Did YouTube's offensive kill ad blockers? Here are the stats
adguard.com
YouTube tried to block video playback for ad-blocking users last year. Some even thought that this global effort would lead to the demise of ad blockers. But that did not happen.

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.

  • A_Random_Idiot@lemmy.worldEnglish
    25·
    10 months ago

    I got hit hard by the cpu bombing that youtube did to punish adblocking, to the point i had to stop watching videos while playing games.

    cause having a video running while playing a game would bomb my performance so hard that I’d go from 150+fps to 15fps.

    I think, ultimately, Googles war against adblockers Streisand’d the fuck out of adblockers and probably got more people ultimately to use them, either out of spite of googles bullshit or because they saw the arguments and realized the web was far better with a digital condom.

    • Draconic NEO@lemmy.worldEnglish
      4·
      10 months ago

      I don’t know how true that is about YouTube intentionally CPU bombing ad block users specifically.

      I will say though that websites run by big tech companies getting much heavier and more poorly optimized is ultimately just a fact of life. They don’t care about optimization, in fact it benefits them more that people have the latest and greatest hardware so that’s what they’re going to target. Ultimately that means that these websites will get slower on older hardware with time, and people will rely more and more on alternative frontends to access content, and it won’t really matter if you have ad blockers or not (*turning it off on a bloated site that is bogging down your CPU might actually make it worse).