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.

    • DARbarian@artemis.camp
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      1 year ago

      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.

  • Landrin201@lemmy.ml
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    1 year ago

    I genuinely think that advertising should be illegal at this point. It’s a ridiculous concept.

      • merc@sh.itjust.works
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        1 year ago

        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.

        • bobman@unilem.org
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          1 year ago

          Paying to tell others that they should buy something they otherwise would not.

          • merc@sh.itjust.works
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            1 year ago

            So, the government of Florida advising people to stock up on emergency supplies ahead of the oncoming hurricane – banned?

    • OminousOrange@lemmy.ca
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      1 year ago

      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.

        • mindbleach@sh.itjust.works
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          1 year ago

          Same shit with Facebook claiming videos were the bestest content possible, using numbers sourced from the vicinity of their pelvis. Now every goddamn news site has autoplaying video for no damn reason.

        • OminousOrange@lemmy.ca
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          1 year ago

          Oh definitely. Its essentially a massive case of ‘it’s difficult to get someone to understand something when their salary depends on not understanding it.’

  • cosecantphi [he/him]@hexbear.net
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    1 year ago

    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.

    • energetic695@lemmy.ko4abp.com
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      1 year ago

      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.

      • bobman@unilem.org
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        1 year ago

        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.

      • mindbleach@sh.itjust.works
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        1 year ago

        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!

        • Mini_Moonpie@startrek.website
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          1 year ago

          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?

        • bobman@unilem.org
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          1 year ago

          I wonder how lemmy makes money…

          Oh wait. It’s almost like ads only exist so people can make a living doing nothing.

  • bzxt@lemmy.ml
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    1 year ago

    I have been having this problem 2 days ago, but I have started using NoScript in combination with UBlock Origin yesterday and i didn’t see any ads after that.

  • LoafyLemon@kbin.social
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    1 year ago

    Remember when some people said we’re nuts thinking Google will try to ban ad blockers with manifest v3? Yeah.

    • HerrLewakaas@feddit.de
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      1 year ago

      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

    • viking@infosec.pub
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      1 year ago

      Firefox has zero issues with adblock on Desktop. On mobile I prefer Newpipe, but hey. Anything goes.

    • Lt_Cdr_Data@discuss.tchncs.de
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      1 year ago

      Tbh, at this point there’s no reason in them disabling ad blockers. If you haven’t gotten used to this insane amount of ads by experiencing the slow, uphill creep, having to go from seeing no ads to suddenly this, is impossible. I couldn’t watch youtube videos in the current state of ads, so I’d just have one less vice.

      I had already stopped once, when youtube vanced went offline (until i found revanced) and I will do it again

        • Chriskmee@lemm.ee
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          1 year ago

          How are they supposed to run a free service without ads, especially one as expensive to run as a video hosting website?

          • SuddenDownpour@sh.itjust.works
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            1 year ago

            By making Youtube Premium worth it, both for users and creators. Make it transparent what % of the YP fee is actually going to creators, make that % actually fair, give extra features to YP users, incentivize creators to ask their viewers to collaborate with it if they actually can afford to. Youtube has reached a point where it has become a public utility, to the point that tens of millions of people use it to supplement their education or stay updated on the news. A website increasingly necessary shouldn’t force someone without a penny to choose between paying what they can’t afford or have their head fried up by ads.

            Of course, this idea rooted in civil values is incompatible with an economic actor that sees both creators and consumers as cattle that must be milked as efficiently as possible.

            • Chriskmee@lemm.ee
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              1 year ago

              A website increasingly necessary shouldn’t force someone without a penny to choose between paying what they can’t afford or have their head fried up by ads.

              If not ads then what is the free option supposed to look like. I hate ads also, but it’s not like it’s sustainable to run free without ads.

              • bobman@unilem.org
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                1 year ago

                It looks like Lemmy and PeerTube, where people do the hard work because they care and not to make a profit off of idiots with more money than sense.

                Saying it’s ‘impossible’ is objectively false and just shows people you don’t understand the world you live in.

              • SuddenDownpour@sh.itjust.works
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                1 year ago

                Wikipedia has no ads yet it has a pretty large amount of spare money, and there are plenty of other free to use platforms and projects. Youtube is not Wikipedia, sure, but Wikipedia has no reason to offer Youtube Premium.

                • Chriskmee@lemm.ee
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                  1 year ago

                  Wikipedia mostly displays text, YouTube mostly streams HD video, which one do you think costs more?

          • flerp@lemm.ee
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            1 year ago

            Oh no! Is the company that makes 70b per quarter and is buying back 70b of shares to keep making more in trouble of only making 80b per quarter next year and not 100b? Poor babies.

              • mindbleach@sh.itjust.works
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                1 year ago

                As if video streaming will die with one site. One for-profit site, that’s not remotely turning a profit. A vestigial organ of an advertising giant, burning money to build dependency and exploit it for control.

                BitTorrent used to share more video than Netflix - despite a lack of money, despite a lack of ads, and despite being illegal. Content creators will be fine without this corporate facade.

                • Chriskmee@lemm.ee
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                  1 year ago

                  I don’t know what YouTube’s market share is, but for videos that are not short TikTok style it’s probably like 95%? And they are also in the TikTok short and twitch streaming areas now, so I think it would be a massive blow to video streaming if they went away.

                  BitTorrent just moves all the costs to the users, and users are typically not wanting to run their own video servers. They might work for tech people who don’t mind running servers or already have a server they are running, but you have to think about the regular user that is probably 80% or more of the market. You can’t expect to get big off relying on users to be the servers.

  • henfredemars@infosec.pub
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    1 year ago

    This is such a better use of their time and dollars versus improving their service to make it more attractive to customers.

    If this is the change that really sets them financially straight, then I would say they have a failing business model.

    • splendoruranium@infosec.pub
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      1 year ago

      This is such a better use of their time and dollars versus improving their service to make it more attractive to customers.

      Making their service more attractive to customers is precicesly what they’re trying to do.

      It’s just that an advertising agency’s customers are not the folk who watch, read or hear the ads, it’s the folk who pay for the ads.

      • tryptaminev 🇵🇸 🇺🇦 🇪🇺@feddit.de
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        1 year ago

        I am not sure if it will work out like this though. The amount of ads they are forcing down peoples throat is isane. Eventually it will make people consume less videos and with that less ads overall.

        • splendoruranium@infosec.pub
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          1 year ago

          I am not sure if it will work out like this though. The amount of ads they are forcing down peoples throat is isane. Eventually it will make people consume less videos and with that less ads overall.

          Sure, could be - but keep in mind that they have all the relevant usage data at hand. Any decrease in service popularity among users (or indeed any kind of user behavior) is immediately visible to them. They have the means to know exactly what annoyances the market will bear.

          And considering that YouTube still holds a de-facto monopoly on video discoverability within the entire anglophone internet I feel like it’s safe to say that the market will likely bear a lot more annoyances :P

    • Landrin201@lemmy.ml
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      1 year ago

      If premium cost $5per month I’d pay for it, u use YouTube all the time

      No way in hell it’s worth $15 a month though, their pricing is completely brwindead

  • MiddledAgedGuy@beehaw.org
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    1 year ago

    I feel like we can ignore this and it’ll mostly be a non-issue. Hopefully I don’t have to eat those words later.

    YouTube can detect common current adblocking methods, and use this to hinder you now, prompting to comply with them. If you do, they win. You pay for no ads or you have an exception in your adblocker.

    As another comment mentioned, it’s a cat and mouse game. Adblockers will get ahead of it. So just wait it out.