watch yt videos with it.
Sometimes it would be useful if it could use a proxy like piped or invidious, but those links don’t work
Ooh, I should try that! I already use mpv, so that’d streamline things a bit
Consider upping the cache for youtube. By default it is 2 minutes, which is mostly fine, except that if you are speeding through a part with 2x or faster, you may quickly run out of that small cache, because it only loads with the speed of something between 1x and 2x.
And then you may also set up saving the cache to disk instead of RAM, because it may be quite larger. Single config option.
You can make these only apply for youtube videos only with conditional auto profiles. The doc has an example for an automatic youtube profile, it’s perfect.I don’t use the main YouTube website at all anymore. A big reason for this is that I spend a lot of time using a really weak laptop that tends to struggle with the JavaScript-laden abomination that is modern corporate web design. Firefox itself struggles as well, so I primarily use Luakit with Invidious, which runs peachy. I also put together a local html page for my bookmarks that is generated from Yaml using a small C application (which is not optimal, I know, but I’ve been learning C and this was a good opportunity). Whenever something doesn’t work in Luakit, I evade to Palemoon. I also tried watching YouTube via mpv earlier, and it’s great! It runs infinitely better than any web player at max resolution and buffers the whole video. Never going back.
The irony of this poll blocking access from users with a VPN.
