Going to Google Ads setting[0] and turning off "Ads based on your interests" stopped the delay for me.<p>[0] <a href="https://www.google.com/settings/u/0/ads/authenticated?hl=en" rel="nofollow">https://www.google.com/settings/u/0/ads/authenticated?hl=en</a>
Alternative hypothesis (assuming a bug rather than intended behavior): YouTube is testing a new ad mechanism, and the new mechanism (rather naturally) wasn't tested on systems blocking ads; it then produces a delay if the ad can't be downloaded, rather than silently skipping it.<p>But yeah, I do tend to watch most of my videos through youtube-dl these days, even though the HTML5 player works fine for me in Firefox without any ads.
It's quite staggering to think the risk adblocking poses to Google's business.<p>They have virtually no business apart from ads.<p>AFIAK they have marketshare in the UK (and maybe US) which surpasses print+tv.<p>Can you imagine this 40 years ago? An invention which cuts out newspaper ads and time travels broadcast TV past the commercials?<p>Staggering.
YouTube is free. It's free because Google pays for it via ads. If you aren't watching ads, then you're effectively not paying for the content. Exactly what are people expecting to happen and why are they mad at Google here? Why do they feel like they're owed something for nothing?<p>If you don't like it, go launch and finance your own free-to-watch-no-ads-included video site.
I use uBlock Origin and youtube appears to still be fine for me. Maybe Google is targeting AdBlock first and then they'll start trying to detect others maybe? I guess this all depends if they're actually indeed penalizing people for blocking ads in the first place.
Haven’t looked into it, but this looks like an unintentional technical error. Google tends to optimize their websites for Chrome, so other browsers like Firefox have to deal with issues like this, regularly.
I've been amazed that adblockers work on videos since I started using them. It seems like it wouldn't be much trouble at all to simply embed the ad in the video stream. It does let people skip past the ad, but I'm not sure how important that is. If they start doing that, you could do the heavy-handed approach of re-encoding the video to show the ad(or a spot for the ad to be filled in by the server) side-by-side and allow them to 'opt in' to the old Javascript solution by disabling their ad blocker.
I got this earlier this week (uBlock user). Everything worked fine under the same account with uBlock turned off (good Lord, didn't realize how many ads they've added since I last disabled adblock), so I don't think this is an account-level flag but rather some new way of serving ads that fails into "An error has occurred" rather than serving the video immediately. Interesting development in the ads vs blockers war but I doubt there's any account flagging going on right now.
You can practice mindfulness in the mean time, and your brain still isn't polluted with crappy ideas.<p>That's still a win in my book.<p>I used to visit a site that mandated turning off the ad blocker and paused the ad if you left the page. Thankfully, there was a countdown, and the page was large enough to scroll past the video while the ad was running.<p>I became remarkably good at estimating how long wait down there (with the sound off) before scrolling back up...
What about the notion of something like some of us did with Flash content? I symlinked .adobe and .macromedia to /dev/null and was able to watch Flash content without the LSOs/SuperCookies being downloaded to my drive -- they were written to the bit bucket.<p>Does anyone think it's possible to write a Perl/Python/Bash program to basically achieve the same thing? To "convince" the site the ads are coming down but they never get seen? This could be browser independent/act as a sort of proxy. I realize Privoxy does something like this, but gets detected.<p>Thoughts?
If anyone is interested, I'm working on a free online YouTube client website that doesn't show ads, has a separate login system that allows you to subscribe to users, without YouTube knowing anything about that. I need help with building the website, so anyone doing design / PHP is welcome to contact me.<p>edit: Forgot to add, the website uses no JavaScript and doesn't track you at all. It also tries to implement most of YouTube's functionality, so you don't loose anything by using the website instead of YouTube.
Do no evil, right?<p>/s<p>People seem to have this romanticized view of Google but this is a company that makes almost the entirety of its revenue from tracking users. Between Google, Chrome, Android, Gmail and Google Maps they have an astonishing amount of access to people's lives and most people seem none the wise to it. And yet, if another company does anything even remotely close (Microsoft with Windows 10, for example), they would be crucified. Google seems to escape the same level of criticism for some reason.