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.
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.
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!
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.
I always knew that funding the internet using ads wasn’t sustainable in the long run.
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?