TL;DR version:
From June to August, the number of active users of the AdGuard Ad Blocker extension for Chrome dropped by about 8%. But in late August, the trend reversed. The temporary slump in user growth was offset by the increased demand in the second half of the year.
After a brief period of turbulence that lasted about a month, we saw the trend stabilize. And while the daily number of uninstalls was still higher than before YouTube’s crackdown, it remained consistently lower than the number of daily installs.
After media reports and YouTube’s own statements implied that ad blockers were doomed, and especially after more and more users started noticing that their ad blocking extensions were not working properly on YouTube, we did indeed see a spike in uninstalls. However, at the same time, the number of installs also increased significantly! It may well be that the way ad blockers’ woes were amplified in the media inadvertently boosted their popularity and helped them woo new users.
The takeaway from all of this is that ad blockers — first and foremost, ad-blocking extensions — were rocked by YouTube’s onslaught, but survived. And, moreover, the interest has rebounded, as is evidenced by the growth in the number of active users.
I’ve always just used uBlock on Chrome and I never see ads. I’m not doing anything other than that so it surprises me so many people have such trouble with ads.
Honestly, whenever I want to watch YT, I just open YT with uBlock Origin and SponsorBlock in a Private Tab. Haven’t really noticed anything, and honestly it helps me to stop watching videos.
Not only did I not uninstall my adblocker, I also switched to the Invidious front-end to avoid any anti-adblocking scripts, and I can also download videos now, and get no trackers at all.
Same here, it made me finally add some extra blocking on my router.
Youtube still works fine with uBlock Origin. I’ve had the adblock detection pop up a few times, but updating the filters fixed it every time. I will never uninstall my ad blocker. The web is not usable without it.
Are the adblocker-detection bits a chrome/ium-only thing? I use firefox w/ ublock origin and I’ve never gotten any
I’ve gotten it on Firefox this week.
Since I very rarely comment on anything, the solution is generally to just log out of my account.
I need to learn the filter truck mentioned above.
filter truck
The what now?
Filter update. No clue how autocorrect got truck out of that.
Perhaps you originally meant to write trick?
Yeah I’m normally logged in ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Yeah I have my adblocker disabled on edge on my work laptop as it messes with my web dev.
I accidentally used it for general browsing and I couldn’t believe what people put up with! It’s like a totally different internet.
that effect is amplified in areas with only shit-tier internet, like half of rural america.
I haven’t observed any problems with uBlock Origin on Firefox.
I moved from Vivaldi to Firefox during the crackdown, signed out all of my Google accounts, and immediately noticed the problems went away. Sorry Vivaldi…
For those curious how efficient these things are, recently I did some tests using this tool (clear your cache between tests).
I had decided to install an additional DNS blocker on my OpenWRT router so I was curious how these methods stack up against each other.
I tested uBlock Origin (default lists, reports 116k network filters), the Firefox (122) built-in ETP (Enhanced Tracking Protection) and the router adblock (only a modest 65k IPs in the default set, you can add more lists).
- Everything off gives me a score of only 3% blocked. Those 3% must be stuff so outrageous that they probably get blocked by upstream DNS servers.
- Firefox ETP only, set to strict: 41%
- Router adblock only: 69%
- Firefox + router both on: 83%
- uBlock Origin (alone or in combination): 97%
I got a 100% on iOS using Wipr. Not sure that’s accurate if ublock origin didn’t even get a 100%…
Must be a different statistic, I believe OPs stats are “percent of total traffic blocked” so 100% means your entire network would be blocked…
What list are you using on your router? I’m using Steven Black’s list (which is just an amalgamation of a bunch of other lists) for my PiHole/uBlock filter list, and Firefox+uBlock Origin scored 99% (only failing the cosmetic static ad test).
While easy to do, issue with doing this is you don’t give active views to the lists that get combine so the owners of those lists are less inclined to update/maintain them. I would recommend if the list is useful to get each of the combine lists he uses and add them all separately.
It’s the Adblock package for OpenWRT. The default selection is adaway, adguard, disconnect, yoyo, which is 3 x 10k lists and one 30k list.
I see that it has support for compiling Steve Black lists but SB can vary 50 - 500k and I only have a router with 128 MB RAM. I’ll have to experiment with the “standard” SB list, see if it fits and if it makes any difference.
Same. Didn’t even get any youtube pop-ups regarding adblocker detection. Also no slowing down observed (as was reported in some articles a while back).
Those slowndown article were clickbait / bad journalism , youtube hasn’t been slowing down the site for adblock user.
I saw a popup once, refreshed and it was gone. 🤣
I got a pop up once, I cleared the ublock cache and never had any issues after.
I’ve noticed the occasional jump cut forwards in video where there should’ve been ads, just two or three seconds.
Same. Not one interruption during the crackdown.
I’ve gotten the pop-up once or twice, but updating uBlock fixed that.
I have instead noticed a large decrease in quality, things like frozen images/pages and endless buffering. I don’t know if all that is related, but it did start around the time YouTube started cracking down on ad blockers.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
I saw the Youtube banner telling me it detected an ad blocker and wouldn’t let me watch a lot for about a week. Now it’s been over two months with nothing but smooth sailing on μBlock Origin. I’m even back to being able to block Shorts from appearing on my sub feed, where before it seemed like any YT-specific filters would let them detect the blocker.
How do you block shorts? Please and thanks.
I know that the re-vanced app on Android has a setting to remove them. Not sure about desktop.
There’s a set of filters that hides them from your feed and from search results. If I remember tonight, I’ll share it when I’m back on my home computer.
I recently found Firefox has extensions for blocking them on your homepage works a treat with app an sponsor block.
Added them the last time my hide for 30 days expired and the option was gone.
Seriously why the fuck would I want to watch vertical videos on my desktop that if I wasn’t blocking them would be bookends by ads longer than the fucking video
Keep using adblockers and don’t surrender your digital freedom to big tech corporations. Also check out private frontends for YouTube (and other plattforms: https://www.privacyguides.org/en/frontends/
Then, there’s this: https://restoreprivacy.com/state-spyware-extensively-using-ads-as-distribution-channel/
For this reason alone, fuck any company banning ad blockers.
Its literally always been that way. When a webmaster gives up control of their content, it gets exploited.
Yeah, malvertising has been a thing for over a decade, maybe closer to two. And it is something hosts at every level have had to deal with, including NYT and BBC.
I’d have no issue allowing ads if company’s properly vetted what was being advertised and did so through their own host/domain, because then you’d know that there was a human between you and whomever they’re selling space to. And I’ve seen a few small blogs do this sort of thing when I’ve been deep down a rabbit hole trying to solve a problem, and I respect the hell out of them for being willing to do the legwork to own what you serve. But most places want to do ad sales at such volume that its just not ‘economically feasible’ (ie, it eats away at the money they’re getting from the ads) to do so.
I wonder if they saw a large enough down tick is user traffic to realize that endlessly badgering people with 5 ads to watch a 30 second clip is driving away their user base.
I know my YouTube consumption has decreased by a factor of 10. I used to use it for almost all of my streaming entertainment. In conjunction with other streaming services’ password sharing crackdown, I am spending more time reading and going outside than I have in the past decade. That’s a trend these providers don’t want catching on.
If I had to watch ads, I would not use youtube. Period.
This. My preferred way of catching up to my favorite channels nowadays is watching their content on LibreTube with AdBlock and SponsorBlock on and supporting them on Patreon if they have one.
My YouTube use is going down because the algorithm absolutely sucks now. I went to the gaming tab 2 hours after the state of play and it was nowhere to be found. But outdated years old crap was being shown.
But never had any ad issues with ublock origin or revanced.
uBlock seems to have won the arms race, since whenever I had problems it worked again after updating it.
With unlock I didn’t even know there was an arms race. Seamless performance the whole time!
I’ve never given Youtube a cent and I always use adblock, on the endpoints and my network, and I have had no problems watching anything I wanted on youtube. I guess you just have to mercilessly block ads at all levels to achieve dominance
Yeah, never noticed a thing of this “war” because of FF and uBlock origin.
It all just kept working, including on Youtube.
This made me discover freetube, which is ads free and an excellent way to cut on YouTube « time sink » that Google is so good at, with its recommended tab, auto play feature, clickbait title.
Adblocker will die when there’s no more ads to see.
when there’s no more ads to see.
the surviving AI will be upset at the loss of revenue that occurs, but since they’ll exterminate the human race, it’s not an entirely unexpected side effect.
I’ve been using uBlock Origin in Firefox on both Linux and Android this whole time. If Lemmy hadn’t lit up about it, I wouldn’t have noticed. I never saw one ad or that “dur hur no ad block” message.
And I let Youtube ads run for YEARS. Ads basically everywhere on the net have become intolerable in their content and quantity, so I said enough. And it is 100% Adsense’s fault.
Ads basically everywhere on the net have become intolerable in their content and quantity,
I was reading a huffpost article the other day on my work computer on Firefox that doesn’t have an ad blocker. The page was refreshing with new ads every 5 seconds and took up like 20% more CPU power than before I opened the page.
So huffpost is now in my mental blocklist.
yeah we need a coalition of sites that agree a single page serve is fine, they don’t need tons of garbage running in the background.
Yeah I’ve always been on firefox and I haven’t noticed a single thing change during the last year of all this hubbub about Youtube.
The fact that ads are so intolerable is the problem. I understand that much of the internet being free is because of ads. But we went from the early days of the internet where ads were malicious, active annoyances to the modern internet where ads are malicious, passive annoyances. Clicking on an ad no longer ruins my afternoon with a virus, but it does log and sell my data to the highest bidder. Nearly every ad on the internet is in bad faith.
Until we have better ads, I will block absolutely everything I can.
There’s no such a thing as good ads. Not even before the internet.
I’m actually going to disagree there. Where I live there is a monthly magazine delivered free to anyone who wants it. The magazine is 100% adverts and is paid for entirely by the people advertising. It’s very useful when you’re trying to find a plumber of sell a car or whatever.
EDIT: But you were probably being hyperbolic and I will agree that I dislike to see adverts anywhere that I’m not actively searchibg them out
In other words, the yellow pages.
I can’t remember the last time I saw an ad on any of my devices, so I’d say “lol”
