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.
uBlock seems to have won the arms race, since whenever I had problems it worked again after updating it.
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
Youtube is fine for me, never stopped working here on firefox with ublock origin, but twitch though, yesterday I couldn’t watch any stream for 5 seconds without a error that only went away after turning everything off and letting the ads flow.
Same here. Firefox and uBlock Origin. My son uses Chrome with uBlock Origin and was having problems. Constantly and me to check and never a problem. I mostly only watch YouTube on ReVanced
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/
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.
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).
The cpu bombing actually wasn’t Youtube, it was adblock plus (if thats what you were using)
Nope, I use ublock origin.
and never had a problem of youtube impacting games before.
So far, no ads on YouTube. The defenses hold!
deleted by creator
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.
YouTube slowing itself down to unusable made me write a local extension that takes any YouTube watch link and opens it in yewtu.be my life has been better since. Fuck you tube’s stance. You’re gonna make the experience terrible I’ll watch your content via another client.
For those of us who can’t code their own extensions: LibRedirect does this for other sites as well, not just YouTube.
Oh, ty. This will replace a few extensions for me.
Very cool! I’m walking this same route, but with LibRedirect and Invidious Instance Selector Firefox addons. Maybe libraries can do community video-hosting and moderation? But please, no more businesses
I’m not familiar with yewtu.be, but couldn’t you accomplish the the same thing with a simple Host File entry in your operating system? Get the IP of yewtu.be (by pinging it which I just did to get 104.244.72.25), create an entry that says:
youtube.com 104.244.72.25So when your OS goes to find youtube.com, it gets directed to the IP of yewtu.be
No, the browser would still send YouTube.com as the host header. While yewtu.be could be configured to allow this to work, the TLS cert would not and the browser would get upset.
Your browser doesn’t check SSL certificates?
Still using Firefox + ublock origin + sponsorblock. I’ve not seen an ad on YouTube for years.
On my phone I’m using Tubular, a fork of NewPipe with Sponsorblock integration.
Never saw ads against adblock. I use firefox with ublock, and alterbative sponsorblock clients for youtube on android :)
This is what I use also, but youtube stopped it and blocked the videos. The work around was opening in an incognito window.
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.
Well I’m not seeing any ads, so I’d say yes
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.
Didn’t uninstall any of my AdBlock layers, but YouTube didn’t survive.
Even though I actually never saw the famous popup, the whole thing made me take steps after months of feeling that the recommendations sucked and I was often wasting lots of time watching stuff I didn’t even like.
Now I’m actually getting back into reading and audiobooks, and using invidious for the occasional watch.
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 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
