10 ms·

As YouTube declares war on ad blockers, Google sponsors ad blocking conference

86 points by judiisis 3y ago

shashashasha___ 3y ago
chromium derivatives, such as vivaldi, brave, edge, etc... must have an open source fork on top chromium which removes any manifest v3 enforcement and ensures ad blocking capabilities. if they will have to do it alone, it would be too great of an effort as I'm sure google with couple v3 code everywhere and make it hard to remove this enforcement alone. they also need to help remove blocking popups like youtubes one which works and act exactly like an ad. I'm sure this could bring more usage to these browsers. I've moved to vivaldi and never looked back
- throwaway914 3y ago
  Although I use Firefox, I will dutifully mention that Brave seems to be the best of all of them. I initially thought Brave was about seeing ads and earning crypto. Turns out this is something you opt-into. It goes much further than ungoogled-chromium and adds a ton of patches to protect privacy.
- charcircuit 3y ago
  manifest v3 doesn't prevent blocking ads from youtube
  - shashashasha___ 3y ago
    didn't say it is. its related to the article and future of ads and web browsers and v3 + youtube ad popups feel to me like 2 big issues that are ongoing
beenBoutIT 3y ago
Anybody have any idea of what percentage of viewers skip watching their target YouTube video when they get an ad in front of it or abandon it when presented with an ad midway through? Seems like anyone who wants their video to get maximum exposure would want to eliminate ads for anyone who's willing to watch it and should be able to buy out the ads on their end.
- lazybreather 3y ago
  Works for channels looking to only promote something else. But majority of content on YT is to make money to the creator. Ads is the sole source of any revenue there, comsidering the ad revenue share model. Or the premium subscription revenue share. Either way it hard to do away with ads in still booming creator economy.
  - MezzoDelCammin 3y ago
    "Ads is the sole source of revenue" is plainly wrong, unless You're maybe just beginning. Looking at some breakdowns (strangely, quite a few channels publish them) the ad revenue seems to be just a minor slice these days. The actual income is either from sponsorship, Patreon, merch, or just plain "advertising yourself" (seemingly the case of many photo/videography channels). It's not too much of a stretch to say YouTube ads are detrimental to any of these revenues.
    - specproc 3y ago
      Aye, kinder forms of advertising are a common youtube genre. Like videos demoing tech, company made tutorials etc.
      - flir 3y ago
        "Works for channels looking to only promote something else"?
  - AniseAbyss 3y ago
    [dead]
- globalnode 3y ago
  if youre looking at a sample of me, its 100% ;)
  - alpaca128 3y ago
atorodius 3y ago
YouTube Premium everyone… If you get the family version, 6ppl can watch YT without Ads from the main apps, imho a great deal (I don‘t have any other video subscriptions)
- mrweasel 3y ago
  The only complaint I have is that there's no way to downgrade to YouTube Premium Lite. Lite is going away now, and I can't figure out if it's a deliberately botched launch or just plain incompetence. You couldn't downgrade to lite, it was never really pushed in any way, it was just a stealth product. YouTube Premium is the subscription I get the most value from, even if I could do without the forced YouTube Music subscription, but my wife likes the music streaming.
- rented_mule 3y ago
  The family version is not available for Google Workspace accounts (which was pushed as something useful for families for years when it first came out, and family use remained free when they did away with other free uses so they are very aware it's used that way). So it's $14 per month per person in my US-based family. That's too steep compared to Netflix, Disney+, etc. for us. If they provided a way to move subscriptions, viewing history, playlists, etc. to a vanilla account, I'd do that. Without that, I've invested too much time in curating things to start over. Especially without knowing what steps in user experience degradation lie ahead.
- encom 3y ago
  I might have considered that for a millisecond, if Google hadn't demonetised a lot of the creators I care about. I'd rather support them directly.
- bigstrat2003 3y ago
  I don't really think youtube has good enough content to justify paying for it, but setting that aside I still think a premium subscription has one major problem. Google has no reliability, so why would I trust that if I subscribe to youtube they won't just replace it with a worse product?
nonrandomstring 3y ago
The "war" headline makes it sound incendiary. What I read was a fascinating story about how conflicted the whole space is, and how Google is sponsoring developers to work on ad-blocking technology, and about how Google concedes that advertisement is problematic from many sides, privacy, distraction, inappropriate context.... Personally I loathe and detest advertisements, and the entire advertising industry because "consumerism" is a derelict philosophy. But from a simply practical stance, I use video clips in education, so yt-dlp ensures I have a reliable offline copy for lectures. Having ads show up in a lesson or conference would be wholly inappropriate. On the other hand I've read comments from people here who say they love ads. They say they find them useful, and even that targeted ads bring value to their lives. If those people are being sincere (and why would they not be?), then there's obviously a market for advertising. And a need for ad-free technology too. I'm all for diversity. It's nice that different people have different tastes and needs. So if YouTube were sincere, and technically capable, we'd simply have two URLs https://noads.youtube.com/ https://noads.youtube.com/ and https://ads.youtube.com/ https://ads.youtube.com/ People could choose what they want. Ads or no ads. Instead of that we get "war", which is always a bonfire of wealth, and psychologically deleterious to all involved. So some thoughts come to mind; Maybe The people who say they "like ads" aren't sincere. They are either paid mouthpieces for the advertising industry, or they suffer from "identification" (aka fanboyism) which leads them to make dishonest comments. Or perhaps YouTube haven't realised how stupid they are being spending millions on fighting ad-blockers when instead they could just offer an ad-free channel to those that want it. Or even more silly; nobody has realised that the optimal solution (economically and politically) is just giving people what they want in the first place, rather than turning it into a childish battle of wills.
- bambax 3y ago
  > So if YouTube were sincere, and technically capable, we'd simply have two URLs https://noads.youtube.com/ https://noads.youtube.com/ and https://ads.youtube.com/ https://ads.youtube.com/ They do. The noads one is available with a subscription.
  - nonrandomstring 3y ago
RamblingCTO 3y ago
What's a good youtube alternative? The only thing I found so far was odysee. I'd rather go back to quality videos made by actual humans than money grab spam. Are there some sites where some creators cross post?
- M4v3R 3y ago
  Check out Curiosity Stream and Nebula
  - gwd 3y ago
    A bunch of creators I liked on YT were advertising Nebula, among other things talking about not dealing with "The Algorithm", so I tried it out. I liked not having the ads, but it turns out "The Algorithm" is actually a feature for me. On Nebula, it's like Netflix: your home page is whatever they feel like showing you, not stuff somewhat connected to what you've watched and liked before. Also, there's no comments or likes, so no way to give the creators any kind of feedback (even something as simple as, "You have an editing mistake at 2:24").
    - RamblingCTO 3y ago
      That's a shame because I love having recommendations for the same topic. On YouTube the videos in the sidebar don't have anything to do with the video I'm watching and that sucks.
  - RamblingCTO 3y ago
    Thanks, I'll check out Nebula.
- Mistletoe 3y ago
  There really isn’t one. That’s what a monopoly is and why we used to have laws that were enforced that prevented that from happening. Standard Oil YouTube is where you will get your videos.
flykespice 3y ago
To be honest blocking ad sounds like borderline piracy specially when a service offered for free depends on it.
- wombat-man 3y ago
  Idk if I'd go that far. But I'm surprised at how much anger there is around the move. As if a service like YouTube could run without revenue forever.
  - Applejinx 3y ago
    It's a twitter-like situation. You can't simply look to payment of money directly to the company as a metric of how much power they've got. What is it worth to wholly control the algorithm by which the whole world is shown its media, and have it summed up as 'the algorithm' and neither publicized nor questioned? How much would you pay to be in that situation? How much could you ask of third parties if you are the choke-point by which everyone gets their limited picture on the world: limited by specifically you, and you get away with it? Monopoly in this kind of space is WAY more valuable than getting paid by users. You literally control the world on a statistical basis, which is how that is done in the first place. It's power arguably beyond states and governments, in a black box that just goes on operating, without much argument. That's better than revenue, if you can keep it up and running, which Google has no trouble doing. There's a reason they do.
    - wombat-man 3y ago
      I hear you. They ignored AdBlock for a while but the business is maturing and shareholders want dollars. What you describe is useful as a business strategy but waxing on about the intangible influence of controlling YouTube isn't going to play well if the business unit revenue is down. I think Google is tightening up the business to keep the party going.
      - Applejinx 3y ago
        The thing is, the areas where that strategy is MOST useful are the areas that'll get you in big trouble. They could well have taken big money, even nation-state money, for a while there, upended the whole damn planet in service of aiding state actors who're now imploding, and could be scrambling to transition to a less risky strategy. That would be an example of trading on the true power of monopoly, algorithm and YouTube, and then having it turn and bite you. If you're selling influence to bad actors for exorbitant sums, you'd better win, by which I mean THEY had better win. Otherwise you're left holding the bag. If it's that, I'm happy to have them pivot. Because that would be a pretty apocalyptic scenario, even as a nebulous strategy that was never implemented. If it WAS ever implemented, I'm betting it backfired and they're desperate to fall back on more seemingly normal behavior.
BLKNSLVR 3y ago
Embrace, Extend, Extinguish?
- archargelod 3y ago
  EEE doesn't work in open-source context. Adblock is not a product - it's a culture.
bambax 3y ago
This is a fairly balanced article, and seemingly well-informed. What I would like to know is who uses an ad blocker and not uBlock, and why? What's the point of using an inferior product if the best one is free and ubiquitous?
- variadix 3y ago
  AdGuard is useful on iOS because of how limited browsers are on it. They also provide a DNS adblocking service which for someone less technical who can’t setup a pihole is a useful service.
8chanAnon 3y ago
Considering that Hacker News is a developer-oriented website, I half-expected the responses here to be "pfft, I don't watch Youtube on Youtube anyway, never seen any ads". There are technical solutions to this and I don't mean workarounds like ad blockers. I don't want to sound dismissive or condescending but why are we being held hostage by the likes of Youtube? The code has been cracked. We know that by the existence of utilities like Invidious and youtube-dl yet people still behave as if we are somehow helpless in the face of Big Tech. You guys should be offering solutions but you seem content to just bellyache about it. I am sorry to see that.
Jigsy 3y ago
I'm not sure if I'm the outlier in this regard, but in my case, I simply stopped watching YouTube. (Good job, Google!) I have been using Piped to watch a few programming related videos, though.
ivanmontillam 3y ago
In my humble opinion, they are buying their tickets to the ad-blocking technology they need. A sure fire way to guarantee this access, is to sponsor said conference.
Gys 3y ago
Keep Your Friends Close and Your Enemies Closer ;)
- kazinator 3y ago
  It occurs to me that this situation is ideally achieved if 1. Your friends are imaginary (pretty close: right in your head) 2. Your enemies are your own split personalities (even closer)
  - LoganDark 3y ago
    > 1. Your friends are imaginary (pretty close: right in your head) Dissociative Identity Disorder results in exactly this situation (source: I have it) > 2. Your enemies are your own split personalities (even closer) ... touchè
vinni2 3y ago
I watch Youtube on Apple TV so ad blockers don’t work. Instead I bought YouTube premium from India via VPN which costed me 1159 INR or 14USD for 12 months. Totally worth the time saved.
- tananaev 3y ago
  I thought they already closed the loophole. You have to have a local card to be able to buy it.
  - qingcharles 3y ago
    Perhaps depends which country? I know someone who just did it with Venezuela and it worked fine.
- haunter 3y ago
  You can use Yattee with Invidious or Piped on a Apple TV without any jailbreak https://github.com/yattee/yattee https://github.com/yattee/yattee https://apps.apple.com/us/app/yattee/id1595136629 https://apps.apple.com/us/app/yattee/id1595136629 Guide https://np.reddit.com/r/Yattee/comments/13d3lj7/how_to_set_up_and_use_yattee_to_watch_youtube/ https://np.reddit.com/r/Yattee/comments/13d3lj7/how_to_set_u...
  - k8sToGo 3y ago
    Can’t use my account with it though
    - thegeekpirate 3y ago
      Seems like you can, no? https://github.com/yattee/yattee/wiki/Features#availability https://github.com/yattee/yattee/wiki/Features#availability
      - k8sToGo 3y ago
        The guide said "It doesn't support Google or YouTube accounts, but it does support Invidious and Piped accounts." so that's what I was referring to. Not sure.

86 points by judiisis 3y ago

chromium derivatives, such as vivaldi, brave, edge, etc... must have an open source fork on top chromium which removes any manifest v3 enforcement and ensures ad blocking capabilities. if they will have to do it alone, it would be too great of an effort as I'm sure google with couple v3 code everywhere and make it hard to remove this enforcement alone. they also need to help remove blocking popups like youtubes one which works and act exactly like an ad. I'm sure this could bring more usage to these browsers. I've moved to vivaldi and never looked back

throwaway914 3y ago
Although I use Firefox, I will dutifully mention that Brave seems to be the best of all of them. I initially thought Brave was about seeing ads and earning crypto. Turns out this is something you opt-into. It goes much further than ungoogled-chromium and adds a ton of patches to protect privacy.
charcircuit 3y ago
manifest v3 doesn't prevent blocking ads from youtube
- shashashasha___ 3y ago
  didn't say it is. its related to the article and future of ads and web browsers and v3 + youtube ad popups feel to me like 2 big issues that are ongoing

beenBoutIT 3y ago

Anybody have any idea of what percentage of viewers skip watching their target YouTube video when they get an ad in front of it or abandon it when presented with an ad midway through? Seems like anyone who wants their video to get maximum exposure would want to eliminate ads for anyone who's willing to watch it and should be able to buy out the ads on their end.

lazybreather 3y ago
Works for channels looking to only promote something else. But majority of content on YT is to make money to the creator. Ads is the sole source of any revenue there, comsidering the ad revenue share model. Or the premium subscription revenue share. Either way it hard to do away with ads in still booming creator economy.
- MezzoDelCammin 3y ago
  "Ads is the sole source of revenue" is plainly wrong, unless You're maybe just beginning. Looking at some breakdowns (strangely, quite a few channels publish them) the ad revenue seems to be just a minor slice these days. The actual income is either from sponsorship, Patreon, merch, or just plain "advertising yourself" (seemingly the case of many photo/videography channels). It's not too much of a stretch to say YouTube ads are detrimental to any of these revenues.
  - specproc 3y ago
    Aye, kinder forms of advertising are a common youtube genre. Like videos demoing tech, company made tutorials etc.
    - flir 3y ago
      "Works for channels looking to only promote something else"?
- AniseAbyss 3y ago
  [dead]
globalnode 3y ago
if youre looking at a sample of me, its 100% ;)
- alpaca128 3y ago

atorodius 3y ago

YouTube Premium everyone… If you get the family version, 6ppl can watch YT without Ads from the main apps, imho a great deal (I don‘t have any other video subscriptions)

mrweasel 3y ago
The only complaint I have is that there's no way to downgrade to YouTube Premium Lite. Lite is going away now, and I can't figure out if it's a deliberately botched launch or just plain incompetence. You couldn't downgrade to lite, it was never really pushed in any way, it was just a stealth product. YouTube Premium is the subscription I get the most value from, even if I could do without the forced YouTube Music subscription, but my wife likes the music streaming.
rented_mule 3y ago
The family version is not available for Google Workspace accounts (which was pushed as something useful for families for years when it first came out, and family use remained free when they did away with other free uses so they are very aware it's used that way). So it's $14 per month per person in my US-based family. That's too steep compared to Netflix, Disney+, etc. for us. If they provided a way to move subscriptions, viewing history, playlists, etc. to a vanilla account, I'd do that. Without that, I've invested too much time in curating things to start over. Especially without knowing what steps in user experience degradation lie ahead.
encom 3y ago
I might have considered that for a millisecond, if Google hadn't demonetised a lot of the creators I care about. I'd rather support them directly.
bigstrat2003 3y ago
I don't really think youtube has good enough content to justify paying for it, but setting that aside I still think a premium subscription has one major problem. Google has no reliability, so why would I trust that if I subscribe to youtube they won't just replace it with a worse product?

nonrandomstring 3y ago

The "war" headline makes it sound incendiary. What I read was a fascinating story about how conflicted the whole space is, and how Google is sponsoring developers to work on ad-blocking technology, and about how Google concedes that advertisement is problematic from many sides, privacy, distraction, inappropriate context.... Personally I loathe and detest advertisements, and the entire advertising industry because "consumerism" is a derelict philosophy. But from a simply practical stance, I use video clips in education, so yt-dlp ensures I have a reliable offline copy for lectures. Having ads show up in a lesson or conference would be wholly inappropriate. On the other hand I've read comments from people here who say they love ads. They say they find them useful, and even that targeted ads bring value to their lives. If those people are being sincere (and why would they not be?), then there's obviously a market for advertising. And a need for ad-free technology too. I'm all for diversity. It's nice that different people have different tastes and needs. So if YouTube were sincere, and technically capable, we'd simply have two URLs https://noads.youtube.com/ https://noads.youtube.com/ and https://ads.youtube.com/ https://ads.youtube.com/ People could choose what they want. Ads or no ads. Instead of that we get "war", which is always a bonfire of wealth, and psychologically deleterious to all involved. So some thoughts come to mind; Maybe The people who say they "like ads" aren't sincere. They are either paid mouthpieces for the advertising industry, or they suffer from "identification" (aka fanboyism) which leads them to make dishonest comments. Or perhaps YouTube haven't realised how stupid they are being spending millions on fighting ad-blockers when instead they could just offer an ad-free channel to those that want it. Or even more silly; nobody has realised that the optimal solution (economically and politically) is just giving people what they want in the first place, rather than turning it into a childish battle of wills.

bambax 3y ago
> So if YouTube were sincere, and technically capable, we'd simply have two URLs https://noads.youtube.com/ https://noads.youtube.com/ and https://ads.youtube.com/ https://ads.youtube.com/ They do. The noads one is available with a subscription.
- nonrandomstring 3y ago

RamblingCTO 3y ago

What's a good youtube alternative? The only thing I found so far was odysee. I'd rather go back to quality videos made by actual humans than money grab spam. Are there some sites where some creators cross post?

M4v3R 3y ago
Check out Curiosity Stream and Nebula
- gwd 3y ago
  A bunch of creators I liked on YT were advertising Nebula, among other things talking about not dealing with "The Algorithm", so I tried it out. I liked not having the ads, but it turns out "The Algorithm" is actually a feature for me. On Nebula, it's like Netflix: your home page is whatever they feel like showing you, not stuff somewhat connected to what you've watched and liked before. Also, there's no comments or likes, so no way to give the creators any kind of feedback (even something as simple as, "You have an editing mistake at 2:24").
  - RamblingCTO 3y ago
    That's a shame because I love having recommendations for the same topic. On YouTube the videos in the sidebar don't have anything to do with the video I'm watching and that sucks.
- RamblingCTO 3y ago
  Thanks, I'll check out Nebula.
Mistletoe 3y ago
There really isn’t one. That’s what a monopoly is and why we used to have laws that were enforced that prevented that from happening. Standard Oil YouTube is where you will get your videos.

flykespice 3y ago

To be honest blocking ad sounds like borderline piracy specially when a service offered for free depends on it.

wombat-man 3y ago
Idk if I'd go that far. But I'm surprised at how much anger there is around the move. As if a service like YouTube could run without revenue forever.
- Applejinx 3y ago
  It's a twitter-like situation. You can't simply look to payment of money directly to the company as a metric of how much power they've got. What is it worth to wholly control the algorithm by which the whole world is shown its media, and have it summed up as 'the algorithm' and neither publicized nor questioned? How much would you pay to be in that situation? How much could you ask of third parties if you are the choke-point by which everyone gets their limited picture on the world: limited by specifically you, and you get away with it? Monopoly in this kind of space is WAY more valuable than getting paid by users. You literally control the world on a statistical basis, which is how that is done in the first place. It's power arguably beyond states and governments, in a black box that just goes on operating, without much argument. That's better than revenue, if you can keep it up and running, which Google has no trouble doing. There's a reason they do.
  - wombat-man 3y ago
    I hear you. They ignored AdBlock for a while but the business is maturing and shareholders want dollars. What you describe is useful as a business strategy but waxing on about the intangible influence of controlling YouTube isn't going to play well if the business unit revenue is down. I think Google is tightening up the business to keep the party going.
    - Applejinx 3y ago
      The thing is, the areas where that strategy is MOST useful are the areas that'll get you in big trouble. They could well have taken big money, even nation-state money, for a while there, upended the whole damn planet in service of aiding state actors who're now imploding, and could be scrambling to transition to a less risky strategy. That would be an example of trading on the true power of monopoly, algorithm and YouTube, and then having it turn and bite you. If you're selling influence to bad actors for exorbitant sums, you'd better win, by which I mean THEY had better win. Otherwise you're left holding the bag. If it's that, I'm happy to have them pivot. Because that would be a pretty apocalyptic scenario, even as a nebulous strategy that was never implemented. If it WAS ever implemented, I'm betting it backfired and they're desperate to fall back on more seemingly normal behavior.

BLKNSLVR 3y ago

Embrace, Extend, Extinguish?

archargelod 3y ago
EEE doesn't work in open-source context. Adblock is not a product - it's a culture.

bambax 3y ago

This is a fairly balanced article, and seemingly well-informed. What I would like to know is who uses an ad blocker and not uBlock, and why? What's the point of using an inferior product if the best one is free and ubiquitous?

variadix 3y ago
AdGuard is useful on iOS because of how limited browsers are on it. They also provide a DNS adblocking service which for someone less technical who can’t setup a pihole is a useful service.

8chanAnon 3y ago

Considering that Hacker News is a developer-oriented website, I half-expected the responses here to be "pfft, I don't watch Youtube on Youtube anyway, never seen any ads". There are technical solutions to this and I don't mean workarounds like ad blockers. I don't want to sound dismissive or condescending but why are we being held hostage by the likes of Youtube? The code has been cracked. We know that by the existence of utilities like Invidious and youtube-dl yet people still behave as if we are somehow helpless in the face of Big Tech. You guys should be offering solutions but you seem content to just bellyache about it. I am sorry to see that.

Jigsy 3y ago

I'm not sure if I'm the outlier in this regard, but in my case, I simply stopped watching YouTube. (Good job, Google!) I have been using Piped to watch a few programming related videos, though.

ivanmontillam 3y ago

In my humble opinion, they are buying their tickets to the ad-blocking technology they need. A sure fire way to guarantee this access, is to sponsor said conference.

Gys 3y ago

Keep Your Friends Close and Your Enemies Closer ;)

kazinator 3y ago
It occurs to me that this situation is ideally achieved if 1. Your friends are imaginary (pretty close: right in your head) 2. Your enemies are your own split personalities (even closer)
- LoganDark 3y ago
  > 1. Your friends are imaginary (pretty close: right in your head) Dissociative Identity Disorder results in exactly this situation (source: I have it) > 2. Your enemies are your own split personalities (even closer) ... touchè

vinni2 3y ago

I watch Youtube on Apple TV so ad blockers don’t work. Instead I bought YouTube premium from India via VPN which costed me 1159 INR or 14USD for 12 months. Totally worth the time saved.

tananaev 3y ago
I thought they already closed the loophole. You have to have a local card to be able to buy it.
- qingcharles 3y ago
  Perhaps depends which country? I know someone who just did it with Venezuela and it worked fine.
haunter 3y ago
You can use Yattee with Invidious or Piped on a Apple TV without any jailbreak https://github.com/yattee/yattee https://github.com/yattee/yattee https://apps.apple.com/us/app/yattee/id1595136629 https://apps.apple.com/us/app/yattee/id1595136629 Guide https://np.reddit.com/r/Yattee/comments/13d3lj7/how_to_set_up_and_use_yattee_to_watch_youtube/ https://np.reddit.com/r/Yattee/comments/13d3lj7/how_to_set_u...
- k8sToGo 3y ago
  Can’t use my account with it though
  - thegeekpirate 3y ago
    Seems like you can, no? https://github.com/yattee/yattee/wiki/Features#availability https://github.com/yattee/yattee/wiki/Features#availability
    - k8sToGo 3y ago
      The guide said "It doesn't support Google or YouTube accounts, but it does support Invidious and Piped accounts." so that's what I was referring to. Not sure.