Chances are it's just to install a BETTER adblocker...but even if not, YouTube is being greedy here. They could still make a fairly profitable site and compete based on features and usability, but instead they are maximizing their revenue at the cost of all else. They are greedy, and instead of having a thriving business, they are making the exact same mistake as cable TV providers: choking th life out of viewers with too many ads for short-term gain at the cost of longevity.<p>Frankly, in the past years, nothing makes me more sick that the pure greed of tech companies doing things just because they can, and Google and its employees are at the top of that list of those who make me wretch.
They will win.<p>They will setup DRM, or render the full site in canvas, or with wasm, or something, or requires a TPM trusted signatured in an approved web browser or some shit.<p>The new generation will accept a limited client, because they know mostly locked down phones. So only a few will not accept it, and they will not have to care about it a single bit.
uBlock has been working fine. If you get blocked from youtube, you can go to uBlock options, click purge all caches, then "Update Now." Do a full reload in youtube and you're good to go. Tactics are changing continually.
This doesn't really pass the sniff test, unless users of ad blockers are particularly uninformed.<p>If you want to avoid the YT messages, you can turn off the blocker for YT. If you're uninstalling then you're likely upgrading to a blocker that actually works. The article might be more convincing if they included stats from reliable YT blockers like uBlock Origin.
I deeply dislike advertising, but I am also willing to pay for services I value, so I am subscribed to YouTube Premium. But given how evil and greedy Google has become, I fully expect the "premium" service to eventually transition from no ads to "limited ads" (and that is the day I will cancel my account and walk away forever).
There's an argument to be made that a site that permits ad blockers should command a higher price from advertisers than one that forbids them, since a user who would use an ad blocker is the least likely user to ever click on an ad. If you're showing ads to a userbase that consists of a mix of users who would and wouldn't use an ad blocker if able to do it, then you're increasing your impressions by policy without increasing your conversions, compared to a site that shows ads <i>only</i> to users who have the chance to block ads and don't.
The statement "subscriptions to AdGuard's paid service surged, as it's not affected by YouTube's crackdown" is false. AdGuard apps are also affected by YouTube's anti-adblocker measures. However, there are workarounds. You can avoid the anti-adblocker measures by setting your user agent to an old browser, such as Internet Explorer.
Well good, because hopefully it will shed enough load that YouTube considers it a success doesn't go any further than this. uBlock Origin still works, that's good enough for me.
[dupe]<p>Lots of news last week: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38128765">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38128765</a>
Those of you defending youtube on this, have you actually tried watching anything on the site without ad blockers? It's not just that they serve you occasional, only moderately annoying ads as a subsidy for not paying, they do it in such an intrusively pervasive manner that it seems intentionally designed to make it nearly unusable. The sheer quantity of garbage interrupting your music or anything else you care to watch goes way beyond reasonable and right into the land of "fuck you until you pay".<p>It's downright shitty from a highly profitable company whose content volume is entirely created by other users themselves who in any case regularly get demonetized from the ads in their own content for all sorts of arbitrary X and Y bullshit reasons, to the point that those running most of my favorite channels don't even make anything from the very same ads that youtube crams down everyone elses throats.
> <a href="https://github.com/0x48piraj/fadblock">https://github.com/0x48piraj/fadblock</a><p>I'm trying out alternatives fadblock seems to work well enough so far, but this is enshitification.<p>If it comes to it I'll migrate over to using yt-dlp or disregard YT entirely and find somewhere else. I believe others feel similarly. Ads are not acceptable to me.