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.
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.
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.
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.
And thus the enshittification cycle completes
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
You are not the customer. You are there product.
Yes, but if they destroy their products (aka drive users away) their real customers (ad companies) will pull out.
capitalism (or at least the weird version of it used in the tech world) is about short term profit. if they get good numbers from this, they can make future projections of an imaginary increase over the years and make the ad companies happy for a while. they do not care about breaking the product in the long term
Just ask Twitter/X or what's left ot it.
Why would the ad companies back out if Youtube got rid of the people who were blocking their ads anyway? If anything, it makes Youtube a safer investment.
Less viewer numbers to show to advertisers.
They're already in hot water because of lying to their customers over this. They actually track ad blocker usage because lying about ads getting played when they weren't would be fraud. In fact they're getting sued by a whole bunch of advertisers because the "100% verified watched ads on Youtube.com" were actually playing in hidden frames on random websites.
I'm pretty sure the anti blocking, remote attestation direction Google is taking is an attempt to quickly fix this situation before it can get out of hand. They don't know what ads plays are legitimate anymore and their customers are angry about it.
Worst case scenario, all Youtube advertisers over the last x years get their money back with some compensation, which would be devastating to Youtube as a product.
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
I agree. It’s around $22 NZD and that is just too steep. They have a slightly cheaper one but you can’t background play with it. I’m sick of being nickel and dimed at every possible opportunity and then hearing about how these companies are making record profits.
I won't give a penny to the evil google.
Just make a (digital) trip to India and get family of 5 accounts for about 1$ a month per account. This the way I did it.
It's $25/mo for family. I hate that I pay for it, but I use music, and I mostly watch YouTube on a streaming device, so I've never been able to use ad blockers. $15 for the fam felt worth it, but $25 has me rethinking. Maybe I can configure YT-DL to get the shows I care about on my Plex
Any android based streaming device can run SmartTube (formerly SmartTube next). On an Android phone you can patch the YouTube apk with revanced, which also gives you full access to yt music.
From what I read on their own report, less than 2% use adblocks.
That is depressing
So you know that the people watching YouTube aren’t really considered “customers” by google in the traditional sense, right?