I’m not sure if this works anymore but I saved this message a while back. If you get this pop-up then put this into your adblock custom rules and it should sort it out:
I believe it should work with any adblocker that lets you set custom rules but since adblocking still works for me I haven’t tried this myself. Saved it from reddit like 3 months ago so I hope it’s still relevant
They may be doing this in some countries and not others or just A/B testing users based on some random allocation of accounts.
I would not be surprised if Google wants to understand how effective something like this is in terms of getting people to disable adblock vs them just being like "welp fuck YouTube I guess." So would make a lot of sense to A/B test this rather than roll it out across the board.
Yeah, I subsequently learned it may be rolling out in different countries. I meant to update my comment as such but forgot :/ FYI: In case anyone's interested, I'm in New Zealand.
I am also in the Netherlands using uBlock Origin and Firefox and am not getting it. So my best guess is they're doing A/B testing and people are being randomly selected to see how they'll respond to something like this.
And a lot of users who just doesn’t care enough to do anything drastic about it. We already saw it with reddit, and twitter to a point. The userbase on the internet is so huge now that the people actually being aware and caring about privacy and non-commercialisation are a tiny minority. Companies can easily still make a profit on the vast majority of people who will uncritically consume.
Practically and actually are two different things.
Just because serving the video costs a fraction of a cent doesn’t mean you can round that down to zero, especially when you are serving billions of video views a day.
IRL Example: I host several videos across my various sites. I pay $99/mo for a CDN. Said CDN caches my videos and does not charge for bandwidth usage. Therefore you can technically argue that I pay $99/mo for X visitors. In actuality , the CDN caches all my content. It also provides DDOS protection, a firewall, and other advanced features. That is what I pay $99/mo for.
My cost to distribute the video is $99 + my hosting bill ($50-$200/mo depending on backend jobs) / number of views. This would be true if the video has 1 view or a billion (most of the ones I host have had “millions” of views)
The video can be 360p or 8k. CDN does not care. Mine are 4k.
You did say practically, but I’m saying that practically is still a cost. You are still paying money to serve your videos.
People post on YouTube because they don’t have to pay the server costs for videos. If you want to get the video makers to pay the server costs, feel free. However, given their thin margins, they probably won’t.
Also, it sounds like your CDN is betting your videos won’t routinely go viral and get billions of views. If that happened, I would expect your monthly bill to go up.
My CDN’s policies are pretty well set via contract. There is no provision for using too much bandwidth and I pay yearly at any rate.
I bring this up not so the average joe can host their own videos, but to point out that yes, someone can create a youtube clone. The hosting of multimedia content isn’t what stops that. A site like youtube has to attract 2 market verticals: talent and users, which is incredibly difficult without gobs of money to throw at it.
But you are also missing item 3, monetization. Alphabet turns practically free into something they can make money off of with advertising. People who are popular enough on YouTube get paid for what they make. It may not be a lot, but it is more than having to pay to get your video hosted.
And those content creators that strike out on their own platforms typically put their content behind a paywall to fund the cost to develop and distribute their work.
The cost for the system may be practically free, but it isn’t actually free.
Looks like I’m about to switch fully to YT-DL/Plex for the subscriptions I care about. Should be good until they start embedding ads into the video files anyway.
I would love to know what the benefit is. I would think that a very minimal amount of users use adblockers. Maybe I’m wrong but their investment into these things must be substantial.
At this point I feel like Google wants to Intentionally kill off YouTube so they don’t have to bear the cost anymore. Just another one for the Google graveyard.
This message is displayed in the browser because Google asked your browser to do it, and your browser got the message and put it there.
When displaying ads, the end user experience is 100% client-side. You are using your screen and speakers to observe it. You can turn off your speakers and screen if you want, which will effectively “block” the ad.
But that is silly. Not only do you own your screen and speakers, but you have control of what you’re browser is doing, too (if you use a respectable browser). When HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and other content is downloaded, just that happened: file downloads. After it has been downloaded, your browser then consumes it.
When it is consumed, a lot happens, but ultimately, the code in the browser displays content. Your (respectable) browser does all of this, and will change the look depending on local fonts, accessibility options, etc. With an ad block add-on, it will also remove these ads.
However, when ads are removed, the DOM is mutated with deleted or replaced content. It is possible for a website to then write ad block detection scripts to see if the ad contents have been removed or not. There are many ways to do this, and this screenshot is the result of one way of doing it.
However, enter the cat-and-mouse-chase of ad block block blocks. You can block your ads, then block the ad block block like this screenshot. These types of ad block rules are less common, but many public ones are available. Check the uBlock Origin lists in the setting page. By default, only about a third of the lists are enabled, and these extra blocks are in there.
Another avenue of determining that ads were not loaded is for the server to inspect if client-side (you) requests were made to fetch the ads. Even if this is in place, the server cannot determine if you have actually watched the ad or not. It could try to do more client-side attempts at validating that you somehow displayed it, but again, that’s client-side.
Imagine if you were sent a letter and a pamphlet in the mail. Imagine if the letter said that you could mail them back for a free sample of their product, but only if you read the pamphlet. They would have to trust that you read it, because you are reading your mail in the privacy of your own home. However, you could opt to toss the pamphlet (like an ad blocker) and never read it. It’s your mail, your home, and your choice.
The worst case scenario is that they only serve video to logged-in users, require accounts to be verified with government-issued ID, and enforce the whole thing with the web browser DRM they just proposed.
Make no mistake: this is a war on the public’s property rights and their right not to have ads inflicted on them Clockwork Orange-style. It can get a lot worse than you think, and will unless we force the government to stop them legislatively.
Honestly I can’t fathom this concept. Youtube isn’t a right. It’s an optional service. Why aren’t we all up in arms about the 5,000 porn sites that have paywalled their services for years? IMO the response to “youtube won’t let users use the site without ads” should be “lets help peer tube be more succesful” Just as we are here rather than trying to make a law to get reddit to open up their API for free.
I don’t like youtube. But I don’t think it’s fair or viable to mandate them allow their content for free without ads. That’s a bit like mandating hotels give rooms for free. Hosting videos costs a non zero amount of money. Google intends to make more money from advertisements then they spend on hosting videos.
Honestly I can’t fathom this concept. Youtube isn’t a right.
You know what is a right? Your property right to control the operation of your computer. Google is, as we speak, trying to violate that right by colonizing it with DRM and subverting your property to serve their own ends instead of yours.
Google has the right to serve a 403 error to anybody who refuses to pay, but they do not have the right to usurp control of people’s property to forcibly display ads. And make no mistake, it’s very much the latter that they (and all the other companies) are trying to do, as evidenced by things like this.
Do you “fathom” it now? How much clearer do I need to make it?
I’m missing here. This isn’t the sony rootkit to my knowledge. Right now we’re talking about youtube itself detecting it’s ads aren’t being shown and throwing up a page blocking the rest.
“Evidenced by” a non google service putting ads in it’s premium service? Don’t get me wrong it’s bullshit, but again a reason to not use spotify.
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