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.
How are they supposed to run a free service without ads, especially one as expensive to run as a video hosting website?
google has “fuck you” amounts of money, the minority of users using firefox mean nothing to them.
If google was having problems funding youtube, believe me, they’d stop paying creators before that would happen, and then the creators would tell us about it.
Do you really think they would stop paying creators before stopping people from bypassing the way both them and creators make money? It doesn’t take a business major to see that running a free service without ads is only going to cost them money.
I think (unsure) you misunderstand. Google, and any other company’s, main goal is to make money. To achieve this goal, i’m saying that if google were to lose profits from people using ad blockers, they are more likely to extract profits from their creators than sacrifice their bottom line.
If google can’t adequately monetize their services (by losing the ad-blocking war), they can’t monetize the creators. Google is evil, but so is the economic system that causes inconvenience to be the most effective way to monetize content.
This is why i wholeheartedly support things like Patreon, Ko-Fi, etc. because that directly supports creators and means that they don’t have to completely rely on a company that no longer says “don’t be evil”.
The creators are their product, the adblock users cost everyone money and provide no benefit, why would they punish their product over the users costing them money? The adblock users aren’t the bottom line, they are no benefit, and cost both YouTube and the creators in lost revenue.
That’s great and all, but YouTube still has bills to pay, they can’t just let you use the service free without ads, let you just give money to creators through those other services, and expect to even break even.
That’s if Google loses the ad-blocking war, hence the second paragraph, unless they manage to stuff web environment integrity/similar into their website, or if front ends like Invidious become more popular.
That’s true, but I think Google makes enough money from other things (tracking, other website’s ads) that it wouldn’t hurt them too bad. I think the recent crackdown on ad blocking is less from a large profit drop and rather to send a message to avoid the former from happening. Again though, I could be wrong about that one.
In the end though, I just want to watch and directly support my creators without being forced to waste 15 seconds of my life that I will never get back on a product I never have and never will use.
How does lemmy make money?
Also, hasn’t youtube been wildly profitable for years? Profit, by definition is excess. It’s what’s left over after all business expense have been paid.
If youtube is profitable, why do they need more profit? Oh yeah, they don’t.
Sorry this needs to be spelled out for you.
As far as I know YouTube is not that profitable, but it’s hard to tell as they don’t release all the numbers.
Do you make any excess money? Do you have any money left over after rent, food, etc? If you do, do you need that money? If you don’t would you like to make more? Nobody wants to live with no excess money, so why should a business?
Woah dude, you’re getting right into my point of projection.
Just because you want to use your excess to get even more excess, you’re assuming that everyone else will. Why eschew luxurious so those who have less can have more? You’d never project that lol, cause that’s not how you feel.
Have a good day, man. Hope I enlightened you a bit.
Gonna block you now cause I feel you have nothing to offer me. See ya.
So you want to live just making ends meet? Don’t care about having a savings account? You would be happy with just enough to get by without any excess? I don’t know anybody who would be happy with that.
If you want to run away from the conversation then go ahead. If you do happen to have some money you don’t want though, since who needs to make more than what they need just to break even even, right? I’ll happily take it off your hands.
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.
Maybe instead of looking at revenue you should look at profit. Revenue means nothing if your running costs eat it all up.
Also, maybe try to look at YouTube Numbers instead of the whole parent company? The patient company being profitable isn’t an excuse for the child company to lose money.
Thing is, even with all their efforts they still can’t make it profitable. Not sure if they release the data (doubt). But, YouTube has always been barely profitable or operating on loss. Google bought yt over 15 years ago and haven’t figured out how to make money off it and arguably made it worse with their policies and algos.
Part of the problem might be all those people blocking the ads, which I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s a pretty big chunk of their viewers. No ads means no ad revenue, which means losing money.