YouTube is testing a three-strikes policy for ad blocking

The cat and mouse game continues. We’ve been in a cycle of YouTube increasing the ads, driving more people to block them. I’m not sure that pushing harder on the audience with the lowest tolerance to ads is the way to go, but I guess we’ll find out. Maybe there’s enough people who will cave and don’t have the technical literacy to find further workarounds. I’ve been saying for a while, that if YouTube really cared, they’d make you login, or otherwise choose not to let you watch and here we are. Seems like the obvious workarounds are VPNs or alternative front ends.

I hopped on the youtube premium train a long time back, just because I mainly used youtube to consume podcasts and the like and it paid my creators better and got me no ads on youtube anywhere. The first time these BS policies hit me, a paying user, I will cancel it and never look back.

YouTube knows that people who insist to not watch ads/pay premium will find a way to watch it for free, and they don't mind it. They mind of people who got the ad blocker as freeware and watched YouTube without ads when they don't mind getting it. Looking at YouTube numbers and the growing hype of Arc browser and other freeware blockers, make sense of such a not-insisting ad blocker wall.

This requires that you are logged in to YouTube, doesn't it? I'm not sure how deep in the minority I am, but I use all Google services in private browsing mode if I can get away with it.

I have a home toolchain making use of flask, yt-dlp, sponsorblock, plex, and ersatztv and it all works so well. I could not imagine watching youtube in a browser or a crappy roku app.<p>I just have to hope this war never comes to my small village.

And some users will be testing three-strikes policy for yt bullshit

I wonder if we could just declare all older and public YouTube videos as cultural heritage and then legally backup them.

As a free market maximalist, I believe YouTube has the right to show me as many ads as possible; but I reserve the right to close my eyes and not watch them.<p>An adblocker helps me close my eyes at scale, and so if YouTube wants to interfere with that, that&#x27;s where we&#x27;ll have a little issue.

No way I’d pay just to get rid of ads (and honestly that’s all I’d use Premium for). They’ll still track me and get to my personality from what I watch. So I’d essentially be paying them AND they’d still do that. That’s turning me into the ultimate sucker.

Not mad at this.<p>You can pay to remove the ads and retain the same (better, IMO) experience.<p>YouTube also put the kibosh on 3P clients since forever, so that&#x27;s not being taken away.<p>That&#x27;s the difference between what YT has done and the un-Galaxy-brain dumb crap Reddit and Twitter have pulled.

I would rather not use YouTube than allow ads. I may be the minority, I don&#x27;t care.

97% of those surveyed in the article do not plan on paying for YouTube premium as a result ahahaha

How are they going to police this?<p>I watch YouTube across multiple devices without a Google account not to mention NewPipe and other ways that Google doesn&#x27;t approve of.

Go ahead. We have TikTok and YouTube is only used by old grannies anyway.

[dupe]<p>this was news from late June

Has nobody learned a thing from Musk&#x27;s example?<p>Drunk on a stew of free money and ideological hegemony, these behemoths actually believe they&#x27;ve captured something that cannot be replaced.<p>I post my videos on peertube now; others will follow if they go down the same path as Twitter and Reddit. I can&#x27;t wait to see it happen.<p>I really can&#x27;t wait for people to realize we can federate AirBnB and Uber too.<p>The Fed has called in the bill on the last thirty years, and all the little MBAs are about to learn, at [last], what a protocol is.

RIP Brave Browser<p>YouTube should just stop pretending to be a free video host at this point &amp; instead put everything behind a paywall. So much for the free service until we unicorn with VC&#x2F;public money.<p>Would be neat if they terminate Google accounts altogether to actually piss people off