YouTube blames ad blockers for slow load times, not the browser

The problem is not that Google wants to put Ads on YouTube. The problem is that they are putting too many ads there, a disproportional amount of them. Based on the money they are pulling in, they could easily put fewer, less intrusive ads on the platform and still make a healthy profit.<p>The fact that they are going above and beyond is what makes people angry. YouTube may be the property of Google but they got so successful due to all of society and most people have the intuitive sense that Google is taking more than their fair share from society now.<p>The problem is not technical, and as long as Google continues to make their profits soar beyond what they deserve, people will continue to use adblockers.

I’m just thankful the team of people working on uBlock Origin and its filters are managing to stay one step ahead of Google. Seeing those anti-adblock popups made me realize how much of a habit watching YouTube has become for me.<p>Before anyone asks, I don’t care about the moral or ethical concerns of adblocking. Nor do I ever plan to pay Google for YouTube Premium. If Google wins the adblocking war I’ll begrudgingly find another platform.

YouTube is riding a bicycle.<p>YouTube sticks a rod into its wheel spoke while moving.<p>YouTube blames Ad Blockers.

I&#x27;d love to disable my ad blockers and pay for video content (as I do for Netflix and Nebula), but YouTube has time and time again disappointed me. Some of the most egregious instances:<p>- Overzealous Content ID and lack of punishment for false claims. I understand it&#x27;s more lightweight than DMCA and easier for YouTube, but when you&#x27;re such a cultural hub the standards should be higher.<p>- Rewarding longer videos and causing even the most straightforward 30-second content to balloon to 12+ minutes.<p>- Hiding all content on Home until you enable &quot;watch history&quot; (hey, why not give me suggestions based on my carefully curated list of subscriptions?).<p>- Promoting absolutely bottom-of-the-barrel Shorts content.<p>- Favoring provocative content, creating the alt-right pipeline[1].<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Alt-right_pipeline" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Alt-right_pipeline</a>

The only slow load time I get on YT is that bit where yt-dlp is running.

I do not let my kids watch YouTube but one of them wanted a very specific blippi episode so I put it on and watched it with them.<p>YouTube showed them the beginning of an IDF ad with dead bodies. On a small children’s blippi episode. Not signed in but unbelievable still.<p>I had seen this specific ad and stopped it before we got to the dead bodies.<p>My kids won’t touch another google product until they make their own decisions. (13 or so). It also made me question the motives of someone paying to play ads with dead bodies on children’s shows.

Impressive (and sad...) how adding:<p><pre><code> www.youtube.com##+js(nano-stb, resolve(1), 5000, 0.001) </code></pre> to my uBlock origin filter list made YT much snappier on Firefox.

Google is and has forever been evil, never lose sight of that.

I don&#x27;t know what is happening here. I get on youtube every single day and I have Firefox with uBlock and NoScript, as I had them since ~2018 when I moved off Chrome. There is absolutely no delay for me at all. No change in any delay, same today as it was a week before or the weeks before that. Also I&#x27;m an uBlock user since times immemorial, on Chrome before Firefox too, so I never saw any ads. The only time I see ads are when my clients share their screen and trust me, I install uBlock instantly in their browser.

Then why do I only get the 5-second-long skeleton UI on Firefox?<p>I use both Firefox and Chrome with uBlock. But I only get the slow loading UI on Firefox. If I change the User Agent in Firefox to Chrome, then it loads as fast as in Chrome.<p>This is deliberately set in place to be slow on Firefox.

I opened a video on YouTube today on my work laptop. I have Firefox and uBlock Origin installed.<p>At one point the video playback started to slow down, the audio was playing but the video was freezing and stuttering. I paused the video and checked the UBO tooltip - 930 ads (elements) blocked.<p>And they want to tell me it&#x27;s UBO causing slowness???

EFF should make a plugin that webmasters can add to their websites. Then whenever Google does bad things, the plugin will show a warning popup when the user agent is Chrome.

The prevalence of ad blockers indicates a problem with the product and product pricing. I&#x27;d gladly pay YouTube for premium, but my family does not watch enough YouTube to justify US$23&#x2F;mo.<p>IMO, the content and software industry has a pricing problem. From $80&#x2F;yr (or nothing!) for a weekly blog subscription to software subscription licensing for products that might be feature-complete-ish after the first year.<p>Maybe the economics&#x2F;market research doesn&#x27;t support people who are fine supporting at a lower price but not the requested price. Or, maybe the recent zeitgeist of &quot;fewer people paying more&quot; works out well for creators.

I see the real issue in the lack of competition. Which unfortunately is an inherent attribute of the nature of social sites, as the natural tendency is to form a monopoly even quicker than in other economic areas.<p>This makes me not buy the idea that Youtube cannot survive without ads. I bet there are startups out there that would kill to be in Youtubes position sans the ads.<p>&quot;That&#x27;s surely unsustainable&quot; one might think. But I believe Youtube already markets the rankings of videos and how high up they are displayed in your feed and search result.<p>I ran my own subjective experiments on Youtube, trying to determine the effects of the &quot;not interested&quot; and &quot;don&#x27;t recommend&quot; buttons on channels I have never clicked but seemed to be promoted. The result was that there are seemingly promoted channels that transcend any such functions. Nothing political as the most significant example was a popular youtuber. Of course one can put that down to the normal workings of the youtube algorithm, but that&#x27;s kind of the problem: those two cannot be discerned, which means Youtube can make money this way if they chose to.<p>Other realistic sources of income: The US government stepping in and subsidizing, because of the cultural relevance and impact.<p>Or the continuation of the current economic model: long term stock investments, raising the value of a google account ownership and acquisition of customers for other google products.

All the trappings of a company that considers itself irreplaceable. Which a few years ago we might have all agreed on but consider this, what if Tiktok launched a long form version of their algorithm with a strong web viewing experience and better payouts for creators. In that world would YouTube seem irreplaceable or would it seem more like a relic.

&quot;To support a diverse ecosystem of creators globally and allow billions to access their favorite content on YouTube, we&#x27;ve launched an effort to urge viewers with ad blockers enabled to allow ads on YouTube or try YouTube Premium for an ad free experience. Users who have ad blockers installed may experience suboptimal viewing, regardless of the browser they are using.&quot;<p>The beginning of the first sentence is what we might call &quot;framing&quot;. It&#x27;s hilariously deceptive. Let&#x27;s remove it.<p>&quot;We&#x27;ve launched an effort to urge viewers with ad blockers enabled to allow ads on YouTube or try YouTube Premium for an ad free experience. Users who have ad blockers installed may experience suboptimal viewing, regardless of the browser they are using.&quot;<p>Readers can deduce YouTube&#x27;s motivations.

I hope Google knows that I&#x27;d rather stare five seconds at a half-loaded DOM than watch their ads.

If you watch youtube that much, then just pay for premium. Seems the philosophy here is because adblockers are technologically feasible, you&#x27;re entitled to use a service for free. Because ads have some issues, blocking them and never contributing a cent in other ways is acceptable.<p>A video here and there is whatever. But it&#x27;s hypocritical to watch many videos per month and expect to not pay for it - unless you also expect to not get paid for your work or services.

I use Firefox and ublock origin. I also have a Youtube premium account. When I change my firefox useragent to windows&#x2F;chrome my load times go from 5-10 seconds to under 1.

Why log in? You know what channels you follow, just don&#x27;t log in and use an add blocker. Who needs their recommendations, I can find my own content.

This is a lie. The slow-down of YouTube page loads was done on purpose. YouTube worked perfect with ad-blockers for a decade. It only started now.

Do Be Evil.

So instead of showing nasty finger pointing messages shaming you, they&#x27;re just going to start screwing with people introducing random delay and fud. Lovely, they should just start flashing the goatse guy if you use an adblocker and let you know what they <i>really</i> think of you.<p>I&#x27;m not surprised most gapps work like crap under firefox, and I can&#x27;t even leave reviews for things there as it hasn&#x27;t worked under FF in like 10 years. It&#x27;s like the old IE6 days all over, but now Google is the new Microsoft.

I&#x27;m missing the point how changing the user agent resolves the delay? It is quite possible that this was an attempt to hinder ad blocking but why would changing the user agent to Chrome while maintaining all of the same ad blockers remove the slowdown?<p>I actually still think that there is a decent change that this wasn&#x27;t fully intentional (as in the task wasn&#x27;t to user-agent detect non-Chrome and slow it down) but the explanation doesn&#x27;t cover why this delay depends on the user agent?

This is hilariously petty it&#x27;s almost The Onion worthy. If they keep at it, John Oliver will pick it up.

If only there were an affordable subscription plan people could buy to avoid the ads? I do find it funny that people who make well over $100K a year will jump through so many hoops to avoid a $20 a month subscription cost. Then, when YT finally says no more and makes the experience worse for these people, the justifications and complaints start rolling out like there’s no end!<p>And if you only watch YT occasionally, meaning the subscription isn’t worth it, then I think watching a couple ads for the 1-2 videos you watch a month is a great compromise! I watch YT all the time, and the ads are not excessive compared to cable, or heck, even popular streaming nowadays! The new streaming platforms make you pay a subscription, give you reduced video quality, and have the gall to slap you with a ton of ads!<p>One final note (that I’ve mentioned on HN before): the channels on YT have full control over whether or not ads play, and where and when the ads play. Of course the channel owners won’t publicly announce this, because it’s much easier to let YT take the PR hit for the ads. And because I know it will be asked why I’m any sort of authority on this, I have a channel with 50K subscribers and have experimented with turning ads off on particular videos to see if YT respects that decision, and they do.